Foucault The Legacy Edited by
Clare O'Farrell
Photographs by Richard O'Farrell
Queensland University of Technology
First published in 1997 in book form by Queensland University of Technology Victoria Park Road Kelvin Grove, Qld Australia 4059 First published as a CD-ROM in 2002. Compilation, editorial matter and Introduction copyright © Clare O’Farrell © Individual authors retain copyright of their work. Photographs on jacket and on section dividers copyright © Richard O’Farrell
ISBN 1 86435 567 0
Design by O’Farrell, Lesley Cassidy, Jean Hilton Photos scanned by Vivienne Wilson and Clare O’Farrell Jacket design by Clare O’Farrell and Vivienne Wilson Printed in Brisbane by QUT Publications and Printing
Copies of this book can be ordered from: Clare O’Farrell School of Cultural and Language Studies QUT Victoria Park Road Kelvin Grove, Qld Australia 4059 Fax: +61 7 3864 3728 email:
[email protected] website: http://www.foucault.qut.edu.au CRICOS No. 00213J
Contents Acknowledgments ............................................................................... ix Textual Note ........................................................................................... x Introduction ........................................................................................... 1 Foucault: A View from the Antipodes
Clare O'Farrell .................................................................................................... 1
Part One: Literature and History ..................................................... 11 Sade as a Figure Of Radical Modernity: Making-and-Breaking the History of Sexuality
Peter Cryle ......................................................................................................... 12 Foucault/ Artaud: The Madness of the Oeuvre
Edward Scheer ................................................................................................... 17 Eleutheromania: Freedom and Surveillance in Beckett and Foucault
Anthony Ulhmann ............................................................................................ 27 The Memoir, The Corpse and the Bad Judge: Foucault and Bataille
Shane Wilcox ..................................................................................................... 38 The Body and Violence: The Subject of Knowledge in Dostoesvky's The Brothers Karamazov and Foucault's Analytic of Finitude
Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover ................................................................................. 46 Foucault and New Historicism in Literary Studies
Claire Colebrook ................................................................................................ 57
Part Two: Australian History: Art, Science and Government .... 63 History and the Painted Landscape in Mid-Nineteenth Century South Australia
Russell Staif.f...................................................................................................... 64 Foucault's 'Statement' and Paradigm Change in Nineteenth Century Australia
Mary Mackay .................................................................................................... 80 Governing at a Distance: the Colonisation of Australia
Gavin Kendall .................................................................................................... 90 Foucault, Ideology and the Social Contract in Australian History
Geoff Danaher .................................................................................................. 104
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Part Three: Art, Architecture and Cities ....................................... 111 Art, Politics and the History of Change
Thomas Wallgren ............................................................................................ 112 A Panoptic Art History? The Dilemma of Context
Andrew McNamara ........................................................................................ 121 'Making Facile Gestures Difficult': Artists, Criticality, and the Politics of Publicness
Rob Garrett ...................................................................................................... 128 Foucault's Gaze
Jean Hillier ....................................................................................................... 139 'Architectural Irregularities': Discourse and Technique in a Foucauldian History of the Picturesque Cottage
John Macarthur ............................................................................................... 155
Part Four: Philosophy ...................................................................... 175 The Ethics of Singularity in an Era of Complete Nihilism
Mika Ojakangas ............................................................................................... 176 An Exegesis of the Text Was ist Aufkliirung? Foucault's Intellectual Testament
Jorge Davila ..................................................................................................... 185 Clutter and Glitter: Foucault and the Writing of History
Andrew Thacker .............................................................................................. 192 Foucault, Politics and the Performative
Patricia Moynihan .......................................................................................... 202 The Subject of Foucault
Michael Janover ............................................................................................... 215 Foucault, Dialogue and the Other
Chris Falzon .................................................................................................... 227 Atrocity Mechanics: Is there a Logic to Modern Inhumanity?
Paul Alberts ..................................................................................................... 235 The Disorder of Things: Foucault and Comic Writing
Tony Schirato .................................................................................................. 244 Beyond Power /Knowledge, or Towards Erasing the Distinction Between the Discursive and Non-discursive
George Petelin ................................................................................................. 248 Foucault's Sublime: E-Mail to Postumius Terentianus
Philip Barker .................................................................................................... 257
Contents
Part Five: Psychoanalysis ................................................................ 265 Foucault, Hegel, Psychoanalysis and Anthropologies of Truth David Holmes .................................................................................................. 266 Cathexis: Metaphorics of Power Tony Thwaites ................................................................................................. 279
Part Six: Feminism ............................................................................ 287 Foucault's 'Care of the Self': Some Implications for Feminist Politics Maya Lloyd ...................................................................................................... 288 Feminist History After Foucault Gail Reekie ....................................................................................................... 298 Poststructuralism, Feminism and the Question of Rape: Rethinking the 'Desexualisation' Politics of Michel Foucault Kylie Stephen ................................................................................................... 309 Brand News: Using Foucault to Theorise Rape, the Media and Feminist Strategies Chris Atmore ................................................................................................... 321 Normalising Equality: Surveillance and the 'Equitable' Public Servant D. H. Jones ...................................................................................................... 334
Part Seven: Truth, Law and Medicine .......................................... 345 The Production of Truth: Body and Soul Part 1: 'Telling Truths': Truth Telling in the Judicial Process Dirk Meure ...................................................................................................... 346 The Production of Truth: Body and Soul Part 2: Displaying the Truth of the Body Randall Albury ................................................................................................ 356 Legal Language As Discursive Formation Christine Higgins ............................................................................................ 361
Part Eight: The Art of Government ............................................... 373 'Liberalism' and Government: Political Philosophy and the Liberal Art of Rule David Burchell ................................................................................................ 374 A Political Ontology Mitchell Dean .................................................................................................. 385 Culture and Utility: Calculating Culture's Civilising Effect Tony Bennett ................................................................................................... 398 What Is An Expert?
f. P. Minson ..................................................................................................... 405
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Computers and Governmentality in Australia's Department of Social Security
Paul Henman ................................................................................................... 418 Governing Chinese Bodies: The Significance of Studies in the Concept of Governmentality for the Analysis of Birth Control in China Gary Sigley ...................................................................................................... 429 A Foucauldian Genealogy of Income
Ratnam Alagiah and Michael Gaffikin ........................................................... 447 'This Is Not A Prison': Foucault, The Panopticon And Pentonville
John Pratt ........................................................................................................ 462
Part Nine: Management Studies .................................................... 483 Foucault, Power, Social Theory and the Study of Organisations
Stewart Clegg .................................................................................................. 484 Foucault and Management Studies: Post-critical critique? Shayne W. Grice .............................................................................................. 492
Part Ten: Public Relations ............................................................... 499 Constructing Publics: Foucault's Power/ Knowledge Matrix and the Genealogy of Public Relations and Press Agentry
P. David Marshall ........................................................................................... 500 The Role of Public Relations in Empowering Groups and Institutions: A Study
Elizabeth Logan ............................................................................................... 507 Women Politicians: Media Objects or Political Subjects?
Judy Motion ..................................................................................................... 518
Part Eleven: Policing the Environment ........................................ 529 Governing the Environment: the Programs and Politics of Environmental Discourse
Ade Peace ......................................................................................................... 530 Policing Nature: Ecology, Natural Science and Biopolitics
Paul Rutherford ............................................................................................... 546
Part Twelve: The 'Third World' and Postcolonialism .............. 563 Pastoral Power: Foucault and the New Imperial Order
Patricia Stamp ................................................................................................. 564 The Colonial Legacy of Regulating 'Third World' Women as the Alluring 'Other'
Parlo Singh ...................................................................................................... 571
Contents
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Part Thirteen: Education .................................................................. 591 Personal Autonomy As An Aim of Education: a Foucauldian Critique James Marshall ................................................................................................ 592 Ethics, Technics, Politics: Australian Debates on Competencies and Citizenship Denise Meredyth ............................................................................................. 603 Competency-Based Training- Taylorism Revisited? Bert Wigman ................................................................................................... 614 'This Slender Technique': Examining Assessment Policy Daphne Mead more .......................................................................................... 620 Michel Foucault, Dorothy Heathcote, Drama and Early Childhood Kathleen Warren ............................................................................................. 631 Reconceptualising Parent and Child Conflict: A Foucauldian Perspective Susan Grieshaber ............................................................................................. 639 Power Relations in Pedagogy: An Empirical Study Based on Foucauldian Thought Jennifer M. Gore .............................................................................................. 651 Beyond The Panopticon: Accounting For Behaviour In Parent-Teacher Communications Jayne Keogh ..................................................................................................... 664 Disciplining Students: The Construction of Student Subjectivities Barbara Grant .................................................................................................. 674
Part Fourteen: Health and Nursing ............................................... 685 Foucault Had to Die Shamefully Michael Bartos ................................................................................................. 686 The New Morality: Public Health and Personal Conduct Alan Petersen .................................................................................................. 696 The Rhetoric of Health Care? Foucault, Health Care Practices and the Docile body - 1990s style Julianne Cheek and Trudy Rudge ................................................................... 707 Using Foucauldian Ideas to Analyse a Problem Concerning Women and the Environment Elaine Stratford ............................................................................................... 714 The Health of Our Children: A National Efficiency Framework for a Nation Janet Schmitzer ................................................................................................ 723
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Foucault and Gerontological Knowledge: The Making of the Aged Body Stephen Katz .................................................................................................... 728 Action Research in a Nursing Home: Theorising Critical Incidents Arising from Action Through a Foucauldian View of Institutional Power Sue Crane ........................................................................................................ 736 Toward a Critical Ontology: Nursing and the Problem of the Modern Subject Kim Walker ...................................................................................................... 743
Repositioning the Nurse Suzanne Goopy ................................................................................................ 755
Part Fifteen: Marketing Foucault ................................................... 765 The Name of the Author Clare O'Farrell ................................................................................................ 766 Condensing Foucault Alec McHoul ................................................................................................... 771
Contributors ....................................................................................... 783
Acknowledgments
The writings in this volume were originally presented as papers at a conference titled Foucault: The Legacy which took place at the beach resort of Surfer's Paradise in Australia in July 1994. I would like to express my gratitude here to all those who helped in the organisation of that conference. The French Embassy and Queensland University of Technology provided financial assistance and I wish to acknowledge, in particular, the generous support of Gerard Guillet and Francis Etienne at the French Embassy in Canberra. Canon and Xerox contributed towards printing costs for the conference. I would also like to thank my colleagues at QUT in the School of Cultural and Policy Studies and the Department of Continuing Professional Education, in particular, Margaret Johnston, Lesley Cassidy and Michelle Dwyer. Many others were also most generous with their time and help in organising various aspects of the conference, in particular staff at the Ramada Hotel, Ozaccom, Roger Mackell, manager of Gleebooks in Sydney and Nicholas Tsoutas, Director of the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane in 1994. In the production of the current volume, I am indebted to my typists Lesley Cassidy and Jean Hilton for their persistence through what seemed at times to be an endless task. I also wish to thank my family, in particular my mother, to whom I owe the original idea for the conference, as well as friends and colleagues for the encouragement which has helped me finally bring this book to completion. The photographs by my brother Richard which appear on the front cover and on the pages dividing the sections of the book were exhibited at the conference.
Textual Note Every effort has been made to establish a minimum level of consistency with regards to references and footnotes, but given the wide diversity of disciplines represented in this volume, different conventions have been retained in individual papers.
Introduction Foucault: A View from the Antipodes
An intellectual itinerary It was in 1978, as a young undergraduate, that I first came across Foucault.l
The item in question was an article titled 'The position of Cuvier in the history of biology'2 set and specially translated by one of the tutors, Paul Foss for a course in the School of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of New South Wales. Fascinated by the extreme difficulty of the piece, I decided that I would take up the challenge of writing a paper on it. If difficulty is sometimes no more than a facade to hide an inner void, the analysis of this article by Foucault revealed a type of thought strikingly attractive in its combination of extreme orderliness and brilliant intuitive insight, providing as it did an entirely new and excitingly different point of view on familiar scenery. The effect was similar to viewing those reversible diagrams so cherished by psychologists. The next work of Foucault's which I tackled, this time in a course on methodology, was The Archaeology of Knowledge.3 Having digested this further and much larger cocktail of anarchic insight and rigorous order, I was hooked. I would write my honours thesis on Foucault. At the time, it was considered a radical move to undertake academic work on a thinker who was still very much alive particularly one with such unorthodox views on method and the history of thought. But my supervisors in the Schools of French and History and Philosophy of Science, in particular Randall Albury, were keenly supportive and Foucault certainly seemed far more exciting and daring than the other alternatives I had been toying with- Gaston Bachelard and Henri Bergson. Added to this, was the enjoyable prospect of being able to write and deliver papers on ideas which genuinely shocked and outraged a large part of the older academic establishment. Indeed, in the late seventies in Australia, as elsewhere in the English speaking world, only a small number of people had even heard of Foucault and fewer still were inclined to take his work seriously. A small group of academics in Sydney were notable in this regard: they included Paul Patton, Meaghan Morris, Paul Foss, Randall Albury and George Alexander. In 1979, some members of this group published the first book to appear in English on the subject of Foucault's work that was not purelyacollectionofFoucault'sownwritings.4 Thebookwaslaunchedwith a series of three papers by Paul Patton, George Alexander and myself to an unexpectedly large gathering of about 150 people at the University of Sydney. Paul Patton also ran a small reading group on Discipline and Punish at the same university with an audience whom I found fascinating by virtue
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of the quite irrelevant fact that they all, to a man and a woman, (myself excepted) would carefully 'roll their own' as discussion progressed, as if in confirmation of that long association of French theory and unfiltered tobacco so perennially evident in photographs of any gathering of French intellectuals. The best known photograph of Althusser shows him cigarette in mouth and Sartre's pipe was famous. And, as I would discover later myself, intellectual luminaries such as Gilles Deleuze, lecturing at the radical university of Paris VIII-Vincennes, would be scarcely visible from the back of the room, so thick was the veil of smoke. An excellent article by Jean-Claude Guedon,s which commented at length on the reception of Foucault and French thought by English speaking critics prompted me to formulate the idea of comparing the French and English language receptions ofFoucaultthrougha rigorous application ofFoucault's own archaeological method. Thus it was, armed with this project, that I made my first trip to France during the Australian university summer vacation of 1978. Having procured a card to the Bibliotheque Nationale, through the kind offices of Judith Robinson-Valery, I assiduously haunted the half empty and luxuriously spacious periodicals reading room as well as the far less empty and less spacious library at the Sorbonne, consulting what were at the time, deliciously untouched issues of French literary and philosophical magazines, journals and newspapers dating from 1960. I also attended Foucault's lectures at the prestigious research institution where he held a chair, the College de France. At the beginning o£1979 he was running a course titled 'The birth of biopolitics'. These courses ran in the famous 'salle 8', host to so many other intellectual mandarins since the days of Henri Bergson at the turn of the century. The atmosphere at these events was extraordinary. In order to get a decent seat, one had to turn up half an hour before the lecture began, no mean feat for a lecture beginning at 9 am on a cold Parisian winter's morning. If one turned up even slightly late, one was obliged to sit in another theatre and listen to the words of the master broadcast through a loud speaker. The table at which Foucault sat would be crowded with tape recorders (my own included!) and a small group of young men (never young women) would sit literally and religiously at his feet around him on the rostrum. The audience would listen with all the attention and reverence usually accorded to a great sage or celebrity as Foucault deployed an impressive array of arcane historical detail in support of his latest theses. The material Foucault dealt with in these lectures and in the later courses which I attended in the early eighties was difficult and his delivery, seated behind a table, was devoid of dramatic flourish apart from an occasional expressive hand gesture. Yet, he held the audience enthralled with his obvious absorption in and enthusiasm for his subject matter as well as with his sheer intellectual brilliance. Much comment has been made about Foucault's appearance- his ugliness, his interesting baldness, the steel tooth (a legacy of social security dentistry) revealed by a wide attractive smile, but few have commented that the overall impression was of a man to whom the body was in some senses supremely unimportant- a vehicle wholly subordinated to mind and intellect, to be mobilised in support of a ferocious and keen intellectual curiosity. For all his theoretical discussion of 'the body', I
Introduction
3
was left with the impression after those lectures in the late 1970s and early 1980s that Foucault's interest in the body was just that- theoretical- another interesting intellectual problem to be solved. The other striking feature of these lectures was the extraordinary and all pervasive undercurrent of irony of the most subtle kind. 6 Yet the audience seldom laughed - perhaps it was fearful of disturbing the religious atmosphere of reverence and worship that a high priest in so hallowed institution as the College de France was able to command. In 1980, emboldened with the success of my honours thesis on Foucault I enrolled in a Ph.D. in the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University. 7 My supervisor, Eugene Kamenka, head of the History of Ideas Unit, was doubtful about my selection of topic. 'Are you sure there is enough material for a doctorate on Foucault?' he enquired politely. The revelation of my thesis topic in the Coombs tea room to various enquirers produced strong reactions. One senior academic turned away in disgust over his tea and biscuits with a contemptuous exclamation of'oh my God!' Foucault was seen as a highly dubious entity- French, tricky, complicated, hard to understand, empirically unsound, possibly a fraud and almost certainly tainted by that unspoken nemesis of sensible Anglo Saxon Protestant thought, European Roman Catholicism. A year later, undaunted by such hostility and armed with scholarships from both the Australian and French governments, I travelled to France where I was to enrol at the radical University of Paris VIII-Vincennes, where Foucault had briefly held the foundation chair of Philosophy in 1969-1970. The occupier of that chair in 1981 was France's leading historian of philosophy and Hegel expert, Fran~ois Chatelet, who was to be my supervisor. Chatelet was a mine of behind-thescenes information on recent French intellectual history and was scathingly brilliant in his criticism of received intellectual dogmas of all kinds. This critical spirit remained unimpaired throughout his long struggle with emphysema until his death in 1985. 8 Every week he would front up to his seminar at the university slightly weaker and thinner, until his doctor advised him that the thick pall of tobacco smoke that was de rigueur at any large seminar at Vincennes was no longer to be tolerated. One of these smoked filled seminars, with floor almost ankle deep in cigarette butts and disposable coffee cups, was memorable for his response to a student who asked in the best tradition of post 1968 rejection of professorial authority why he, Chatelet, persisted in smoking if he was so seriously ill. Chatelet, magnificent pedagogue as he was, took the opportunity to respond with a witty and erudite lesson on the philosophy of Epicurius. He would rather, he said in essence, live a short enjoyable life (Chatelet was also a noted gourmet) than lead along puritanical existence. Unable to teach at Vincennes, Chatelet ran his seminar for specially invited students in his magnificently furnished eighteenth century courtyard overlooking a courtyard complete with statues. After initial difficulties with the truly baroque and anarchic administration of Vincennes, I thought of transferring to the University of Paris IV-Sorbonne. Chatelet advised me that this would be unwise. Hostility there to Foucault and other such progressive 'media' intellectuals reigned supreme. Indeed, I had already been able to confirm this assessment at an
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earlier meeting with Professor of Philosophy, Yvon Belaval, at that institution in 1978.9
An interview Chatelet warned me that Michel Foucault had a reputation for being very hard with women and treating them with scant civility. He also noted that Foucault had written himself into a corner with his theories on power (an assessment I agreed with) and that his writings on sexuality clearly had an important personal dimension. Thus forewarned, I wrote to Foucault in November1981explainingthatlwaswritingathesisonhisworkandwould like to meet him. He replied by return post with an unevenly typed and neatly signed letter fixing a time and a place. With some trepidation and armed with a series of questions, I fronted up to his modern apartment block in the rue de Vaugirard in the 15th arrondissement. Foucault opened the door and welcomed me into a white, light filled apartment. 10 He took my coat and politely asked whether I would like a whisky or an orange juice. In the best traditions of French politeness, he also complimented me on what I was wearing. As he was fetching an orange juice, I noticed a copy ofJacques Le Goff's La Naissance du purgatoire11 lying neatly on a coffee table. Throughout the two hour interview, there was not a trace of the hostility towards women that Chatelet and others had warned me about. The only annoyance he showed was when I asked him about why he chose to reinterpret his past work in interviews and on the roles of Nietzsche and Marx in his work. He was clearly irritated by constant questions on these matters and, particularly in the case of Nietzsche, elicited a marked lack of interest in pursuing the topic. A number of interesting things emerged about Foucault during this interview, the first of these was his politeness and generosity. I was particularly impressed that he took my questions seriously, as a young female student from what, to French people, is a remote and insignificant, if admittedly somewhat exotic part of the world. Also impressive was his sheer intellectual brilliance: his ability to provide instantaneously clear and convincing answers, sometimes in point form complete with conclusion. A genuine and unaffected modesty about his work was also apparent. Downplaying my remarks on the originality and revolutionary character of his ideas, he said that much of what he had said had actually been discussed before by the British historians of the 1930s, the Annales historians as well as by historians and philosophers of science. He did recognise, however, that his work was certainly able to challenge and disturb people and to make them think. At the outset of the interview, he was eager to stress that he was not a philosopher by training and that he was merely interested in tinkering with a few ideas. It was much to his regret, he said politely and diplomatically, that he had no general philosophical 'theory'. When I assured him that although I was enrolled in philosophy at Vincennes, my background was actually in the hybrid discipline of history and philosophy of science, he seemed relieved and elicited a lively curiosity about this unusual educational formation. I then proposed a question on notions of the 'specific'
Introduction
5
versus the 'universal' intellectual. At this point, I will temporarily abandon my excursion into 'ego-history', in favour of another genre- the interview -, setting forth my questions to Foucault and his replies, which I have reconstructed from notes made at the time in 1981. 'It seems to me', I said, 'that you are a particularly striking example of a "universal intellectual". You are interested in everything, you speak for those who have no voice and you are a" great writer" whose work exercises a wide influence. You also fight to improve conditions for people in the name of certain values such as justice which nonetheless you are careful not to specify' .12 To this, Foucault provided a typically logical and orderly reply. 'The universal intellectual', he said 'has three functions. First of all, he [sic] pronounces a discourse on human destiny. Secondly, he speaks for man in general. Thirdly, he indicates where the general good is, what it consists of and what has to be done'. Foucault then claimed that he occupied none of these positions for the following reasons: 'First of all', he said, 'I do not know what the ideal society would be like. To say what it should be would be despotic. The law of proscription is an oppressive law. Secondly, I have never spoken in the name of anybody. Even in the case of my activity in relation to prisons I have not published any texts. Only the prisoners published texts. Thirdly, speaking the truth poses much more of a problem than laying down the law which does not upset anything or anyone. I did not speak for madmen and prisoners. My aim is to speak the truth in order to unsettle things. The fourth point is that I can say such and such a thing in order to produce action. The question is then, if it is true what are you going to do about it? How are people listening going to react?' Foucault went on to say how disappointed he was that the then recently elected socialist government in France, had not approached him to make any contribution at all in relation to the problem of prisons in France. This kind of disappointment was perhaps typical of the reaction of French intellectuals in general to the rise to power of the socialists in France in the early 1980s. The intellectuals had set great store on a left wing electoral victory, but found that once the socialists were in power, the usual constraints of political expediency became paramount and that they were, in addition, deprived of the glorious status of being in opposition and the unjustly persecuted victims of power with a legitimate political party to lend that status credibility. The general populace were far more cynical. After the socialist victory, la France profonde blamed every social ill, no matter how trivial, on the socialist victory. One lady travelling in the metro, noting a young person with their feet up on the seat, remarked that such undiscipline was clearly the result of the new socialist government. Such observations were standard, as were the kinds of disappointment expressed by Foucault and other intellectuals. On the subject of power in general I put the following questions to Foucault: 'In your discussion of power, I have noticed a certain circularity which might pose problems for political practice or activity: that is power is bad, resistance is good. However in your system, resistance is only the inverse of power and if it wins it therefore becomes bad. You try to escape
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from this circularity by proposing a kind of morality. Do you have another more critical solution to this problem or do you think a moral stance is sufficient?Inaddition,ifpoweriseverywhere,doesthismeanthatitissome kind of metaphysical category?' Foucault replied by insisting that it was 'relations of power' that were everywhere not power itself, which meant that power could not possibly qualify as a metaphysical category in his work. And these relations of power existed of necessity because people had different notions of what was meant by liberty, existence and choice or will. 'Power is not bad in itself', he remarked. 'There is no primary state of affairs without power, but there can in fact be good and bad power. One universal principle is that power can be described as bad ifit is no longer tolerated'. He went on to say that it is often a matter of degree and how much people will put up with. For example, nobody particularly likes the exercise of fiscal power, namely taxes. But fiscal power in itself is not an evil because people manage even if they are not happy about it, as it generally has a worthwhile purpose (even if it could certainly benefit from reform). On the other hand, if the state goes too far and puts a tax on salt, people cease to tolerate this kind of power. 'The secret of power is not violence', Foucault continued, 'Violence only appears when it no longer functions'. Power is something that is never completely accepted, he added, but it cannot be rejected in a global fashion (namely by revolution). Resistance to power is never strong enough and this is where the intellectual comes in: the analyst of power must remember that acceptable power is power that is accepted. Power creates an illusion which hides its mechanisms of repression and it was precisely in those areas where the illusion was strongest that Foucault saw it as his task to mount a struggle. I then asked Foucault about his habit of reinterpreting his past work in terms of his current ideas, suggesting that he was engaging in 'declarations of tyranny' in this regard. 13 He laughed at this and said that if other people were free to interpret his work as they wished he saw no reason why he should not reinterpret his own work just as freely. Thus, the real focus of his work had always been 'subjectivity' not power. If he had indeed referred to power extensively in his work it was because he was interested in one specific aspect that he felt had been neglected- namely relations of power. Still on the subject of the recasting of his past work, I asked him why he had decided to replace the original preface to Folie et Deraison with a new one in 1972. He explained that the style of the original preface worried him at a time when structuralism was at its height in France. In the original preface, and indeed in the entire book, he had used the word 'structure' extensively and quite innocently. The use of this term had prompted critics to seize the opportunity to dub his work'structuralist'. Neither had he liked the original references to 'experience' in 1972. In 1982, however, he declared himself willing to entirely reinstate the first preface as he was currently returning to these earlier perspectives. I also ventured to ask Foucault about the role of marxism in his work: 'Your work seems to be becoming closer to marxism, for example in Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality, val 1., there are a whole range of terms such as "the political economy of the will to truth", "the
Introduction
7
production of truth", "economies of power" and frequent references to the concept of class. Why this adoption of an almost marxist analysis after your relegation of marxism to a mere"storm in a children's paddling pool" in The Order of Things?' With a sigh of irritation, Foucault replied: 'My relation to Marx and marxists is a simple and relaxed one. I am not a marxist because I use the terms, neither am I anti-marxist. The systematic use of certain words might appear marxist, but they indicate rather a kind of anti-use of marxism. I say what I feel like in relation to marxism. Thus, in The Order of Things, one can dispense with marxism, it is not useful at all for the analysis. However, nineteenth century society requires that one discuss marxism - it is useless to search for other terms. If I use certain terms such as class, it is because it is less pretentious to do so. The bourgeoisie as a class indicates a certain moral normativity, a certain ethics of behaviour, of being something different from other classes. There is no reason why I should deprive myself of the use of this term'. On the subject of that other philosopher, with whom Foucault's name has so often been linked, he demonstrated a manifest lack of interest and a disinclination to discuss the subject at length. What had interested him about Nietszche, he said, was that, contrary to Hegel, he was interested in the 'irrational of history' and that he 'put historical questions to philosophy from the basis of a historical body ofknowledge .... Nietzsche demanded that history ask questions of philosophy'. I then asked Foucault a series of questions on structuralism and his book The Order of Things. After asking about the confusion and controversy surrounding the notion of the episteme, he declared that he really did not know what all the fuss had been about, as in the history of science it was quite common to posit discontinuities. Indeed, he stressed that, in general, concepts of discontinuity and normativity such as were embodied in the concept of the episteme were common in the history of science. When he had shown the manuscript to the noted historian and philosopher of science, Georges Canguilhem, the latter had not, for this reason, felt it necessary to comment on the issue. After two hours of discussion, I thanked Foucault and received the enthusiastic assurance that I was welcome to come back and ask him more questions at a future date. I was not to know, however, that time was running out and I did not avail myself of the opportunity so kindly offered. I heard of Foucault's death back in Australia, when a colleague, the literary critic Sam Goldberg, casually mentioned over lunch that he had seen a reportto that effect in that morning's Canberra Times, the only newspaper in Australia to carry the news. It is possible that a secret fan of his work lurked on the staff of that paper, which had invited me to publish a review of Discipline and Punish in 1980.14
A conference Four years after Foucault's death in 1988,Ihad the good fortune to be invited to a historic conference in Paris, organised by the newly formed Foucault Centre headed by Fran~ois Ewald. This event united a star studded and argumentative collection of intellectuals, militants and academics from
8
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around the globe and ended with a concert by Pierre Boulez and the ensemble intercontemporain. 15 The gathering was remarkable, not only for the fact that it was a virtual who's who of the French intellectual set and of well known Foucault commentators from other countries, but also for the fact that almost everyone present had known Foucault personally in some capacity. This gave the whole event which took place in a theatre on the Champs Elysees, the atmosphere of a lively and theatrical wake. And in the fine tradition of the wake, it provided an excellent opportunity for the living to exchange various anecdotes over lunch. At a table to which I had been invited by the historian Paul Veyne, those present outdid each other with reports on what Foucault had said to them just before he died and who had known the soonest that he was seriously ill. Each story, including my own, was listened to with careful attention and sage nodding of heads ensued. It was some years after this remarkable gathering and when the Foucault industry had become a well established, if dispersed, fact, that, inspired by a suggestion of my mother's, I formulated the idea of running a conference myself- a conference which would not be so much on Foucault himself, but which would showcase and bring together the enormous diversity of research triggered off by his ideas. The conference would also mark the tenth anniversary of his death. One of the famous slogans of 1968, with whose eventsFoucault'snamehassooftenbeenlinked,was'souslespaves,laplage'16 and what better place to hold an event on a philosopher who had so resolutely sought to dig up every paving stone in sight, than the beach resort of Surfer's Paradise? Thus it was that in July 1994, that an impressive collection of some 300 delegates including over 100 speakers came together from Australia, New Zealand, Britain, Ireland, Finland, the United States and Canada to present their findings. These findings covered an enormous and often surprising range of subjects and disciplines: from the most esoteric subjects in philosophy, literature and history, to professional disciplines such as nursing, education, accounting, management, public relations, law and architecture. Matters which had scarcely, if ever, been addressed by Foucault such as feminism, the third world, Australian history and environmentalism were discussed at length. In 1980, an anonymous interview with a 'masked philosopher' had appeared in the French newspaper Le Monde. Weary of celebrity and straining to be heard from under the heavy weight of his previous work, Michel Foucault wanted to address readers who would listen to his words rather than his reputation. In this interview, with the lyricism that so often characterised his style, he dreamed of a new type of critique: I cannot help thinking of a critique that would not try to judge, but, rather, would try to allow a work, a book, a sentence, an idea to exist. It would start fires, watch the grass grow, listen to the wind and seize spray in flight so as to scatter it further. Such a critique would create not a profusion of judgements, but signs of existence, it would call them, raise them from their sleep. And if it sometimes invented these signs? So much the better! Criticism by condemnation sends me to sleep. I would like to see a critique that sparks the imagination. It would not reign supreme, or be robed in red: it would bear the lightning of possible stormsP
Introduction
9
The present collection of work first presented at the 1994 conference Foucault: The Legacy demonstrates just how far Foucault's own work has served to actively encourage the realisation of this dream. 1
What follows is an experiment in what Pierre Nora has termed 'ego-history'. He notes: 'A whole scientific tradition has led historians over the last century to efface themselves behind their work, to hide their personality behind their expertise, to barricade themselves behind their index cards ... The findings of historiography over the last twenty years have emphasised the pretence of this impersonality and the precarious character of its guarantee'. With this in mind, he invited a number of historians to write their own 'history', to apply their historical methods to their own lives. 'Neither falsely literary autobiography, neither needlessly intimate confessions, nor abstract profession of faith, nor crude attempt at psychoanalysis, the exercise consists in clarifying one's own history as one would clarify another's'. Pierre Nora (ed), Essais d'ego-histoire, Paris: Gallimard, 1987, pp.57 If further guarantees of academic respectability are needed, one might also invoke the notions of Pierre Bourdieu on the 'selfreflexivity' of the sociologist and his own excellent foray into this genre "'Fieldwork in philosophy"', Chases dites, Paris: Minuit, 1987.
2
Michel Foucault, 'La situation de Cuvier dans l'histoire de la biologie', Revue des sciences et de leurs applications, 1970,23, pp.62-9.
3
Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, London: Tavistock, NewYork: Pantheon, 1972.
4
Paul Patton and Meaghan Morris (eds), Michel Foucault: Power, Truth, Strategy, Sydney: Ferat 1979.
5
Jean-Claude Guedon, 'Michel Foucault: The Knowledge of Power and the Power of Knowledge', Bulletin of the History of Medicine 51, 1977, pp.245-77.
6
The best examples of this irrepressible irony in Foucault's written work are to be found in his small book on Magritte This is not a pipe, trans. James Harkness, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982, and an article titled 'Monstrosities in Criticism', trans. Robert J. Matthews, Diacritics, voll, no. 2, Fait 1971, p. 57-60.
7
A version of the work for this thesis was published as a book titled Foucault: Historian or Philosopher? London: Macmillan, 1989, 1993.
8
For a short appreciation of his life and contributions see Gilles Deleuze, Pericles et Verdi,: La philosophie de Fran~ois Chatelet, Paris: Minuit, 1988.
9
Incidentally, Yvon Belaval had been a candidate at the same time as Foucault in 1970 for the tenure of the Chair of Philosophy (renamed the Chair of the History of Systems of Thought when Foucault was appointed) at the College de France.
10 As he explained to Charles Ruas, what he liked about the apartment was 'the clarity of light for thought' 'Postscript: An Interview with Michel Foucault', Death and the Labyrinth: The World ofRaymond Roussel, trans. Charles Ruas with an introduction by John Ashbery, New York: Doubleday, 1986; London: Athlone Press, 1987, p.171. 11 Jacques Le Goff, La naissance du purgatoire, Paris: Gallimard, 1981. 12 This question refers to the views Foucault expressed in 'Intellectuals and Power', discussion with Gilles Deleuze, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Preface and Introduction by Donald Bouchard, Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press,
10
!foucau[t:
13 I was alluding to a statement in the highly ironic preface to the 1972 edition of Foucault's Histoire de la folie al'age classique, Paris: Gallimard, 1972, p.10. He says: 'Thus is written the Preface, first act which begins to establish the monarchy of the author, declaration of tyranny: my intention should be your precept, you will bend your reading, your analyses, your criticisms to what I wanted to say .... I am the monarch of the things I have said, and I maintain an eminent sovereignty over them: that of my intention and of the meaning I wanted to give to them.' 14 Clare O'Farrell, 'Prison and Social Control', The Canberra Times, 29 March 1980, p.15. 15 The papers from this conference were published as Michel Foucault philosophe: rencontre internationale Paris, 9, 10, 11 Janvier 1988, Paris: Seuil, 1989. 16 'under the paving stones the beach'. 17 Foucault, 'Le philosophe masque', (entretien avec C. Delacampagne), Le Monde, 6 April1980: Le Monde-Dimanche, pp.l.
Part One Literature and History
Sade as a Figure Of Radical Modernity: Making-and-Breaking the History of Sexuality PeterCryfe We are now seeing the rapid development of a discipline whose founding assumption or locus communis is that sexuality has a history, and that 'it' is not the same thing in all times and places. Foucault's contribution to this development is evident. It does not of course consist in making general affirmations about the impossibility of generalising, for that would indeed be the kind of cheery 'relativism' imputed to him by self-appointed defenders of universalist humanism. Rather, Foucault has contributed impressively to a history marked by shifts, mutations and reconfigurations, by events that allow us to speak of a 'before' and an 'after'. Historians of sexuality, in following his lead, are becoming adept at showing that things in the sexual domain were not ever thus: many of us see our task, in part, as the critique of anachronism and the undermining of claims to naturalness. This relatively new habit of thinking, with all its methodological small change, cannot just be said to derive from Foucault: that would be a remarkably un-Foucaldian way of reading his work. There are all kinds of precedents and supports in this area: the work of Aries and his colleagues, and some aspects of phenomenological enquiry are striking examples. But I want to concentrate here on something else which, I shall argue, served as aninitialsupportfor,andaneventualhindranceto,Foucault'sdevelopment of a history of sexuality. Thereisadiscourse,a thoroughly narrative one, that functions here as both adjuvant and adversary: the historical narrative that has so regularly been constructed around the work of Sade. For such influential figures of French modernism as Breton, Bataille, Desnos, Eluard, and Klossowski, Sade is the exemplary figure- not to say the author- of literary modernity. The divinity of the divine Marquess comes precisely from this: his courage in voicing the hitherto unspoken truth of human sexuality. The story told in modernist accounts of Sade is not of course the history of sexuality that is now being constructed by scholarly activity, but rather that of an author who breaks heroically with the past. The Marquis de Sade is, we are told, 'unprecedented', sans precedent. 1 Before him, no writer dared to tell the hidden truth of desire. Indeed, the power and the prestige ofSade's narrative fiction seems to be rehearsed or mimicked in this account of his vigorous coming to prominence. His emergence from the shadows of incarceration and his heroic coming to light are themselves both symptom and symbol of a new eroticism. The story of Sade, thus told, has some of the marks of a standardly modern erotic narrative, with emphasis placed on virility as performance. Sade, the man, stands like a phallus, says Bataille, following Swinburne. 2 This tumescent glory we must recognise, according to doctrine, as both an affirmation and an acting out of desire.
Satfe as a !figure Of!l?Ju[icaf !Modernity
13
The power of Sade's eroticism is declared by writers such as Bataille to stem from the telling of a previously unspoken truth. The Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom is 'a book which dominates all books, in a sense, because it tells the truth that is in the depths of man, wild and unchained, the truth that he is required to hold in and keep silent'. 3 The revelation of that which was previously hidden within all humanity can only be a profoundly subversive act, and that is why French literary modernism, especially the Surrealist movement, takes Sade as exemplary. According to Eluard, he is, with Latureamont, one of the two most daring, revolutionary writers of all time. 4 For those who tell this story, Sade is indeed a splendidly literal 'incarnation' of the thrust of insurgent truth: 5 As Bataille says We should not be at all surprised that a truth so strange and so difficult should first of all have come to light in such a dazzling form ... How could a burst of poetic brilliance have failed to accompany this nascent truth? There had to be a revolution, and the clamour of the Bastille gates giving way ... to deliver ... the secret of Sade.6
It is noteworthy that the word used here in French to evoke Sade's glory is eclat. Its double meaning brings together the notions of visual brilliance and expressive power, thus enriching the phallic imagery surrounding his name. This is the 'cannonical' Sade, with three n's, and not two. Literary modernism, committed as it is to the idea of revolution and the thematics of radical discontinuity, tends to construct Sade as the author of revolution. Breton sees his thought as the most subversive of all/ and Apollinaire describes him as 'the freest mind [or spirit] that has yet existed'. 8 No revolution is more telling, or more tellable than the French Revolution, 'that unsurpassed moment of fracture? and no writer more revolutionary than Sade. That his thought might have contributed decisively to the development of revolutionary principle or practice is not at issue. It is rather a matter, as Blanchot says nicely, of a semiotically compelling' coincidence': 'I think that the word coincidence is the most appropriate one. With Sade ... we have the first example of the manner in which writing and the freedom to write may coincide with the movement of real freedom as historical crisis and interruption'.lO Building on this coincidence, exploiting it and making it good have been part of the ongoing work of the Surrealist movement, including its dissidents and its descendants. The process of canonising Sade as a hero of the revolution entails not just glorifying his work - or rather, his figure - but demeaning and forgetting any minor competitors or predecessors. Desnos says, for example, of the seventeenth-century writer Brantome, that he may have been of some interest as a writer on eroticism in earlier times, but that he has now been 'relegated' to the attic by Sade's brilliance. 11 This is how Sade's name, and the story that it stands for, have become the fortified place of erotic modernism. As Roger Borderie says, with what has become routine hyperbole, 'the name of Sade constitutes in a way the strongest geometrical place for criticism in our literary culture' .12 It has become widely acceptedat least within this narrow, fortified place of literary judgment- that Sade's is the most outrageous work of all time. Never, says Blanchot, in any literature or at any time, was there a work so scandalous. 13 Demonstrably,
14
!foucau[t:
such glorification of Sade depends on a slippage between historical and transhistorical discourses, whereby Sade's actions and his work become the Revolution for all time, standing tall as a kind of archetypal historical moment, and producing masterpieces that belong to the universal canon of splendidly unprecedented works of genius. This is the discourse about Sade, then, which can be seen as both helping and hindering, enabling and pre-empting, the development of Foucault's account of the historical nature of sexuality. The explicit purpose of Histoire de la folie al'age classique is not that, of course, but it is interesting to note that the history of la deraison is said to reach a decisive moment with the appearanceofSadeandGoya.Sadeistalkedabout,atthispointinFoucault's work, in an almost self-consciously second-hand way. Foucault refers to Sade's texts as they are quoted in Blanchot, and prefixes a reference to the Society of the Friends of Crime (represented in Sade's Histoire de Juliette) with the adjective fameuse, which means 'much talked about'. 14 The Sade of Histoire de la folie is indeed a much-talked-about Sade, and Foucault's text finds him quite predictably, alongside Goya, as one of the two exemplary figures of that moment in history: Sadism is not a name given belatedly to a practice as old as Eros; it is a massive culturalrealitywhichappearedpreciselyattheendoftheeighteenthcentury, and which constitutes one of the greatest conversions of western imagination: unreason turned into raving of the heart, madness of desire... . The emergence of sadism takes place at the point in time where unreason, which had been shut away and reduced to silence for more than a century, reappears, no longer as a figure of the world, nor as an image, but as the discourse of desire (HF:381).
This location of Sade could be called a successful graft of the Surrealist divine Marquess onto the history of madness, retrieving Sade's revolutionary desire as the voice of unreason. But this may also help to explain why Foucault's history, at this point, becomes both abrupt and lyrical, as if the unreason of classical times, subjected to such painstaking analysis, were now being spoken and released in one moment, as a hitherto pent-up force. It is almost as if Sade, and desire, had no previous history, no discursive formation, other than that produced by their very incarceration. In Les Mots et les chases, Foucault seems to find Sade standing astride the epistemic fault line, as a paradoxical monument to rupture.lS The Story of Juliette, we read, 'is a narrative which closes the classical age on itself, just as Don Quixote had once opened it up'.16 But at the same time as he closes off the classical, Sade is said to express 'the dark repeated violence of desire which breaks in waves over the limits of representation' (MC:223). Sade is both inside and outside the classical age: he is both the sea and the rocks, swept up and sprayed over by the dark waves of desire. And it is here, at this point in his archaeology of knowledge, that Foucault begins to sketch a history of what we have come to call sexuality. Before the late eighteenth century- that is, before Sade- there was the age of libertinage, and after, the age of sexualite (MC:222). The date of this change seems heavily overdetermined, allowing Foucault's historical thesis to 'coincide' with the mythical Sade narrative.
Satfe as a !figure Of!l?Ju[icaf !Modernity
15
By the time of Histoire de la sexualite, however, the story, and the history, have been fundamentally reshaped. A remark made almost in passing early in the first volume draws attention to 'a few historical facts that can have value as markers'. 17 This may well be a discreetly reflexive comment on the narrative meaning-making of historians. Whether it serves to relativise Sade is not made explicit at that stage, but it is noteworthy that Foucault now locates historical breaks in quite other places than in the work of the divine Marquess. When he tells the repression-liberation narrative, albeit in reluctant and ironic mode, he locates the two supposed moments of radical change in the seventeenth and twentieth centuries (VS:12-21; 152-158). But even as he moves to reject this account, he insists on the fact of there being more than one period of mutation. The first of the 'fertile moments' he identifies as the mid sixteenth century, and the second as the early nineteenth. The old epistemic break may still be there, but Sade's work, even a propos of sexuality, no longer appears to be one of its privileged sites. The onset of modernity, in the practice of constructing sexuality as truth-to-beavowed, is located much earlier, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with the development of an art of confession. Thus, when Foucault affirms polemically that 'telling the truth of sex ... does not date from the nineteenth century' (VS:76), he is presumably rejecting two narratives at once: not only the psychoanalytical history he explicitly refers to, according to which Freud is the unprecedented genius of sexual perception (VS:210), but also the familiar account given by Bataille, Breton, and their colleagues, whereby Sade is the genius who prefigured Freud's truth, and announced it from the depths of his prison. The 'discursive explosion' of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries no longer has Sade as its unique detonator, nor even as one of it most brilliant flashes: Foucault turns his attention towards the nineteenth century proper, and begins by quoting a text that dates from 1846 (VS:155). Gone, too, are the romantic metaphors used earlier to evoke the process of change. Surgir, meaning to well or rise up, had been used in Les Mots et les choses to recount the emergence of desire-from-within as the very force of modernity (MC:222), but now Foucault has recourse to quite other verbs, like relancer and reporter (to restart, carry over, or continue) when he does in fact talk of Sade. These verbs begin with the prefix re-, and thus deny absolute newness in this context. Of Sade, we are told that 'he carries on [relance] the injunction in terms that seem directly retranscribed from the treatises on confession' (VS:30), and that he 'carries over [reporte] the exhaustive analysis of sex into the exacerbated mechanisms of the former power of sovereignty' (VS: 195-6). In parallel fashion, the verb relancer is used about Freud. This does not amount, perhaps, to a demolition of the monumentally historical Sade, who is still referred to, on just one occasion, as contemporaneous with the threshold of our modernity (VS:195). Yet whatever the significance of the threshold metaphor, describing a space through which discourses are relances or reportes, it seems clear that modernity no longer has need for- nor perhaps even room for - explosive revolutionary genius.
!foucau[t:
16
One of Foucault's achievements inHistoire de la sexualite is to relativise the ardent truth of modernist narrative histories. He does this, in part, by pointing to the existence of traditions of eroticism- what he calls forms of ars erotica- in which a body of knowledge is transmitted through initiation. This form of knowledge he opposes at the outset to a modern, Western scientia sexualis (VS:77-78), although he comes to ask later whether scientia sexualis might not intersect with, or maintain, elements of ars erotica (VS:94-96). In paying such attention to transmitted or traditional knowledge, he is giving renewed importance to the discursively already-known in the construction of sexuality. To follow through with this later work of Foucault, we really need to put Sade in his place, alongside other, equivalent places, to read Sade's work in relation to its non-canonical antecedents and contemporaries. Attentive descriptions of the classically, authoritatively, didactically erotic are likely to serve us better than repeated spasms of modernist excitation. 1
See, for a literal example, Marcel Moreau, 'Le Devoir de monstruosite', Obliques, 12-13, 1977, 15.
2
Georges Bataille, La Litterature et le mal (Paris: Gallimard/Idees, 1957) 119.
3
Ibid
4
Paul Eluard, 'L'Evidence poetique', Obliques, 12-13, 1977, p.141.
5
Cf Philippe Roger, Sade: la philosophie dans le pressoir (Paris: Grasset, 1976) p.47.
6
Bataille, La Litterature et le mal, p.147.
7
Andre Breton, Anthologie de l'humour noir (Paris: Sagittaire, 1950) p.31.
8
Paul Eluard, 'Evidence poetique', ibid, p.34.
9 Jacques Henrie, 'L'Intolerable et l'infame', Obliques, 12-13, p.40. 10 Maurice Blanchot, L'Inconvenance majeure (Paris: Pauvert, 1965) pp.24-25. 11 Robert Desnos, De l'erotisme considere dans ses manifestations ecrites et du point de vue de l'esprit moderne (Paris: Cercle des arts, undated) p.37. 12 Roger Borderie, 'La Question de Sade', Obliques, 12-13, p.2. 13 Maurice Blanchot, Lautreamont et Sade (Paris: Minuit, 1949) p.217. 14 Michel Foucault, Histoire de la folie al'fige classique (Paris: Gallimard, 1972) p.552. Subsequent references given in brackets in the text (HF). 15 Man Ray's imaginary portrait of Sade is discussed in terms akin to these in Roger, Sade: la philosophie dans le pressoir, pp.15-6. 16 Michel Foucault, Les Mots et les chases (Paris: Gallimard, 1966) p.223. Subsequent references given in brackets in the text (MC). 17 Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualite, I. La Volante de savoir (Paris: Gallimard 1976) p.22. Subsequent references given in brackets in the text (VS).
Foucault/Artaud: The Madness of the Oeuvre
UwartlSclieer 'You are raving Monsieur Artaud. Youaremad. I'm not raving. I'm not mad'. (Antonin Artaud 1947). 'to define true madness, What is't but to be nothing else but mad?' Hamlet Act II, Sc.II 'Schizophrenia is not only a human fact, but also a possibility for thought' (Gilles Deleuze 1969).
Foucault's 'folie'
a l'age classique he characterises la folie for the first time as 'rien d'autre sans doute que l'absence d'oeuvre'. 1 La folie: madness, but also a word covering a range of meanings from slight eccentricity to clinical insanity.2 It is here situated in a relation to 'oeuvre'; work, product, work of art, body of work. Histoire de la folie is, at least in part, the history of this relation and its formulation in this phrase which, in its different modalities, moves through Foucault's various histoires de la folie clearing a space in which la folie can be conceptualised without confining it. Henri Gouhier, the head of the jury which in May 1961 heard Foucault's defence of his doctoral thesis Folie et deraison: Histoire de la folie al'age classique, said that he did not understand what Foucault meant by defining la folie as l'absence d'oeuvre. Foucault's detailed replies can be read in his essays 'LeNon du pere' of 1962 and 'La Folie, l'absence d'oeuvre' of 1964. Yet in the revised preface to the 1972 edition of Histoire de la folie, Foucault attempts to play down the significance of his phrase as a formulation given un peu al'aveugle, somewhat unwittingly or blindly. Shoshana Felman has noted that in the French translation of Hegel's Encyclopaedia, the entry under 'la folie' says that 'blindness is the distinctive characteristic of madness'. 3 PerhapsinthislaterprefacetohisbookwearereadingFoucault's ironic acknowledgment that defining madness is itself a slightly mad gesture, though not quite an acknowledgment that, as Derrida characterises it, his entire project in Histoire de la folie is mad. 4 In Derrida's notorious encounter with this text the phrase is une note de base (a fundamental motif) in Foucault's book. This is perhaps because he recognises its centrality to the problematical project of a history of madness and also perhaps because a certain interpretation of it neatly fits his arguments since if the absence of the oeuvre signifies 'the lack of any conventionally determined structure', syntactical, narratological, aesthetic etc. 'it implies that madness is both de jure and de facto' excluded from Descartes' text, and from Foucault's writing about madness, both of which are inevitably bound up with 'Reason in general'. 5 It is a phrase which thereby threatens In Foucault's original preface to Folie et deraison: Histoire de la folie
18
!foucau[t:
Foucault's entire project simply because it is a formulation of madness, a gesture of confinement. Yet the foreclosure of the project would depend on an epistemologically closed position, an absolute determination, of which this phrase constitutes only a possible and, as I will argue, inverse embodiment. It is not a happy positivist gesture but a negative lyrical framing which, however, with respect to at least one of its subjects, ironically serves to exclude a project which it had been the work of the book Histoire de la folie to re-insert into history. This 'fundamental motif' of the book reappears at its end as the structuring principle of a certain radical discursive practice, linking the themes of Histoire de la folie with the work of one of its central figures, the French poet, dramaturge, actor, artist and essayist, Antonin Artaud.
The madness of the proper name Artaud appears in Histoire de la folie as one in a litany of proper names including Nietzsche, Nerval, Holderlin, Roussell and de SadewhichFoucault uses metonymically to refer to certain texts in literature which embody the 'lyrical explosion' of the pathos of la folie. Derrida notes 'that Artaud is the first to attempt to reassemble, on a martyrological tree, the vast family of madmen of genius. He does so in Van Gogh, le suicide de la societe (1947)'. 6 Artaud does this earlier in a lesser known text called Lettre Sur Lautreamont in 1946. Derrida does not note this since his interest in this context is the Nietzsche/Artaud nexus and Artaud does not mention Nietzsche in his earlier text. Derrida is also concerned with the temptation afforded by the similarities between these figures to construct a 'single genealogy' for 'mad poets'. Derrida resists. Foucault and Artaud, by implication, fail to resist. James Miller, whose biography of Foucault is one of the first texts to explore in any detail the significance of Artaud to Foucault, describes the function of this list of names, in a characteristically overenthusiastic passage, as having been 'invoked in a kind of gnostic mantra, as if to summon the shattering raptures of the "thought from outside"'. 7 While this does have some pertinence with respect to the potential intrusion of the 'thought from outside' or 'mad thought' into the signifying systems of these writers, the invocation of this litany is more precisely an emplacement of la folie within a transgressive discursive practice of which these proper names are the indices, a positioning of madness within the field of a borderline literature which does not silence its voices but modulates them through the matrices of the text. Shoshana Felman locates the logic of this process of emplacement in 'Foucault's conception' that 'the proper meaning of the notion "madness" is precisely that it has no proper meaning, that it is, and rigorously, "a false concept", a metaphor indeed- of the radical metaphoricity which corrodes concepts in their essence, a metaphor of literature, from whose obliteration philosophy proceeds'. s This then places madness as metaphor in relation to the oeuvre as that which dissolves its conceptual base, a process of indefinite transformation within a finite work. This is not however an attempt to constitute the 'conceptual center (sic)' of madness since this kind of positivist project is doomed from the start as it'encounters only the decentralizing energy of its displacement'.9
j'oucau{t/Ylrtaua
19
Felman's curious translation of the phrase gives the formulation 'madness is the absence of production' which, in the context, emphasises the disintegration of authorial control over production. (Yet this occurs in a production of which the disintegration of the author is also the constitutive exercise). Meaning is therefore unachieved and, for Felman, the oeuvre is then always 'unaccomplished' and the absence of the oeuvre is precisely this 'unaccomplishment at work'. However, madness can here become a metaphor for literary production or non-production since a writing which actively produces 'loss of the relation to the mastery of meaning, of achievement' doesnotabolishitself as writing but only that mythology ofits centre, one of whose avatars has been the figure of the author. Felman's rather loose translation of 'oeuvre' here enables some curious positions in her own text. In the context of the question about madness, 'oeuvre' is given as 'production' to enable non-production to emerge but in a discussion of Descartes (through Derrida) it is this same 'oeuvre', this time given as 'work', that guarantees its non-madness, 'Of course the discourse of Descartes insures itself through its own language, through the production of a "work", against this kind of madness from which it springs; as does the discourse of Foucault' .10 Perhaps it is simply the invocation of these proper names that guarantees the status of their works. Artaud's name is invoked differently to profoundly question the status of the work itself. Not simply another example in Foucault's litany of mad artists and of the non-histories to which have they been assigned, it is with respect to Artaud that Foucault dedicates the phrase which defines for him the only way to perceive la folie in this sense of being faithful to its excess. It is, for Foucault, a way of maintaining himself at the limit of his discourse since Artaud was there before him refusing any attempt at recuperation. Foucault's book is written in the wake of this refusal, in its fragile acknowledgment of the profound irrecuperability of the experience of madness.
The presence of the oeuvre Artaud wrote in L'Ombilic des Limbes in 1925, one of his earliest works, 'I don't conceive the oeuvre as detached from life ... Each one of my works dribbles over me'. This evocation of the conception of a work as dribbling offspring is typical of the physical imagery which Artaud employs to give the sense of a 'Discourse ... now reunited with its birth in a perfect and permanent self presence' .11 In Le Pese-Nerfs of the same year, he writes 'toute l'ecriture est de la cochonnerie', 'all writing is pigshit', and later in the same piece,'And I told you: no oeuvre, no language, no speech, no mind, nothing. Nothing except a fine Pese-nerfs (nerve scales)' (OC:tl). These are constant themes in Artaud's oeuvre which situate it in terms of the limit. The silence from where it came and the impossible presence for which it sets out are both perilously located within the work as on a kind of fragile scales which threaten the work's existence. Here Artaud thematises the absence of the work as a category to be overcome. Any oeuvre, as Foucault points out in his L'Archeologie du savoir, can only be invoked as a unified discursive whole through an interpretative operation which 'deciphers in the text, the transcription of something that it both conceals and manifests' .12 Artaud's oeuvre, which Foucault gives here as an
20
!foucau[t:
example oftheproblematicnature of the oeuvre, consists ofletters, glossolalia, theatre, art, film criticism and reviews, essays, texts on theatre, manifestos, poems, screenplays, a novel, translations, fragments, spells, sketches, portraits, recordings, acting roles in cinema and on the stage. His collected works at Gallimard now includes some 28 volumes. Though variegated and complex,hisoeuvreistestimonythathismadnessdidnotreduce,orelevate, him to a permanent silence. Historically, Artaud's work was absent for only six years. The last texts Artaud produced before his eight year, eight month incarceration in the asylums of France were published in June of 1937. From this time up to September 1943 Artaud's production was spasmodic and he did not give his name to anything produced in this period. Apart from this absence of production, Artaud always took pains to ensure that his work would survive and would be seen or read, though he also maintained that any work was necessarily partial and incomplete. This desire to create durable works that would be read is perhaps most clearly and famously evident in his correspondence with Jacques Riviere.
The work as absence In early 1923, when Artaud was 27, he sent some poems to La Nouvelle Revue Fran~:aise, a chic literary journal. The editor rejected them but said would like
to meet the author. Artaud duly met Riviere, the editor, and began a correspondence with him in which he sought to explain the essential insufficiency of his poetry. His reasons have to do with what he calls a 'frightful disease of the mind' in which his thought 'abandons' him, not in the manner of a loss of inspiration but 'd'une absence totale' (0Ct1:20). This has Artaud in 'constant pursuit' of his 'intellectual being' and this is why, as he says, 'whenever I can seize upon a form, however imperfect it may be, I hold it fast, in the fear of losing all thought'. Here the substance of what Artaud is describing at the level of an experience is close to some of Foucault's various descriptions throughout Histoire de la folie, of the limit of the work and madness; for example, in the first text appended to Histoire de la folie, 'La Folie, 1'absence d'oeuvre, 'la folie indicates the void from where the work comes' (HF: 581). But Artaud's work brackets the absence of the oeuvre, anticipating its demise and remembering the silence which surrounded its appearance. La folie is also precipitated by Artaud, not in order to master it, but to continue writing, to continue producing. He writes to Riviere that the formal defects of his works do not have anything to do with a lack of intellectual development but with a 'central collapse of the soul' (0Ct1:25) and that he has 'suffered greatly in the mind' and therefore has 'a right to speak' (0Ct1:28). In one of the poems included in the letters is the phrase 'L'oubli /Deracine la symphonie' (0Ct1:29) which refers to this absencing by which that 'something furtive' steals from Artaud the words he has found. Yet Artaud's reworkings of this crime in the poems are not enough to give them any real power. Next to his letters they appear as pallid apologia for a defunct form. His letters describe with a greater intensity this process of uprooting conventional forms in an oblivion which locates itself at the core of Artaud's new work, his reworking of the very concept of 'work'. Here Artaud
j'oucau{t/Ylrtaua
21
problematises 'work' since conventionally determined 'work' is theft of the proper 'work' of thought. Thinking itself becomes 'work'. But not any thinking: it is, as Deleuze observes, a matter of bringing into being that which does not yet exist. Thinking the unthought, the central collapse of thought. 13 Artaud can be seen here abreacting, though not yet refusing, conventional aesthetic forms; these 'scraps' that he has salvaged from his own experience of la folie. He uses the poems, written in quatrains, as a test of the power of the form over his content, yet in the letters he openly repudiates literature. What becomes evident as a result of this correspondence is that Artaud wants to save as work the absence of the work as Riviere sees it, as the literary establishment defines it, and perhaps as 'institutionalised rationalism' determines it, in order to make heard his 'absence of a voice to scream with'. Here we see the process by which Artaud's work will emerge as the repudiation of this kind of oeuvre.
Absenting the oeuvre Artaud sent the poems to Riviere as a kind of abreaction of a form that would subsequently become as dead for him as it was alive for Riviere, testing the elaboration of its demise in the letters. Riviere who had maintained all along that the poems themselves lacked 'unity of impression' (0Ct1:22) suddenly proposed to publish the letters and one or two poems as examples. Here at the very beginning of Artaud's career as a writer, the process becomes visible by which his oeuvre is constituted, in the sense that Foucault describes of an externally applied set of criteria which determine a particular interpretative operation, in this movement of overlooking a certain nonachievement or un-accomplishment of aesthetic categories such as 'unity of impression', in order to reconstruct an experience of suffering, a tragic experience. Riviere responds to Artaud in the manner of a benign and paternal psychologist treating the symptoms he reads in Artaud's lyrical letters. For Maurice Blanchot, in his enormously influential Le Livre avenir, this publication of 'the Artaud/Riviere correspondence is an 'event of great significance' since it calls into question the essence of artistic production as origin and accomplishment, 'whether the movement which gave rise to the work is that in view of which the work is sometimes achieved, sometimes sacrificed'.14 Whether this movement, the 'experience of the oeuvre' as Blanchot calls it, becomes the work which it has been unable to achieve, since Riviere is interested in it- and for Riviere, 'it' is a question of psychopathology- rather than the failed poems. For Blanchot, the collection of Artaud's letters, or the oeuvre as testimony to the experience of the oeuvre, is still 'naturally not an oeuvre'.15He is,like Riviere, more interested in 'that void' which Artaud's non-oeuvre 'exalts, denounces, traverses, preserves, fills and is filled by'. We read in these phrases the trace of that spectral (absent/ present) discourse which haunts Foucault's book with its formulation of la folie, l'absence d'oeuvre. Artaud's name is scattered throughout Histoire de la folie but figures most prominently in the preface, the concluding chapter and the introductions to
22
!foucau[t:
the three parts, constituting a kind of frame through which the text appears to gaze, as if through a window whose opacity has been acknowledged but subsequently largely ignored, for nowhere in this book is there a sustained discussion of an Artaud text. Two pages from the end, the phrase designates Artaud's madness as 'precisely the absence of the oeuvre' (HF:555). A naive reading of this would suggest that this is precisely why there is no systematic engagement with Artaud's work as it is here effectively eclipsed by 'that experience, the constantly renewed courage of that ordeal, all those words hurled against a fundamental absence of language, all that space of physical suffering and of terror which surrounds or rather coincides with the void', after all, 'that is the oeuvre itself' (HF:556). But to what extent is this an essential naivete determined by Foucault's emplacement of Artaud throughout the book? And here leaving aside the question of the naivete of'speaking in the direction of Artaud' at all,16 Jane Goodall, in her recent book on Artaud, challenges Foucault's project in the direction of this emplacement. In relation to Histoire de la folie she writes, 'Artaud's function is to represent madness as that which is denied presence' .17 For Goodall, as for Artaud, madness was not silence, but noise, which, in given historical circumstances, was forcibly silenced. Foucault and Derrida both frequently remind us that madness is silence because it places itself outside signification, outside the symbolic order. This also means that a certain language will be deaf to the noise of madness, a deafness which is itself interpretative of the non-meaning of mad works. This paper is, in part, a response to Goodall's challenge with its suggestion that Foucault not only appropriates Artaud, but misappropriates him as well, since, like other post-structuralist encounters with Artaud, Foucault's bears witness to what Goodall describes as 'the insistence with which Artaud and his works are conjured away as an enabling condition for some of the most influential discourses in which he features'.1 8 In a section of the first chapter dealing with the confrontation, at the beginning of the Renaissance, between the critical consciousness of la folie and a cosmic or tragic consciousness which was to be buried in the Classical age, this question raises itself with a certain insistence. It is this tragic consciousness which, for Foucault, came to express itself in the oeuvre of Artaud, in that oeuvre which would pose to twentieth century thought, if it was paying attention, the most urgent of questions .. .in that oeuvre which never stopped proclaiming that our culture has lost its tragic centre, from the day that it excluded outside of itself the great solar madness of the world, the tearings where the 'Life and Death of Satan Fire' ceaselessly fulfils itself (HF:40).
This latter is a reference to a text by Artaud which was commissioned by Gallimard in February 1935 and was to be called Satan. The work was never completed but several pages of fragments remain and were published in June 1953 by Editions Arcanes with a preface by Serge Berna who found the manuscripts by accident in 1949 when helping a friend empty an attic. These fragments were composed between 1935 and 1937 when Artaud left for Ireland. This first edition includes other fragments from the same period which did not relate to the work in progress of Satan but were nonetheless
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23
included. It is perhaps not entirely insignificant that Foucault appears to cite this dubious edition of Artaud's fragments in the context of a discussion about the eclipsing of the tragic experience of madness by critical consciousness. Foucault asks, 'How did this movement end which leads Artaud to say (qui faisait dire aArtaud), "The Renaissance of the 16th century broke away from a reality which had these possibly superhuman laws, and the humanism of the Renaissance was not an enhancement but a diminution of man?"' (HF:40-41). This is the only place in the entire book where Foucault quotes Artaud directly, (or appears to). The footnote draws the reader's attention to a 1949 edition of Vie et Mort de Satan le Feu, an edition which never existed. This reminds us of how casual Foucault could be with citations but also suggests something about his project in this book and how the absence of the oeuvre as a historical determination is something which Foucault's misciting is destined here to repeat, with respect to Artaud. It would, however, not be possible, and Foucault acknowledges this, to announce the systematic silencing of the noise of madness and the exclusion of its shapeless structures without locating a madness, without re-confining it in order to permit it, once again, to be spoken for. This is a structural necessity which, as Derrida points out in his own commentaries on this relation, no commentary can hope to avoid. But there is this other isomorphism to resolve here in which Foucault's mis-citation of the Artaud text, as the, no doubt, benign refusal of its proper site, its mis-siting or misplacement, is that which renders the mad text absent, unreadable and not the impossibility of deciphering its structures. These words which Foucault attributes to Artaud at this judicious site in his own argument are not to be found in Vie et Mort de Satan le Feu. Where therefore in Artaud's enormous oeuvre did Foucault find them, did Artaud ever write them? I cannot answer these questions here. Suffice to say that if Foucault's book still produces this kind of uncertainty in relation to this oeuvre - and it is not here a case of an uncertainty prior to Foucault's inscription of it- then questioning Foucault's deployment of the Artaud text may restore to both the aberrations proper to them, rather than those achieved 'un peu al'aveugle'. For despite his project Foucault here demonstrates that in practice it is always other texts that are mad and forfeit their site, and their right to accurate citation. They surrender their place even if, as in Artaud, they can mould themselves to the space left vacant by the oeuvre. In these early pages of Histoire de la folie, Artaud's work is called upon to witness its own absenting and the abreacting of its own relation to la folie.
Works of Madness In the closing section of the book Artaud is called upon once more to witness
to the pure enigma of la folie as the absence ofthe oeuvre. Foucault differentiates the relation between Artaud's madness and his work (along with Nietzsche and Van Gogh) from the Classical experience in which a language of delirium could not have been a work. The limit that united them in their separation, where 'madness challenged the work' (HF:555), did not collapse them into each other but raised a question about them, 'Is it madness, or a work?' The question of the truth of the oeuvre was then, still possible. For the modern world this relation is now a contestation more 'perilous' than
24
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before. Madness is still the absolute rupture with the work. It forms the constitutive moment of the work's abolition and draws there the 'exterior edge, the line of dissolution, the contour against the void' (HF:556). But it no longer gives access to the truth of the oeuvre. Madness now signifies the 'decision beyond which this truth ceases irrevocably' (HF:556).19 This is the context in which Foucault reintroduces Artaud's madness. It does not 'slip through the cracks of the oeuvre, it is precisely the absence of the oeuvre, the reiterated presence of that absence, its central void experienced and measured in all its endless dimensions' (HF:555). This sketches in a broad sense the trajectory of Artaud's work, 'The identification of the work with the body, and the self-created body with the workasthefinalachievementofpresence'.20Notquitetheunityofbeingand language (since Being for Artaud was another excuse for not living) but a rupture in the limit imposed by the finitude of the work. Artaud's oeuvre brackets this 'experience, not yet divided, of division itself'. Foucault describes this oeuvre as an escarpment or cliff against the void of the absence of the oeuvre. 'L'oeuvre d'Artaud eprouve dans la folie sa propre absence' is translated as' Artaud's oeuvre experiences its own absence in madness',21 but I would like to insist on a variant translation of eprouver which can also mean 'to test'. This would give the sense of Artaud's continual testing of the limit of language and of the oeuvre and the way he manipulates madness in order to challenge these structures. Thus, if his work is in some sense 'mad' it is not in the sense of a 'loss of relation to mastery of meaning' but, on the contrary, in the sense of its radical interrogation of the conventions that enable meaning, those conventions that Artaud had to use in his work, but which he did not confine himself to. What is perhaps 'mad' in Artaud is this fundamental critique within his work of its own socius, or relation to the social sphere. His essay Van Gogh, le suicide de la societe, ironically the only one of his works to ever win a major literary prize, is a sustained attack on this concept of the socius, the sick society of the normal which desires only its own company, and so invents psychiatry: And what is a genuine madman? He is one who prefers to go mad, in the social sense of the word, rather than forfeit a certain higher idea of human honour. That's how society strangled all those it wanted to get rid of, or wanted to protect itself from, and put them in asylums, because they refused to be accomplices to a kind of lofty swill. For a madman is someone that society does not wish to hear but wants to prevent from uttering certain unbearable truths. But in that case, internment is not the only weapon, and the concerted assemblage of men has other ways of undermining the wills of those it wants to break.22
This passage reminds us of Foucault's remarks on the normal and the pathological in Histoire de la folie. The hom me normal is the creation of a system which identifies the socius of the subject of law and thereby situates the madman at 'the meeting place of the social decree of internment and a juridical knowledge which discerns the capacity of the subjects of law'. For Foucault all psychiatry is only possible after the establishment of this synthesis which forms the 'concrete a priori for all our psychopathology with its scientific pretensions' (HF:147). In 1946 Artaud wrote:
j'oucau{t/Ylrtaua
25
Instead of treating madmen ... you should treat yourself and cauterise, I say cauterise the so called healthy ones, they are the true invalids, the dreaded carriers of the plague. After 9 years of internment I never saw an insane person in an asylum, but outside I saw the nauseous and revolting army of allthoseunrecognisedbythepolice,bymedicineorbythechurch'(OCt23:417).
Where Artaud writes 'you', Foucault writes 'we', suggesting that they are both conscious of approaching the work from a different place, a different experience of la folie, the one tragic/ critical and the other more self-consciously critical, to adapt Foucault's own schema. Yet for both Foucault and Artaud, the oeuvre, through madness, can' open a void ... a question without answer' by which the socius, in this modern Western world, is obliged to question itself. Though the oeuvre 'endlessly drives madness to its limits', it is nonetheless'contemporary with madness' and by its excess can become, in the cases of Artaud and Foucault, an oeuvre of madness. This phrase oeuvres de folie appears in the final sentence of Histoire de la folie in a discussion about the work of Artaud, Nietzsche and Van Gogh. These are still limit cases for Foucault, 'contours against the void', for 'where there is an oeuvre there is no madness' (HF:556). Artaud wrote elsewhere, in regard to the Theatre of Cruelty, that his oeuvre is not' a symbol of an absent void' but the 'affirmation of a terrible and moreover implacable necessity' andthisisthatthelimitwhichdividestheworkfromeverythingthatitisnot, must be transgressed continually to recognise the infinite potentials of life, of the body and of la folie. The oeuvre must respond to its own 'elastic potential', as Artaud says, to become 'something made out of nothing rather than out of something' (0Ct24:493). Oeuvre not in the sense of a document of some pathological state nor the 'structural analogy' to such a document producing 'effects of madness',23 but a place where one limit trespasses into another, where the truth of the oeuvre is no longer possible as the parameters of its indeterminacy cannot be determined. As Derrida points out, 'Madness ... is the work or the absence of the work'. 24 In his response to Foucault's book, he indicates the kind of work that Foucault, despite himself, was making a place for, the kind of work that I'm gesturing towards here, since 'although the silence of madness is the absence of the work, this silence is not simply the epigraph of the work, nor is it, as concerns language and meaning, outside the work. Like nonmeaning, silence is the work's limit and profound resource'. 25 Foucault's book is, after all, an archaeology of this silence. A noisy silence which speaks of madness. Madness at the heart of the work which calls itself Artaud, no longer absent but experiencing itself and testing its limit against the pure potential of another work. One that is always to come, and which is, rigorously, the absence of the work. 1
2 3
Plon, Paris, 1961 p. v. All references to the original preface are made with respect to this edition. All other references are to the Gallimard edition of 1972, hereafter cited as HF in the text. Translations are my own unless otherwise stated. Shoshana Felman, 'Madness and Philosphyor Literature's Reason'. In 'Graphesis: Perspectives in Literature and Philosophy'. Yale French Studies 52:224, 225 fn15. Ibid, p.206.
!foucau[t:
26 4
Jacques Derrida, 'Cogito et histoire de la folie' in L'Ecriture et la Difference, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1967, p.87. Hereafter cited as 'Cogito'.
5
Geoff Bennington (1979). 'Cogito Incognito', Oxford Literary Review 4:6, 7. This is Bennington's formulation of the basis of the dispute between Foucault and Derrida.
6
Jacques Derrida, 'La Parole Soufflee.' In L'Ecriture et la Difference p.274 fn 1. Hereafter cited as 'Parole'.
7
James Miller (1993). The Passion of Michel Foucault, New York: Simon and Schuster p.213.
8
Felman, 'Madness and Philosophy' p.227.
9
Ibid.
10 Ibid, p.217. 11 J. Derrida, 'Parole', p.289. 12 M. Foucault, L'Archeologie du savoir, Paris: Gallimard, 1969. The Archeology of Knowledge, trans., Alan Sheridan. London: Tavistock, New York: Pantheon, 1972. I am quoting from this translation, p.24. 13 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, Columbia University Press, 1994, p.147. Translation of Difference et Repetition, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968. 14 Maurice Blanchot, Le livre avenir, Paris: Gallimard, 1959, p.51. 15 Ibid, p.54. 16 J. Derrida, 'Parole', p.253. Derrida says that 'to diminish it (this naivete) we would have to wait a long time ...a dialogue would have to be opened between... critical discourse and clinical discourse'. He is referring to the manner in which Artaud maintains his vigilance over his own madness and work in a way which abreacts any commentary or any reduction of his experience by anticipating the gestures of the clinic or the critic and thereby disallowing them their privileged 'metaphysical' status. Such discourses can only take place within an essential naivete or position of simplicity with respect to Artaud, since they only read one 'entire side' of Artaud's duplicitous discourse. 17 Jane Goodall (1994). Artaud and the Gnostic Drama, Oxford: Clarendon Press, p.217. Dr. Goodall is one of the most thorough and vigilant readers of Artaud's work, as this book shows. 18 Ibid, p.218 19 The French text here is a little misleading since the verb fonder, 'to found', is used instead of fondre, 'to melt or dissolve' which the context seems to suggest. 20 J. Goodall, Artaud and the Gnostic Drama, p.217. 21 Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization, Random House NY, 1965 trans. Richard Howard p.287. This is a translation based on the abridged second edition of HF of 1964, Plon 10/18 series. 22 Antonin Artaud, 'Van Gogh le Suicide de la Societe' in OC XIII p.17. 'Van Gogh the man Suicided by Society', trans. Mary Beach and Lawrence Ferlinghetti in Artaud Anthology. Ed Jack Hirschman. San Fransisco: City Lights Books, 1965. p.137. 23 Clare O'Farrell (1989). Foucault: Historian or Philosopher, London: Macmillan, p.78. 24 J. Derrida, 'Parole', p.290. 25 J. Derrida, 'Cogito', p.84 .
Eleutheromania: Freedom and Surveillance in Beckett and Foucault
The French experience of the 1940s is not synonymous with theW orld War Two which we, educated as members of the victorious Anglo-American alliance, believe we already know. It includes not only the period of Nazi Occupation and the establishment of a French government at Vichy solicitous to the Nazis, but what French historians have come to callla guerre franco-franraise, a virtual civil war fought along ideological lines which began in earnest on June 16, 1940 (when Marshal Petain requested an armistice with the invading Germans), reached its peak in 1944, and continued after the Liberation of France in the form of a purge or epuration, of those alleged to have collaborated with the Nazis (Rousso 1991:5). In The Vichy Syndrome the French Historian Henry Rousso describes Marcel Ophul's film The Sorrow and the Pity, released in 1969, as perhaps the first symptom of what was to be a new outbreak in France of cultural aftershocks from the French experience of the 1940s (Rousso 1991:100). The film ends with an American newsreel dating from 1944 in which the singer Maurice Chevalier flippantly denies rumours he has been killed in the purge and refutes in a more serious tone allegations that he had made a tour of Nazi Germany during the German occupation of France. He then goes on to sing, unaccompanied, a song with the following chorus: Let the whole world sigh or cry I'll be high in the sky
Up on top of a rainbow, Sweeping the clouds away (Ophuls 1975:173).
This case highlights problems to do with judgement and the apportioning of blame and guilt which are symptomatic of many of the cases shown in the film. It also highlights problems that arise when one State overturns another which had been its enemy. Many of those caught up in the epuration claimed that under Vichy they too, after all, were only obeying the law (Lottman 1986:133-134, 269; Lacouture 1991:75-6) and is that not what they had always been taught to do and would again be expected to do under the new State? Rousso suggests in The Vichy Syndrome that, 'The Sorrow and the Pity... disclosed a structural tension: the transmission of a history so full of conflict depends on an alchemy whose secret no one possesses ... The truth is partial in both senses' (Rousso 1991:114). If we allow ourselves the luxury of stepping back for a moment, and reading all these texts- The Sorrow and the Pity, The Vichy Syndrome, Discipline and Punish-in the same way as we read Beckett's Molloy, that is, as literature rather than as history, then Rousso's use of the words 'partial truth' might cause bells to ring as we connect it with Foucault's description of the penal
28
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arithmetic which began in the Middle Ages, and carried through till the eighteenth Century. Here the proofs used to establish the guilt of an accused were divided into categories such as full proof, semi-full proof, and distant clues. A full proof established guilt beyond doubt and led to execution, a semi-proof, however, meant that the accused was semi-guilty, and thus could undergo punishment (Foucault 1991:36, 42). Denunciation by a single eye-witness was enough to establish a semi-truth. We might further equate this with the functioning of justice in France both under occupation and during the purge. In both cases denunciation was enough to justify arrest. 1 As well as this in The Sorrow and the Pity we catch glimpses of a brutal world of punishment of the body strikingly similar to that world evoked by Foucault in Discipline and Punish. We are told of members of the French militia who confessed to plucking out the eyes of captured members of the resistance, placing live maybugs in their sockets and sowing up the eyelids (Ophuls 1975:166-7). A former member of the Resistance describes the torture of his wife at the hands of 'they': her nipples were torn off, she was burned with a red hot iron, and he concludes: 'they buried her without killing her first. .. one of the torturers himself told me that he had pushed a broom handle into her vagina' (Ophuls 1975:158). The horror of such events do not pale beside Foucault's description of the execution of Damiens the regicide (Foucault 1991:3-6). In addition, in The Sorrow and the Pity we encounter something very like the judicial torture, of the eighteenth century and before, which Foucault also describes at length. Here the accused, already considered semi-guilty because of some semiproof, is tortured in an effort to extract a confession (Ophuls 1975:38-42). In The Sorrow and the Pity, Madam Solange tells us how she was arrested as a suspected collaborator- because of a letter of denunciation (p.161)- and tortured: ' ...he plunged me into the tub. I held on...but they punched me on the chin.. .! had to swallow water ... the man... put his finger in my mouth. I threw up ... and he asked: 'Well, do you confess or don't you?' ... At that moment I regretted not having done anything' (Ophuls 1975:162-3). There were also events recounted in The Sorrow and the Pity which remind us of the use of punishment as a form of public edification, both under the occupation where the Nazis rounded up and executed scores of people in retribution for any casualties sustained at the hands of the Resistance, and under the purge where, for example, women who had formed relationships with Germans had their heads shaven before being subjected to public ridicule. For our purposes then, it is significant that both Foucault and Beckett lived through this period of French history. Foucault was at school, sheltered from direct exposure to the worst incidents. Didier Eribon quotes Foucault: .. the war arrived. Much more than the activities of family life, it was these events concerning the world which are the substance of our memory ... Our private life was really threatened. Maybe that is the reason why I am fascinated by history and the relationship between personal experience and those events of which we are a part. I think that is the nucleus of my theoretical desires (Eribon 1991:10).
'Efeutfieromania
29
Beckett, unlike Foucault was not sheltered from the worst. On June 9, 1940 he joined l'exode, the great exodus from Paris of people fleeing the Nazi invasion, which often came under fire from the Luftwaffe. He stayed' on the trot' for a month until finding shelter with friends. In October he returned to Paris and joined the Resistance. He saw a number of Jewish friends picked off by the Gestapo. 'Gloria', the Resistance cell for which he worked operated successfully until it was betrayed by a defrocked priest in 1942. Of the eighty to one hundred and twenty members allied to this group fewer than twenty survived the war. Once the cell was betrayed Beckett and his future wife Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil were forced into hiding. Beckett hidatdifferenttimesatthehomesofMarcelDuchampandNatalieSarraute's mother (under the floorboards). On one occasion Beckett was forced to hide up a tree with a colleague from the Resistance while the Gestapo patrolled below. When they eventually found haven in a hotel, his friend, driven to distraction by the ordeal leapt from a window to his death. Beckett and Suzanne escaped to the unoccupied zone with forged papers. Having made their way to Avignon by train it took them a month to walk one hundred and fifty miles to the village of Roussillon, in the Vaucluse, hiding by day and walking at night. There Beckett again worked for the Resistance, this time somewhat sporadically. He hid weapons for the local cell and disappeared, sometimes from several days at a time, on missions. 2 Speaking about Raymond Roussel in an interview given in 1983 Foucault suggests that the discovery of Beckett3 was an important part of his intellectual development: I belong to that generation of people, who ... were enclosed in a horizon...mapped out by Marxism, Phenomenology, Existentialism, etc. All of which were extremely interesting and stimulating, but which led in the end to a feeling of suffocation.. .! was like all the other students of philosophy at that time, and for me, the rupture came with Beckett: Waiting for Godot, a breath-taking spectacle (Ruas 1985:105).
The proximity of these analogies to the notion of 'discursive formation' which Foucault outlines in detail in The Archaeology ofKnowledgeis apparent. Foucault continues: we live in a world which is completely interwoven, completely interlaced with discourse ... of enunciations that have actually been pronounced, of things which have been said ...To this extent, you cannot dissociate the historical world in which we live from all the discursive elements which have inhabited this world and inhabit it still (Ruas 1985:102).
Following Foucault then, one could try to evoke the matrix of interlaced discourse common to those who lived through the forties in France, specifically as it relates to the notions of surveillance and freedom apparent in Molloy by Beckett and Discipline and Punish by Foucault. The most celebrated image of Discipline and Punish is Bentham's Panopticon, a structure consisting of a central observation tower surrounded by a circle or semi-circle of cells allowing the warder to view the' abnormal individual' at all times and ensuring that the inmate, constantly aware of being watched, cannot see the authority who is watching creating a power-structure which includes
30
!foucau[t:
'insuperable asymmetries' and excludes 'reciprocities'. 4 The major effect of the Panopticon is, 'to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the autonomous functioning of power' (Foucault 1991:201). La guerre franco-franraise threw the workings of the disciplinary power structures Foucault describes into sharp relief. This supposition is based on the understanding that in this time of civil war almost everyone not in power at a given moment could be seen, potentially, as an 'abnormal individual'. The society had become one of fear and suspicion. Anyone else might be of the enemy camp. In 1950-51 the American academic Laurence Wylie conducted a study of day to day life in the small village of Peyrane. This village, in the French Province of Vaucluse, is only a few miles from Roussillon, where Beckett spent the second half of World War Two. Wylie describes the villagers' experience of the war as follows: people had to buy on the black market...and that meant selling something on theblackmarket...Thismeantadoubleviolationofthelaw...toliveinconstant violation is uncomfortable. It leaves one vulnerable to attacks by les autres, that is, by all the other people ofthe village. By a simple denunciation any one of les autres may threaten disaster to your family (1974:28).
All this was taking place in a small village where people had lived all their lives, and no Germans or Americans so much as even passed through this village during the war. Surely this is an example of the 'autonomous functioning of power'. It also gives an extreme example of the workings of our own society as Foucault sees it, a society not of spectacle but of surveillance (Foucault 1991:209, 217), so that nowadays, '"Discipline" may be identified neither with an institution nor with an apparatus; it is a type of power' (Foucault 1991:215). The workings of such power through surveillance permeates Beckett's Molloy. Yet the power-structure is often subverted by humour. Early in the novel a policeman suspects Molloy of vagrancy and demands to see his papers: 'Your papers! he cried. Ah my papers. Now the only papers I carry with me are bits of newspaper, to wipe myself, you understand, when I have a stool.. ..In a panic I took this paper from my pocket and thrust it under his nose' (Beckett 1976:21). Papers were a problem for Beckett who found himself without them when the Germans invaded, got by on forged documents later on, then found it difficult to re-enter France after a brief trip to Ireland because the French authorities were refusing to issue new papers to resident aliens (Bair 1990:324, 337, 358). Later a woman named Lousse takes Molloy in for reasons that at first seem like love - she wishes him to take the place of the dog which had taken the place of a child- but quickly the relationship becomes one of imprisonment linked to the voyeuristic pleasure of surveillance (Becket 1976:31-56). Molloy describes their relationship: 'Lousse herself I saw but little, she seldom showed herself to me, out of tact perhaps, fearing to alarm me. But I think she spied on me a great deal, hiding behind the bushes, or the curtains, or skulking in the shadows of a first-floor room, with a spy-glass perhaps' (Beckett 1976:50). While Molloy meets few others on his journey towards his
'Efeutfieromania
31
mother he is still aware of surveillance and a need to be on guard against 'they'. The following description brings to mind the two separate months during the war when Beckett was on the road, attempting to avoid the authorities, sleeping in haystacks by day and walking at night to avoid capture, careful perhaps of those seduced by Vichy's National Revolution with its slogan, Travail, Famille, Patrie [Work, Family, Fatherland], who believed in 'cleaning up' France, in a moral sense. 5 Molloy describes the techniques of survival: Morning is the time to hide. They wake up, hale and hearty, their tongues hanging out for order, beauty and justice, baying for their due ...towards noon things quiet down ...Corning up to four or five of course there is the nightshift, the watchmen ... you hug the walls, bowed down like a good boy, oozing with obsequiousness ... the night purge is in the hands of technicians ...the bulk of the population have no part in it... Day is the time for lynching, for sleep is sacred (Beckett 1976:62-3).
However, the description of the society of surveillance is most apparent in part two of Molloy, that section narrated by the bourgeois spy Moran. Unlike Molloy, Moran, at least at the commencement ofhisnarrative, is very much part of society. And it is a society in which everyone is watching everyone else, the society of les autres described by Laurence Wylie. Moran is an agent of some sort working for a certain 'Youdi' who is something like Godot as his invisibility is linked with a perhaps exaggerated power. Youdi is almost God-like in his omniscience. To begin, the world Moran describes is middle class and calm (Beckett 1976:85). The calm is soon shattered by the arrival of Gaber, Youdi's messenger, who instructs Moran to pursue Molloy. Subtly then, elements of hierarchical power are brought to our attention. In the two pages preceding Gaber's arrival, Moran, to carefully choose a cliche, is master of all he surveys, he is the one who issues instructions, to his son, to his cook, he watches over his bees, he imagines that he sees without being seen, but somehow Gaber sees him: 'I thought I was hidden from anybody coming into my grounds ... and in fact I must have been. But at the noise of the gate being slammed I turned angrily and saw ... this high mass bearing down on me'. Moran's illusion of power begins to evaporate and we are made aware that the world he inhabits is one of continual surveillance. He catches a glimpse of his son spying on him from behind a bush and notes without satisfaction that, 'Peeping and prying were part of my profession. My son imitated me instinctively' (Becket 1976:86). After his interview with Gaber he cannot locate his son, who he deduces has gone to church without him. But Moran is ever suspicious. He reasons as follows: Is he barefaced enough to tell me ...that he had been to mass if he has not .. ? And I determined to get the truth out of Father Ambrose ...And if Father Ambrose could not enlighten me, I would apply to the verger ... For I knew for a fact that the verger had a list of the faithful and that, from his place beside the font, he ticked us off when it came to the absolution. It is only fair to say that Father Ambrose knew nothing ofthese manoeuvres, yes, anything in the nature of surveillance was hateful to the good Father Ambrose (Beckett 1976:88).
!foucau[t:
32
We soon learn, however, that Father Ambrose is not above surveillance as he questions Moran's son as to why Moran was absent from mass (1976:92). But the world of surveillance spreads beyond the confines of the church. Moran describes a meeting with an atheistic neighbour: 'A neighbour passed. A free-thinker. Well, well, he said, no worship today? He knew my habits, my Sunday habits I mean. Everyone knew them and the chief perhaps better than any, in spite of his remoteness (1976:90). The purpose of surveillance is the desire to impose discipline. This is evident not just in the Sunday ritual, but in the moment to moment happenings in the household which Moran rules with the severity of the old-testament God. 'I like punctuality', he states, 'all those whom my roof sheltered had to like it too' (1976:90). Moran has a methodical mind and it is the progressive loss of this method and the gradual moving away from his disciplined approach that he seems to equate with the progressive dissolution of his body and mind. This is the substance of his narrative, as, in his quest for Molloy, he comes to resemble his quarry more and more. As a final example for this list of the workings of surveillance in Moran's narrative we could turn to an episode with Moran and his cook, Martha. Martha also watches Moran, as Moran watches her, as he watches his son who watches him, as Youdi watches Moran. In this hierarchy Moran has some, though not absolute, power over those he observes. His power is mitigated by the extent to which they are able to watch him in turn and trick him with regard to their behaviour. The only absolute power is that ofYoudi, who has this power because, like the operator of the Panopticon, he sees without being seen, and seems to see all. In contrast, to exercise his own power Moran must remain vigilant and use his powers of deduction where his powers of surveillance let him down. But he fails to catch-out his cook, whom he suspects of an act of defiance. The scene is as follows: The stew was a great disappointment. Where are the onions? I cried. Gone to nothing, replied Martha. I rushed into the kitchen, to look for the onions I suspected her of having removed from the pot, because she knew how much I liked them. I even rummaged in the bin. She watched me mockingly (1976:94).
The humour is augmented when we remember that the standard French rebuff hurled at someone considered a busy-body, the equivalent in fact to 'mind your own business', is 'occupe-toi de tes oignons', which translates literally as 'mind your own onions'. Tied to the notions of surveillance and power in Beckett is the notion of freedom. This is explicitly stated by Moran early in his narrative. He is well aware of the power-structure including 'insuperable asymmetries' and excluding 'reciprocities' which operates between himself and Youdi. He does not want the Molloy case, foisted on him by Youdi via Gaber, but can do nothing about it even as he pretends he is free to choose. He states: 'it's hard for me to refuse, I said, knowing perfectly well that in any case it was impossible for me to refuse. Refuse! But we agents often amused ourselves with grumbling among ourselves and giving ourselves the airs of free men' (1976:87).
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In October 1942, using false papers and having secured the services of a
passeur, who was meantto act as an escort, Beckett and Suzanne DeschevauxDumesnil prepared to flee Paris and make their way into la zone libre of Vichy France (Bair 1990:337). At this time the schoolboy Michel Foucault lived in Poitiers, twenty kilometres from la zone libre. As Didier Eribon puts it, 'On the other side of the line was almost another world, and one needed a pass to get there' (1991:7). 6 As wehavealreadyseen with the self-surveillance of the villagers of Peyrane, the notion of freedom operating in la zone libre or the 'free zone' of Vichy was very much one of degree. Molloy says, 'Can it be we are not free? It might be worth looking into' (Beckett 1976:35). There is no complete freedom possible as there is no outside the law of surveillance. In Discipline and Punish Foucault suggests that: 'the carceral network does not cast the unassimilable into a confused hell; there is no outside ...In this panoptic society ... the delinquent is not outside the law; he is, from the very outset, in the law (1991:301). While it is not possible to be truly free it is perhaps possible to gesture in that direction. Molloy gives an example: '!...loved the image of old Geulincx, dead young, who left me free, on the black boat of Ulysses, to crawl towards the East, along the deck. That is a great measure of freedom, for him who has not the pioneering spirit' (Beckett 1976:48). When Molloy was being translated into German the translator wrote to Beckett requesting that he explain this particular passage. Beckett replied: This passage is suggested (a) by a passage in the Ethics of Geulincx where he compares human freedom to that of a man, on board a boat carrying him irresistibly westward, free to move eastward within the limits of the boat itself, as far as the stem; and (b) by Ulysses' relation in Dante (Inf. 26) of his second voyage (a medieval tradition) to and beyond the Pillars of Hercules, his shipwreck and death .. .I imagine a member of the crew who does not share the adventurous spirit of Ulysses and is at least at liberty to crawl homewards ... along the brief deck (Beckett 1954:28).
In the early days of the war at least, the French Resistance amounted to not much more than this kind of gesture of defiance. In The Sorrow and the Pity two former members of the Resistance talk about their experience of the war. Marcel Faouche-Degliame states that, 'the problems of everyday life no longer existed: we were very free ... '. Emmanuel D'Astier says, 'I think you could only have joined the Resistance if you were maladjusted'. FaoucheDegliame concludes: 'free in the sense that, being outside organised society, all of society's objectives did not affect us very much, it simply didn't matter any more' (Ophuls 1975:118). What is interesting about these comments is the notion of the type of freedom they convey, which appears in the work of both Beckett and Foucault: indiscipline, disorder. Tied to this idea of freedom is acceptance of the possibility or even inevitability of failure. Failure, as much a positive as a negative value, emblematic of the indomitable spirit fighting against impossible odds. Like Don Quixote or members of the Resistance such as Emmanuel D' Astier who states: 'we had the kind of Quixotic feelings that failures can always have' (Ophuls 1975:118). 'Failure' has long been seen as one of the key ideas in Beckett's work. To
34
!foucau[t:
quote some famous lines from Beckett's late work, Worstward Ho: 'All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better' (Beckett 1989:101). The phrase 'indomitable spirit' gives a wrong impression. It is possible that the failure, linked with its freedom comes about as much against the will of the one who fails as because of that will. The failure might be said to issue from the subject's resistance to subjectification. Foucault suggests that power should not be thought of as primarily destructive, but primarily creative. It produces the individual (Foucault 1991:194). It produces the soul (1991:29). Yet if the subject comes into being through subjection, how can such a subject be free or freed, when, as Foucault concludes, 'The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection much more profound than himself' (1991:30)? An answer might be that a type of freedom is to be found in that being which resists (even if unintentionally) subjectification. Such a being, in perhaps its quintessential form, is Beckett's unnamable. Foucault states that the, 'turning of real lives into writing is no longer a procedure ofheroization; it functions [now] as a procedure of objectification and subjection' (Foucault 1991:192). Molloy, like Moran, is writing a report about himself at the behest of others. While the purpose of neither report is fully explained, it could be argued that they are meant as certificates of identification through which these abnormal individuals might be subjectified (Foucault 1991:199). It might be further argued that the process fails, firstly because the narrators claim that they often lie and tend to invent themselves as they go along, and secondly because Moran comes to resemble Molloy through the course of his narrative thereby subverting the process of individualisation. The title of Beckett's first play, written in French just after Molloy and never published or performed, is Eleutheria, a Greek word meaning 'Freedom'. The protagonist Victor Krap, who wants nothing other than to not take part in society at all, is constantly harried by others who are scandalised by his behaviour (he comes, after all, from a good family), and demand that he explain his failure to act, his failure to take part. He cannot or will not. It is something he can only approach by negative definition. He says: 'I have always wanted to be free. I don't know why. I don't know what that means either, to be free ... But far from words I know what it is'. 7 It is this distance from others, the world, and the self, that Victor equates with freedom. He continues: (With incoherence): It's acceptable to you that one goes beyond life, or that it goes beyond you, that one becomes irreducible, on condition of paying the price for that, of putting aside one's freedom. He has given up, he is dead, he is mad, he has found faith, developed a sarcoma, nothing to take exception to. But to no longer be among you by means of being free, that is shameful and scandalous (Beckett 1947:115).8
That is to say, it is acceptable to live your life 'outside' the norms established by society so long as you submit to being categorised and institutionalised: in a hospital, a lunatic asylum, a monastery, or a cemetery, for example. But to abandon society altogether and live 'far from it', with
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space understood here as intimately tied to perception (or rather want of it, as perception is tied to surveillance), as a means of achieving freedom is scandalous. The most visible of those who attempt to live in such a way, those who achieve such distance from our society while still living among us used to be called vagabonds. Molloy lives as a vagabond and as such attracts the attention not only of the police but of Welfare groups, who Foucault also mentions as serving a function of surveillance and discipline within society (1991:212). Foucault cites numerous examples oflaws enacted specifically as a means of incarcerating vagabonds who were seen as living dangerously outside society and therefore outside the law (1991:88, 122, 210, 289-290). The most telling example of the equation of vagabondage with freedom is the case of Beasse, a child of thirteen, charged with vagabondage and sentenced to two years in prison in 1840. Foucault quotes from an account of the trial: The judge: ...What is your station in life? ... [Beasse]: I don't work for anybody. I've worked for myself for a long time now... -lt would be better for you to be put into a good house, as an apprentice and learn a trade,- Oh, a good house, an apprenticeship, it's too much trouble. And anyway the bourgeois... always grumbling, no freedom.- Does not your father wish to reclaim you?- Haven't got no father.- And your mother?- No mother neither, no parents, no friends, free and independent (1991:290-1).
Certainly attaining freedom through vagrancy is not seen as an attractive possibility by all of Beckett's characters. Moran hears a voice telling him that completing his report will help him, 'endure the long anguish of vagrancy and freedom'. And he exclaims: 'Does this mean I shall .. .lose and be banished from the absurd comforts of my home where all is snug and neat and all those things at hand without which I could not bear being a man... which it was my life's work to build' (Beckett 1976:122). The allusion to 'work' in relation to propriety and property might be connected again with the Vichy motto, Travail, Famille, Patrie, and perhaps with the signs which hung at the gates of entrance to Auschwitz and other Jewish extermination camps, stating, 'Arbeit macht frei', or 'work makes one free'. Foucault discusses how work was considered a purifying ethic reforming the morally corrupt whose sins were seen to stem from idleness (1991:121-2). Such illdiscipline, such idleness might also be linked to the subculture called 'zazou' that existed in Paris during the Occupation. Les zazous were a collection of upper middle class French teenagers who listened to American swing. At a time when the French were being told their defeat in the war stemmed from decadence, a loss of the great values, (such as work, family, etc.), and the influence of foreigners, and that they now must clean-up their collective act; at a time, moreover, when the Gestapo patrolled the streets and the best way to stay out of trouble was to blend in with everyone else, les zazous went out of their way to look and behave differently, with a difference that could only be considered decadent and foreign. They might be seen, in defiantly claiming their freedom to be different, to have constituted a kind of resistance. Perhaps the most striking example of their tongue in cheek defiance came when French Jews were ordered to prominently display a yellow star of David with the word 'Juif' a tall times. Somezazousmadeandopenlywore
36
!foucau[t:
yellows stars of their own. And in the centre they had written the word 'swing' (Thoumieux-Rioux 1993:32-9). Such resistance involves not only indiscipline and disorder, but the shortcircuiting of the panoptic machine. Instead of fearing the gaze of the society of surveillance the zazous welcome it, they ask to be seen, to be noticed, so that they might thumb their noses. This is the kind of resistance without ideology which questions our notions of what is political. Just as those notions are questioned by the type of freedom achieved through failure and the subversion of power through humour expressed in the works of Samuel Beckett. 1
2
Lottman concludes, however, that there were significant differences between letters of denunciation under the Occupation and during the purge. The former were often anonymous, while Lottman shows that, officially, at least, under the purge the letters had to be signed, and states that these letters were generally treated with caution by the courts (Lottman, 1986:77, 149). From Bair, 1990:320-366, and Bernold 1992:26.
3
It is easy enough to call upon Foucault in support of the supposition that personal
4
5
history is important to the work of a writer -perhaps surprisingly, as his name has been liked to often obscurely defined notions of the 'death' of the author. It is important to note that Foucault discussed not an actual death or disappearance, but the history of the concept of the author. Firstly, in the period for questions immediately after his paper, 'What is an Author' he said, in discussing 'the death of man': 'This is a theme that allows me to bring to light the ways in which the concept of man is dead; it is a matter of seeing in what manner, according to what rule, the concept of man was formed and has functioned. I have done the same thing for the notion of the author. So let's hold the tears' (Eribon 1991:210). Theproblemisneatlydiffused by Blanchot: 'itisacceptedasacertainty that Foucault, adhering in this to a certain conception of literary production, got rid ot purely and simply, the notion of the subject: no more oeuvre, no more author, no more creative unity. But things are not that simple. The subject does not disappear; rather its excessively determined unity is put in question. What arouses interest and inquiry is its disappearance (that is, the new manner of being which disappearance is), or rather its dispersal' (Blanchot 1990:76). Speaking about Raymond Roussel in the interview given in 1983 Foucault states, 'someone that is a writer doesn't simply create his work in his books,in whathepublishes... in the end it's himself writing his books. And it's this relationship between he and his books ... which is the central point. .. The work is more than the work: the writing subject is part of the work' (Ruas 1985:104). It is this effectwhichithas in common with all disciplines,'The disciplines should be regarded as a sort of counter-law. They have the precise role of introducing insuperable asymmetries and excluding reciprocities' (Foucault 1991:222). On the state attitude to vagabonds during the Occupation see White, 1993:273274, 'during the Occupation a new law was introduced, primarily for political reasons, but also to solve the problem presented by petty thieves, multiple offenders and the homeless. This law, created on 15 October 1941, allowed the state to place in an 'administrative internment' anyone considered a threat to national security or anyone who could not prove he or she had a profession, a residence or a legal means of gaining a living. '
6
The 'free zone' was invaded by the Nazis soon after Beckett and Suzanne crossed over, on 11 November, 1942 (Rousso 1992:182).
7
My thanks to Jerome Lindon for permission to quote from this text. French
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original is as follows: T ai toujours voulu etre libre. Je ne sais pas pourquoi. Je ne saisnon plus ce que <;a veut dire, etre libre ... Mais loin des mots je sais ce que c'est.' 8
French original as follows: 'Victor (Avec incoherence): Vous acceptez qu'on depasse la vie, ou qu' elle vous depasse, qu' on devienne irreductible, aconditon d'y mettre le prix, de deposer sa liberte. 11 a abdique, il est mort, il est fou, il a la foi, un sarcome, rien aredire. Mais ne plus etre parmi vous aforce d'etre libre, <;a c'est une honte et un scandale. '
References Bair, Deirdre (1990). Samuel Beckett: A Biography, London: Vintage. Beckett, Samuel (1947). Eleutheria, unpublished typescript, written in French. Held in the Beckett collection, the Rare Books Library, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, USA. [Typescript consulted April1992]. Translations from this source are mine. __ _, (1954). Letter to Dr. E. Franzen. Quoted in Babel3, [magazine], 1984, Ms 2993 The Samuel Beckett Collection, Archives, UK: The University of Reading. __ _, (1989). Nohow On, London: Calder. __ _, (1976). The Beckett Trilogy, London: Picador. Bemold, Andre (1992). L'amitie de Beckett: 1979-1989. Paris: Hermann. Translations from this source are mine. Blanchot, Maurice (1990). 'Michel Foucault as I Imagine Him'. Foucault/Blanchot, trans. by Jeffrey Mehlman. New York: Zone. Eribon, Didier (1991). Michel Foucault, trans. Betsy Wing. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Foucault, Michel (1991). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan, London: Penguin. Lacouture, Jean (1990). De Gaulle. Volume 1: The Rebel 1890-1944, trans. Patrick O'Brian, London: Collins Harvill. __ _, (1991). De Gaulle. Volume 2: The Ruler,1945-1970. Trans. Alan Sheridan, London: Harvill. Lottman, Herbert R. (1986). The People's Anger: Justice and Revenge in Post-Liberation France, London: Hutchinson. Ophuls, Marcel (1975). The Sorrow and the Pity: The Text and Illustrations from the Marcel Ophuls Film, trans. Mireille Johnson, London: Paladin. Rousso, Henry (1992). Les annees noires: vivre sous l'Occupation. Paris: GallimardDecouvertes. __ _, (1991). The Vichy Syndrome: history and memory in France since 1944. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Ruas, Charles (1985). 'Archeologie d'une passion' [interview with Michel Foucault], in Magazine litteraire, numero 221, juillet-aout. pp.100-5. Translations from this source are mine. Thournieux-Rioux, Emmanuelle (1993). 'Les Zazous, Enfants terribles de Vichy'. L'Histoire, No. 165, April, Paris, pp.32-9. White, Edmund (1993). Genet, London: Chatto and Windus. Wylie, Laurence (1974). Village in the Vaucluse. Third edition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
The Memoir, The Corpse and the Bad Judge: Foucault and Bataille
The Bloody Memoir In his essay on Bataille, 'A Preface to Transgression', Foucault (1977:30)
writes: 'Profanation in a world which no longer recognizes any positive meaning in the sacred- is this not more or less what we may call transgression?' Perhaps this was never more true than in the mid-nineteenth century France of Pierre Riviere, when transgression, in the form of the apparently religiously inspired slaughter of one's own family, could be defined solely in the terms of a medico-legal discourse surrounding the emergent concept of 'monomania'. Through the course of the documents arranged more or less chronologically by Foucault in I, Pierre Riviere, Having Slaughtered my Mother, my Sister, and my Brother ... , the almost ritual killing performed by Riviere is subjected to the attempt to transform it from an inhuman act of abject monstrosity into a symptom, from a cry exceeding the bounds of rationality into the contained object of reason itself. The sacred violence of Riviere's act is reduced to the profanity of madness (for example), to that which justifies and engenders the restricted transgression of the taboos against the taking of life and the violation of the sanctity of motherhood, while leaving them intact and secure. 'For example': in a certain way, this phrase might be said to characterise Foucault's project in general, as one which has served 'to constitute series: to define the elements proper to each series, to fix its boundaries, to reveal its own specific types of relations, to formulate its laws, and, beyond this, to describe the relations between different series' (Foucault 1969:7-8). Each of those' discursive formations' which it has been Foucault's exemplary task to have analysed, is an example of the general phenomenon of discontinuous serialisation, yet none serves to illustrate a model as such: there is no generalisable form of the discursive formation. Nevertheless, discursive formations are recognisable as such, to the extent that lists of them may be drawn up, as Foucault often does: medicine, political economy, biology, grammar, etc. 'Etc'. is, as Alan Liu (1990:86) suggests, 'a trope of inexpressibility' that calls upon the possibility of generalisation and of example, which exceeds the chance of ever actually nominating the precise extent of the generality and the string of examples to which it refers. This Foucault knows better than anyone else: four times, in the chapter in The Archaeology of Knowledge on 'Discursive Formations', he attempts (or makes a show of attempting), to provide a general hypothesis which would explain and provide for the unity of the discursive formation, and each time a contrary example leads him to discard the hypothesis. In the place where he 'expects' to find the grounds for each (unity of object, style, concept or
39
theme), as if he were attempting a'synecdochic redemption' of 'the etc. from the wasteland of endless syntagm' (Liu 1990:86), Foucault finds instead a series of divisions and dispersions, discontinuities and transformations, and the possibility for determining the various ways in which these are regulated. The example opens a chasm within itself between two functions which are never separable - it is specific, unique, what is given before all generalisation as the possibility of its elaboration, and is at the same time permanently inscribed in the series which constitutes each of its elements according to a rule of 'positive' complementarity. It is across the division of each example from itself that Foucault traces the relations of the discursive formation - what remains to be thought when one has exhausted the potential of the relations of object, style, concept and theme and so on; that is, what remains when one is presented with the example that does not fit the model it was supposed to exemplify, are the differential relations which allow one to speak of this or that example, and which at once render it inoperable in its proper place. It is thus that Deleuze writes of Foucault: 'For the archivist deliberately refuses to give examples. He believes that he never stopped giving them in the past, even if at the time he was unaware that they were examples'. The limited and limiting transgression of the kind expressed as 'profanation in a world which no longer recognises any positive meaning in the sacred', operates within the space of these relations, within the space of the example. Transgression is example, all that can be thought of as transgression takes place as example, as the opening of the chasm in the rule which gives it its place. Everything in the Riviere case points to the exemplary nature of transgression, everything sets up transgression as example - the unusually full documentation of the case, its timing with respect to the regicide case of Fieschi with which it was equated according to the penal code, and with respect to the psychiatric-legal debate concerning the admissibility of concepts such as that of 'monomania'. And at the end of an indeterminate string of circumstances, there is Riviere's memoir. The 'Notes' at the end of the dossier, prepared by Foucault and others, serve to contextualise the proceedings of the case. The documents are not so much analysed as 'placed' - the precise extent to which they function as an example of the juridical function of psychoanalytic discourse in the midnineteenth century is what is at stake - a function of exemplification which is in some way separable from the texts themselves. The 'Notes' are a guide or program for the reader who is invited to watch the drama of juridical power unfold. At the centre of this drama, and at its beginning and end, is the memoir of Riviere, the axis of a centripetal force which determines throughout the motion and fate of each of the players. As such, it is left entirely without interpretation or 'any psychiatric or psychoanalytic commentary', for three reasons which Foucault states in his Foreword: first, because it serves as the 'zero benchmark' according to which the other discourses are situated and the relationships between them gauged. Second, and I think that this can be reduced to the first, because the editors did not wish to embroil it in one or more of the discourses whose operation it was supposed to throw into relief:
!foucau[t:
40
Thirdly, and most importantly, owing to a sort of reverence and perhaps, too, terror for a text which was to carry off four corpses along with it [Riviere suicided in prison shortly after his reprieve from the death sentence], we were unwilling to superimpose our own text on Riviere's memoir. We fell under the spell of the parricide with the reddish-brown eyes (Foucault 1973:xiii; emphasis added).
With the slash of the pruning bill that opens up the bodies of his mother, his sister, and his brother, Riviere also opens up the exemplary space which almostswallowshim. He is divided along the axis oftheexamplewhichruns between uniqueness and generality, he is dispersed among the various subjectivities constituted by juridical and medical discourses, he is transformed into the 'case' he always was. Remember, the division, dispersion and transformation of Riviere (for example) is what enables Foucault to make his decision, to identify the psychiatric-judicial discursive formation in operation here. But in order to do this, he must identify Riviere's 'other' transgression, he must separate from 'Riviere-the-example' what is proper to him, what makes him exemplary- the memoir. Foucault's project in I, Pierre Riviere, the partial archaeology of a discursive formation constituted by the statements of the Paris specialists in response to the memoir, rests upon this thing to which he can articulate no reply, which holds him entirely in its thrall: 'It was simply the beauty of Riviere's memoir ['that led us to spend more than a year on these documents']. The utter astonishment it produced in us was the starting point' (Foucault 1973:x). What remains of Riviere beyond the example, beyond the profanation of the analytic krinein, is the terror, reverence and astonishment produced at the moment of an encounter with the sacred.
Burnt Offerings Georges Bataille's The Trial of Gilles de Rais appears to offer itself in comparison with Foucault's work. It too presents the record of a trial, or more precisely, of two trials, ecclesiastical and secular, which mirrors the account of Riviere's doubled trial, split between the legal and the medical. It also provides an introduction, 'The Tragedy of Gilles de Rais', and an'Analysis of Historical Facts', which, while appearing before the trial documents, performs much the same function as the 'Notes' appended to Riviere's case. However, any comparison of the events themselves, strictly speaking, must end there. Riviere and de Rais were each tried for murder, to be sure, but the scale of their respective crimes and the motives for them are separated immeasurably. Riviere was a nineteenth-century peasant who suffered what he, and indeed the authorities, saw as the torments inflicted upon his father by his mother as a kind of religious crisis; de Rais a medieval lord of fantastic wealth and military power, lieutenant to Joan of Arc until her martyrdom, whose spiritual torments appear of an altogether different order than Riviere's, at least to the authorities of the time, and seemingly occur less as the cause of his crimes than as their adjunct. Gilles de Rais is only ever on the verge of transgression. His world, that of the end of feudalism, still recognises a positive value in the sacred, still places a degree of faith in the value of sacred objects. What Gilles de Rais
41
represents is a monstrous profanation. He and his accomplices are indicted, before the ecclesiastical tribunal, for having killed, cut the throats of, and massacred many innocent children in an inhuman fashion, and with them committed, against nature, the abominable and execrable sin of sodomy, in various fashions and with unheard-of perversions that cannot presently be expounded by reason of their horror, but that will be disclosed in Latin at the appropriate time and place; ... [for having] often and repeatedly practised the dreadful invocation of demons and took care that it be practised; ... [for having] sacrificed and made offerings to these same demons, contracted with them; and wickedly perpetrated other crimes and offences, professing doctrinal heresy in offence against Divine Majesty, in the subversion and distortion of our faith, offering a pernicious example unto many. (Bataille 1965:150-1).
The charges brought by the secular court are similar with respect to the murders, and add Rais' seizure of the fortress ofSaint-Etienne-de-Mermorte, which he had not long before sold to Geoffroy Le Ferron, the treasurergeneral of Brittany. The differences between these separate indictments and the grounds upon which the proceedings are conducted are crucial, and summed up in the following exchange. The high secular magistrate attendant at the ecclesiastical hearings interrupts Rais' first confession, and demands that Rais reveal his motives - who had persuaded him, who had instructed him in the techniques of his atrocities, and to what end. Rais can only reply that they were committed of his own accord, at his own instruction and for his own pleasure. To the magistrate's reasoned disbelief and insistence, Rais responds: 'Truly, there was no other cause, no other end nor intention, if not what I've told you: I've told you greater things than this and enough to kill ten thousand men' (Bataille 1965:187). The confession to a crime whose only motive is its own fulfilment, and of which Rais considers himself limitlessly guilty, is the measure of his profanity. To the Church, it is enough that he is a monster; in fact, it demands that this be the case. To the state on the other hand, Rais must be what will later come to be known as a delinquent, an example of a type, whose criminal formation may be identified and generalised, and a category to which we shall return. It is not so simple as this, of course- we are yet in the early days of the separation of the powers of Church and state, and the division which has never really succeeded in separating profanation from transgression has barely even begun its institution. Gilles de Rais' attempts to maintain the sovereignty of his uncalculated extravagance- his numerous fortresses, his glorious retinue, his private army, his magnificent theatrical reproductions of the siege of Orleans- by means of war, theft, alchemy, pacts with the devil, sacrifices and the like, are attempts to transcend the limitations of the profane world, and to achieve the realm of the sacred. In pursuit of this end, of this end of ends, no means could remain simply a means -from the start, Rais' crimes escalate towards ends in themselves, expressing in themselves the subordination of all else. To place oneself on a footing with God is Evil; and yet, in not being God, Evil is profane. The temporal power of the Christian Church rests, at least in part, on this paradox; it allows the Church
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to punish, in this world, crimes against the next. For the Church, then, Rais must be a monster: he must be the embodiment, in a single terrible figure, of the sacred paradox which, if it is to remain inviolate, must be consumed whole in the flames of the execution-pyre. But even for the Church, Rais offers 'a pernicious example'. And as we have seen, to exemplify is to transgress, which is precisely not to be a monster- it is to establish, in the act of exceeding it, the law that makes one a subject. It is to be mad, it is to be criminal, it is even to be saintly, but it is not to be a monster. However, the secular magistrate can find no grounds upon which to establish Rais' madness or even his delinquency, and in frustration turns him back over to the clerics, who may now content themselves with the details of Rais' damnation. Except for the question of his remains. Despite Rais' monstrosity, despite the fact that he resists the analytical division that would make of him a case, Rais' hanged body is not burnt to ashes, as are those of two of his closest accomplices. 'Before the flames could open his body and entrails, it was drawn away and his body placed in a coffin and carried inside the Carmelite church of Nantes, where it was buried' (Bataille 1965:279). Rais' soul is consecrated to God's will, while his material, transgressive body is returned to the earth- no longer a monster, Rais is, at the last moment, restored to the order of things. Bataille's study of Gilles de Rais is the study of a 'sacred monster', who 'represents in a pure state the impulse that tends to subordinate the activity of men to enchantment' (Bataille 1965:38), an impulse which is the basis of many, if not all, ofBataille's works. But just as for the ChurchRais fails at the last instant to unify the sacred and the profane, Bataille finds himself confronted with the insistence of Rais' shattered remains. What has come back to him is the impossibility of absolute sovereignty, the impossibility of the situation he has represented, and that Gilles de Rais is given to have represented. And yet, it is precisely here that we can see the sense of which Bataille speaks when he says: 'Indeed I think that in a sense my narratives clearly attain the impossible', in his preface to the book of that name (Bataille 1965:9). He cannot attain this extreme simply by representing it, for as he says elsewhere: 'Through language we can never grasp what matters to us, for it eludes us in the form of interdependent propositions, and no central whole to which each of these can be referred ever appears' (Bataille 1957:274). Given all that remains left to language, Bataille attains the impossible by exemplifying it, by allowing the remains to resonate in the empty space of transgression, by allowing Rais to exhaust himself to death in the role which he plays all too well.
Judging Distances At the end of our parallel investigations, we are left to face two apparently contradictory remains- on the one hand, Pierre Riviere's astonishing and indecipherable memoir, and on the other Gilles de Rais' slightly charred but eminently recognisable corpse. Nevertheless, the importance of each is the result of a decision, a separation, the putting of a certain distance between the force of the analysis and the remains of the object; which is to say it is the
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result of the interposition of the experience of the object as remains. In this way we can speak of a particular physics of the critical exercise. The memoir provides Foucault with the sacred basis of his analysis of the discursive formation of transgression, a basis which is instituted in the form of terror, reverence and astonishment, the emotive markers of a singular experience which places the memoir beyond the space of exemplification; an experience of distance which determines the moment of the relationship between analysis and object. If this distance is too great, the moment is high, and the analysis is overwhelmed by the remains - we find ourselves in the position of the secular magistrate whose efforts to master Rais' motives and ultimately his body are in vain, until the very end. If the distance is not great enough, however, we take on the role of the Paris specialists who diagnose Riviere's madness on the strength of his memoir and a few depositions. For Foucault, then, the krinein at the root of criticism- or perhaps more precisely, the krino, the 'I judge' which is also the 'I separate' - is a matter of skill, of having a surveyor's eye capable of discerning the critical distance: in short, of having the practice or the experience at the work. The reverential experience of the distance required for the judging of the object, for the practice of criticism, is an ineffable experience. It takes place in silence, or very nearly so -at those strange moments when we hear it speak, we hear it as a rupture in the fabric of theoretical or philosophical discourse- it is, above all, an interior experience. The eruption of the remains as the mark of a barely containable experience of the impossible does not only occur in I, Pierre Riviere, wherein it might easily be considered, along with the rest of the text, as an aberration never to be repeated by this otherwise exemplary historian/philosopher. At one such moment in Discipline and Punish, Foucault opposes Bentham's design for the Panopticon to the roughly contemporary engravings of Piranesi's Carceri d'Invenzione. These engravings hark back to the vivid descriptions of the torture and dismemberment of criminals that Foucault cites in his early chapters; scenes which give way to those of the non-corporal correction of prisoners' souls through a constant surveillance which enables the finetuning of punishment according to emergent disciplinary sciences. In pitching these two designs together, Foucault is merely representing two ideals, illustrating the extreme ends of the punitive spectrum: 'the ruined prisons,littered with mechanisms of torture', and 'the cruel, ingenious cage ... a pure architectural and optical system' (Foucault 1975:205). But the text, as a whole, traces the historical movement from one to the other: from the spectacle of the excessive and monstrous to the invisibility of the clinically humane and insidious. Piranesi's engravings- prepared only some thirty years before Bentham's plans- are barely mentioned, apparently dismissed as archaic, out of sync with an age that could construct the Millbank Penitentiary in London, and shortly thereafter, many others of similarly inspired design in Europe and America. And yet, these engravings are the site of a return of the remains that we have already seen trouble Foucault's judgment- a kind of repressed grandeur of the prisoner of old, shackled but proudly bearing the taunts or humbly accepting the praises of the feudal crowd, the nobility of criminality which he does not hesitate to resurrect
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even in the midst of his penultimate chapter, and at some length (seven pages), in the figure of the chain-gang. Again, it is the Panopticon which restores the continuity of the narrative; this time in the form of its 'mobile equivalent' (Foucault 1975:263). The 'Imaginary Prison' and the chain-gang represent, in a sense, the unconscious of the Panopticon, the subterranean force whose repression is the birth of the modern carceral. Piranesi, who seems to have spewed these images in great haste directly onto the stone as if in the thrall of some demonic apparition, has struck the chord of an imperative force, at once grotesque and magnificent, which drives Bentham, in his need to rid himself of what remains of the criminal, to expel all excess, violence and madness from the pure functionality of his architectural superego. Bentham's need is not Foucault's: the latter is manifestly not intent on excluding the remains, since it is precisely the impossibility of doing so which is the measure of his exemplary judgment. Bataille's judgment is not good. Or rather, for Bataille, the question of judgment is not relevant to 'what matters to us'. What matters to us is the object itself, or, more correctly, what matters is that the object is no longer an object, that the remains are no longer a matter of judgment. Inner experience is not to be revered as a sacred thing carefully maintained at an optimum distance for maximum effect, and its silence does not take the form of a calculated interruption of the continuity of language. It is language allowed to play itself out, to exhaust itself to the point of death in the distance of the remains. Not the objectifying distance between two things, but the distance outside the remains which makes of it an inside - the distance of transgression. The effects of Bataille's confrontation with the silence of inner experience are disseminated throughout his work- his analyses of Marx, Nietzsche, and above all Hegel are, quite literally, exhaustive: they bear the full weight of philosophy in all its work, even picking up what philosophy leaves behind it, and finding in this its exemplification. At these points, where philosophy has tried to extend its limits and fill silence with its talk, Bataille finds the possibility for a philosophy of transgression which is not fixated upon itself as a limit as if from the outside, but which is concerned to experience itself as a limit, to draw the distance that separates it from itself within the flesh of the philosopher - I use this term 'flesh' to draw what I think is a pertinent link with the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty- and to experience this distance as a continuity of being. This collection is dedicated, of course, to Michel Foucault, and so it only seems fair to cast my last tentative words in his direction. I opened with a brief citation from' A Preface to Transgression', and I would certainly be the first to admit that I have done no more than he in his reading of Bataille, and have merely played the cunning, if cliched, barrister in turning his own words against him. Nevertheless, the worst I have done is show that Foucault is too good a reader of Bataille, that his critical judgment is too sharp - I trust that this is something of which I will not be accused, since it seems that despite my good intentions, and against my better judgment, my final word, far from reaching Foucault, has fallen back to me.
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Works Cited Bataille, Georges (1957). Erotism: Death and Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood. San Francisco: City Lights, 1986. __ _, (1962). The Impossible: 'A Story of Rats' followed by 'Dianus' and by 'The Oresteia'. Trans. Robert Hurley (1991). San Francisco: City Lights. __ _, (1965). The Trial of Gilles de Rais. Trans. Richard Robinson (1991 ). Los Angeles: Amok. Foucault, Michel (1969). The Archaeology of Knowledge. Trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (1972). London: Tavistock. __ _, (1975). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan (1979). London: Penguin. __ _, (ed.) (1973). I, Pierre Riviere, Having Slaughtered my Mother, my Sister, and my Brother... A Case ofParricide in the nineteenth Century. Trans. FrankJellinek (1982). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. __ _, (1977). 'A Preface to Transgression'. Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon Bouchard (eds).lthaca: Cornell University Press. Liu, Alan (1990). 'Local Transcendence: Cultural Criticism, Postmodernism, and the Romanticism of Detail', Representations, 32:75-113.
The Body and Violence: The Subject of Knowledge in Dostoesvky's The Brothers Karamazov and Foucault's Analytic of Finitude Sfo6o~ iJ/Uu!i:o-(jfooer In positing non-representability as the essence of discursive language,
Foucault reverses the Classicist relation between finitude and the infinite.l This reversal signals the emergence of a new cultural paradigm, whose historical origins Foucault locates at the end of the eighteenth century (but which can shift as far back as the mid-seventeenth century in Foucault's analysis of the 'gaze' in Valasquez' Las Meninas). Non-representational discourse, which constitutes the new paradigm, coincides with the' death of God' and the emergence, in God's stead, of the signifier or the doublet called 'man'.2 This new man is, in fact, a sibling of Nietzsche's Superman, who represents the first 'historical' manifestation of the embodied signifier 'man'. Man, this newly discovered entity in the universe of knowledge and things, himself exists in a 'hollowed out' space, which is the effect of a withdrawal of things and words back upon themselves, presumably into tautologies of their own. Although he is now on the outside of things and words, man is the 'principle and means of all production'.3 But this sovereign position is deceptive. For man's concrete existence is determined by 'labour, life and language': 'It is possible to have access to him only though his words, his organism, the objects he makes - as though it is they who possess the truth in the first place ... '.4 Man's finitude is linked to knowledge. For man's finitude is 'in the positivity of his knowledge'.s It is the gaze which appears in this new discursive space of modernity in order to chain man's knowledge to the field of the profane (the atheistic, the desecrated, the trivial, the simple object etc.). The'death of God', which opens up the field of the profane, reconstitutes the sphere of knowledge, whose founding structure is now the 'split' between the signifier and the signified (the separation of Man and God), which leads to the effective exclusion or repression of the signified ('God'). As a consequence of this separation, Foucault sees the emergence of new cultural institutions: modem science, based on observation of the facts, becomes institutionalised as the new method of truth or knowledge. With these symptomatic manifestations of the new episteme, Western knowledge moves out of the Classical sphere of representation, naming and classification into the sphere of the gaze- which is in the first instance the 'clinical gaze'. The gaze is complicit, in tum, with the oedipalisation of consciousness, which, in tum, produces a culture of scientism and 'intellectualism' (to borrow the latter term from Bakhtin).
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In his own analytic method, Foucault attempts to 'transcend' the gaze by overcoming the constraints of the oedipalised perspective of all knowledge. He tries this (at a 'limit', almost whimsically pushing deconstruction to the brink of discursiveness) in Madness and Civilisation (1961), where he is motivated by the desire to 'speak from the point of view' of that which is excluded from knowledge- knowledge's Other- namely madness. According to Derrida, the enterprise fails, in part. In the essay 'Cogito and the History of Madness' Derrida argues that it is impossible to speak from the locus of 'madness', which is not a discourse, which does not have a discourse with which it speaks.6 Derrida is right, of course, if madness is taken at face value and therefore understood to mean what it says. However, if madness is taken as metaphor -a metaphor of the Other of History, then Foucault's analytic method is analogous to the aesthetic method of twentieth century literature, from Artaud and Kafka to Blanchot and Joyce, and twentieth century art, from Surrealism to Russian Conceptualism. What is true for the literature of the absurd as much as for Russian Conceptualist art is the shift of the field of representation to the other side of language- to the area which in language is occupied by the Other, which is to say, by silence,- the space of the Other. This space is also the space below the bar of repression- the space, into which the absent signified (God) has been banned. In this literature, either silence or madness speak. The relationship of madness to knowledge is explored in the last novel of the last of the great nineteenth century novelists - namely in Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, completed in 1881, the year of Dostoevsky's death. In this novel, of the four Karamazov brothers it is Ivan Karamazov (IK) who is assigned the role of the privileged carrier of both madness and knowledge.
Ivan Karamazov, Violence, Finitude and Knowledge IKhas always attracted the special attention of commentators of Dostoevsky's novel. This is because he is a more complex fictional character than any of the other Karamazov brothers. It is not that he says more than the others; in fact, in terms of his 'on stage' lines of dialogue, he probably says less in dialogic exchanges than even his bastard brother Smerdiakov. IK appears mysterious not only to the reader, but also to the characters within the novel. Thus, Alyosha Karamazov (AK) and Dimitry Karamazov (DK) describe IK variously as 'a cypher' (zagdka), 'silent grave' ('Ivan- mogila') and a 'sphynx'. Apart from such explicit descriptions, elaborated by those of the narrator, IK is rarely seen in action in the course of the narrative. He plays a passive role as a guest at the monastery in Book Two, merely accompanying Fyodor Karamazov (FK) in silent disdain. He is the only son who lives with the father in the same house, but there, too, we see him only coming in or going out and never really in interaction with FK. We wonder why, if he is as intelligent as the narrator says he is, this sort of a 'man' would want to reside in the Karamazov house of ill-repute and why, if he is financially so independent, he does not live in independent lodgings? Unlike AK and Mme Hokhlakova, who are observers on the scene, we fail to see IK's
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'youthfulness' emerge at the moment of being rejected by Katarina Ivanovna (KI), which prompts his sardonic outburst about her 'cruelty'. IK's intelligence also seems to fail him in his relationship with Smerdiakov, in which the lackey appears to be 'leading the dance' and leading IK up the garden path or by the nose. IK is dreadfully slow to comprehend the 'game' of Smerdiakov, and instead feels nauseated by, without being able to resist, the 'lure', which this sly peasant prepares for him. IK's alleged derangement ('belaia goriachka') after Smerdiakov's 'confession' and suicide also has the flavour of melodrama or a deus ex machina device to 'end' the plot. Altogether, IK is the most elusive of the Karamazov brothers and the one least able to be grasped through a Realist poetics. However, if IK is not 'read' through the poetics of Realism- and Dostoevsky himself insisted that he was not an ordinary Realist, but a 'realist in a higher sense',- theniKbecomes that element in the structure of the entire novet which leads to the synthesis of all the propositions laid before the reader through the other brothers and the father /mothers, and one which contains the ultimate solution to the epistemological and philosophical questions posed in and by the narrative. The question which is ultimately posed by Dostoevsky's novel is the phenomenological question of the relationship of the human subject to Being. But here we have time to explore only the subsidiary question to the question of Being- which is the question of the relationship of the subject of language to language and knowledge. What IK professes to know (at least in word if not deed) is the difference between 'knowledge' and 'understanding' or 'comprehension'. Despite his rejection of 'understanding', IK does appear to comprehend the fundamental finitude of language and being. This is the gist of his otherwise startling revelation to AK that he will call life quits at 30. Since IK is not at any point suicidal, this proclamation, which can never be tested or proven (for it goes beyond the text of the novel), must be read as a metaphor of finitude. Finally, IK also appears to comprehend the ultimate founding tautology of language, as well as the negativity or nothingness which supports it. This all emerges in a conversation he has with AK in the tavern, just before the recounting of his Legend of the Grand Inquisitor. What IK cannot do is translate this knowledge into his own plot action. In other words, his words and his deeds are powered by two different sources of energy and it is his deeds which remain inexplicable for himself and for the reader, rendering IK at once the most knowing and the most opaque subject/ character of the novel- the split subject of knowledge par excellence. While IK takes his child-abuse stories (violence to the body) to be unassailable evidence of evil in the world, the presence of which entitles him to rebellion- not against God or the Father (the phallus is preserved!) but against God's world, the reader is within his right to interpret this rebellion, in the context of IK's episodes with the Devil, not as a 'metaphysical rebellion', but as an affirmation of the principle of negativity. IK says as much himself when he acts as advocatus diaboli (or a metonymy of his Devil) before AK, who castigates himself for having said 'an absurd thing' with reference to the shooting of the squire who had the little boy torn to shreds by his hunting dogs:
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'What I said was absurd, but -' 'Yes, but- that's the trouble, isn't it, that but.. .' cried Ivan. 'Let me tell you, my novice, that absurdities ['neleposti'] are only too necessary on earth. The world is founded on absurdities and perhaps without them nothing would come to pass in it. We know that we know.' [my translation].
There are two problems with Magarshack's English translation of this passage. Firstly, the English 'absurd', which translates the Russian nelepost, does not have the same sound of negativeness because it lacks the negative particle which prefixes the word in Russian. 'Non-sense' would have been closer to the Russian, while retaining the meaning of'absurd'. Secondly, the last line of IK's speech is mistranslated by Magarshack. Ivan's statement in the original is a tautology carried by an ironic intonation. Magarshack preserves the irony, but loses the tautology by placing the ironic accent on the relative pronoun chto, to the detriment of the true meaning of the passage.Ivan'sprecisewordingis:'Weknowthatweknow!'[Myznaem,chto znaem/Sifchtowereaccentedintheoriginal,itwouldbemarkedbyadiacritic comma, and would mean 'what' - as an interrogative pronoun in the accusative case. Since it is not marked in any Russian edition, it does not mean 'what' but 'that' as a relative pronoun, it is one of the syncategoremata of the Russian language. That means, the passage must be read as follows: if the world (Being) remained without negation, without Non-Being or NonSense as its dialectical 'other', consciousness would always be, in Hegel's words, 'selfsame', 'in-and-for-itself'. So the split in consciousness, which produces man's awareness of knowledge and of himself, would be impossible and would render non-existent the founding tautology of language, expressed with self-lacerating irony by the rebellious Ivan in 'We know that we know!' This foundational tautology of knowledge, which is the only support of the subject of knowledge, irks Ivan. This is because he knows the difference between 'knowing' (znat) and 'understanding' or'comprehending' (ponimat), but finds 'understanding' beyond reach. He intimates as much in his asymmetrical retort to the next question, put to him by AK, who misunderstands IK's preceding statement about 'We know that we know!' SoAK asks: 'Whatdoyouknow?'TowhichiKreplieswithanon-sequitur:'Iunderstand nothing', Ivan continued as if raving .. .'9 Then IK invokes 'facts', which he opposes to 'understanding'. He asserts that he had decided a long time ago that he did 'not want to understand anything'. 'Understanding' will, he claims, 'betray the facts', and he, Ivan, wants to remain with the 'facts'. It is thus 'understanding' or'comprehending' which he has given up- evidently grudgingly. And it is this nostalgia for 'understanding', this yearning for the transcendental signified, which he knows to be unattainable, which constitutes IK's structuring ambivalence as a character. But this yearning for the transcendental signified has no outlet, except as desire of the Other. The drama of ambivalence as desire of the Other is played out by the womenby KI in the first instance, who is DK's fiance, torn between the two brothers as the desire of the 'other' brother. But IK's ambivalence as a character does not end here. As well as being ambivalent, IK is both 'blind' in a certain sense and an' absence' in the same
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sense as his Devil. We see very little of IK in the novel, compared to the other brothers. And yet IK seems to be ubiquitous and on everyone's lips. He seems to have a 'guarding' function in relation to Fyodor Karamazov and it is only through IK's intentional and premeditated absence that the obstacle to the murder of the father is removed. His ubiquity is not of a spatial, but of a spatio-temporal variety, which constitutes an absolute anteriority. He is otherwise the most fixed or static of characters. Whereas both Alyosha Karamazov and Dimitry Karamazov traverse space, IK is always already on the spot of action, as a silent witness most of the time. He speaks only in three or four significant moments of his 'static' plot existence. His most extensive speech is on the subject of rejection of 'God's world'. This is strange for a scientist, whoisotherwise,hetellsus,interestedin the'facts' only. He is thus an observer of 'facts', almost a modern 'archaeologist' (like Foucault) or a bricoleur (like Levi-Strauss or Derrida). He collects facts, and is seen by Alyosha Karamazov' on the bench' near the garden gate, writing them down in his notebook. These two sides of IK - 'rejection of the world' and observation or collection of 'facts' (of the world) are actually complementary aspects of a paradigm, which is posited in The Brothers Karamazov as a type of discursive knowledge. It is the same paradigm, which Foucault has identified in Western discourse at the end of the eighteenth century, when Classical discourse, dominated by 'essences' and 'idealities', was replaced by a discourse of the gaze. Foucault sees this moment in European culture give birth to the institution of the clinic, with the 'clinical gaze' representing the paradigm of modern positivist science of the nineteenth century. This new, post-Revolutionary 'medical discourse' is modelled by IvanKaramazov. It is a discourse which has moved out of the field of 'experience' into a relational field, scanned by the gaze, and situated both in 'real' and 'discursive' space. The 'real space' of this discourse is made up by a 'conglomerate of discourses, social pressures' and an 'ensemble of practices', 10 situated in the real and pre-conditioning the gaze, making up its 'concrete a-priori'. This means that the classical gaze ventures 'outside the "circle of knowledge" of the ideal types and natural history... ' 11 and moves into the world. This world is the world of the social, the political as well as the world of concrete facts. Medicine- which models this new relationship to 'facts', now moves into a public arena- a 'social "space", which is that of 'the nation's health'.12 The new 'medical discourse' of the late eighteenth century is a perfect model for the new 'scientific' (we could almost say proto-'structuralist') discourse, which is constituted by IK's researching and collecting of the 'facts' of the 'Russian national life' of the 1860s in its social and familial aspects. The most prominent of these 'facts' are IK's 'case histories' of child abuse and violence in the family. His child-abuse anecdotes, of which he has collected many more than he has time to recount to Alyosha Karamazov in the tavern, represent 'facts' found in this newly discovered social space. IK develops a philosophy of the discourse of this social space. This is couched in his article on the relationship of Church and state, which he summarises at the gathering in Zosima's cell in Book Two. His article is a polemic with a recently (actually) published book by a Russian theologian,13 who is a
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champion of the reforms of the Russian legal system in the early 1860s, in particular the new system of juries, which are supposed to accord the condemned man a fairer and more democratic trial. What IK argues is that it is wrong to try the criminal by a 'worldly' court in the first place. In order for true justice to be exercised, the transgressor should be handed over to an 'ecclesiastical' court, which would mete out punishment without 'excluding' the criminal from the 'whole' of the church's flock. The mere awareness of his transgression would be enough punishment for the man who has sinned, if he knew that the Mother Church still loved him and considered him to be her 'son'. Because of the love which is not withdrawn from him, he would be motivated to repent and reform. Even hardened criminals are said by IK to respond to love and to turn abject in the face of forgiveness of their sins. IK's quasi-utopian vision of a unified social body- the 'nation'is remarkably similar to the 'medical field' as Foucault sees it at the end of the eighteenth century, which in turn bears structural similarities to the concept of Hegel's modern state. This 'social space' consists of, in Foucault's words, 'a form homogeneous in each of its regions, constituting a set of equivalent items capable of maintaining constant relations with their entirety, a space of free communication in which the relationship of the part to the whole was always transposable and reversible'. 14 What IK is arguing, in his alleged polemic on the relationship of Church and state, is the impossibility of reconciling two absolutes. He even says, in his somewhat cryptic and not entirely logical preamble to the discussion of his article at the Monastery in Part One, that two 'essences', that of 'the Church' and that of 'the state', will always be 'confused' although a true 'mingling' or a 'compromise' will never be possible. The reason for this incompatibility is, according to IK's analysis, the fact that' a lie' underwrites the 'foundations of the whole thing'. This is an early allusion to the 'lie' which will later be identified with his Devil and with the Devil's analytic of negativity. What IK proposes, in the place of the solution of 'his contemporary theologians', is a model in which the Church is not separated from the state, allocated a separate place at the margins of the state, but is allowed to 'absorb' the state and thus become one all-inclusive generality. What IK proposes is, in fact, a relational social model, which unifies the general and the particular in a non-hierarchical structure. In this level playing-field, the particular parts are 'absorbed' 15 into the general and become indistinguishable from the sum of the whole; each part is, as it were, deprived of individuality and reduced to a pure signifier. Only signifiers (or 'citizens') exist in a 'level' relational playing-field, in which their positions are indefinitely interchangeable, through metonymy: for one signifier always signifies another. The social model, proposed by IK, is thus a replica of the model of perception, based on the logic of the signifier, which structures Dostoevsky's novel and its world-view as a whole. What determines the endlessly open system of semiosis, modelled by IK's Church/ state paradigm, is not only the suspension of the hierarchical relationship (the Master/Servant relationship), but the total absence of identity (as 'essence' or 'quality' or 'value') of the parts within the whole. If an identity is asserted vis-a-vis the social body, it is only by the 'criminal'-
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hence through murder or transgression, which is ultimately - metonymy. But this transgressive act does not lead to exclusion- instead, the identifiable transgressor is pulled back into the field through abjection- an admission of guilt and a public declaration or confession. The confession is literally a stripping or undressing in public- a baring of one's 'essentials' (which amounts to either hysteria or repression) in a public space, witnessed by many. It is easy to see the correspondence of this model of discourse to the structure of the evidentiary plot in The Brothers Karamazov, with Dimitry Karamazov at its centre. It is as if IK's Church/ state hypothesis pre-empts or pre-determines the destiny of Dimitry Karamazov and the structure of his petit roman. What IK advocates is an oedipalised cultural model, in which truth is inquisitorial, obtained by 'torture' of the body. This 'torture' is part of the mastery of the Oedipal system. Torturing others (his brother Alyosha Karamazov and the reader) seems to be IK's modus operendi as well. His relentless pursuit of gory detail upon gory detail of the torture and death of children is his 'epistemological' tool, his way to knowledge. 'Torturing' Dimitry Karamazov seems to be the way to the 'truth' of both the investigating law officers at Mokroe and the trial court. Dimitry Karamazov literally has to take off all his clothes, to expose in full his hairy, virile (phallic) body, before his investigators are satisfied. While in court, after his confession is over, he is wearing new and fashionable outfit, which is in sharp contrast to his pallor and generally subdued demeanour. Having been fully 'exposed', he is crushed by unspecified, diffuse guilt. As a subject, Dimitry Karamazov thus 'disappears', ceding centre stage to appearance. The same inquisitorial method characterises the 'clinical gaze' of the late eighteenth century medical discourse, which becomes for Foucault the model of 'scientific' knowledge of modernity, up to Modernism and Structuralism, but stopping short of Post-structuralism, in which Foucault's own project of knowledge (and incidentally Dostoevsky's avant la lettre) constitutes itself as archaeology and then genealogy. The method of inquiry employed in the model of knowledge, which is structured like a 'clinical gaze', is bound up with the penetration of the 'gaze' 'into the field of signs and symptoms' .16 Such a' clinical' method of 'penetration' into the 'material evidence' of the 'case' of parricide is reproduced, in parodic fashion, by the trial court's method of dealing with the 'facts' in The Brothers Karamazov. For it is a massive collection of 'facts' (uliki- 'material proof'), all pointing in the direction of Dimitry Karamazov as the signified, which condemns him as the murderer. But the same method of penetration 'into the field of signs and symptoms',isalsoduplicated-inallseriousness,asastructuringprinciple-bythe text of the novel on the level of its abstract author. The 'symptom', at which the text's gaze arrives, is always a gap, taking the form, at several points on the printed page, of the punctuation mark of multiple dots. It is in this gap of the 'symptom' that discourse (as metaphor) and, with it, the subject of language and knowledge is constituted, bearing witness to Joseph Kosuth' s proposition that the subject (of knowledge, through whom knowledge is constituted) is 'a punctuation mark'.
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Thus we are led to the inevitable conclusion that while both Foucault and Dostoevsky attempt to distance themselves from the' clinical method' of the gaze, and to seek to penetrate the other of discourse (Dostoevsky through a prosaics of the absurd avant-la-lettre and Foucault by jockeying around madness as a possible entry point to knowledge), both are ultimately committed, despite themselves, to the method of the gaze, which is (for the present) the only possible method of rational discourse. However, this model of knowledge, based on the gaze, has, according to both Foucault and Dostoevsky, one huge drawback. It is bound up with the 'postulate that henceforth the signifier (sign and symptom) would be entirely transparent for the signified, which would appear, without concealment or residue, in its most pristine reality, and that the essence of the signified- the heart of the disease - would be entirely exhausted in the intelligible syntax of the signifier'. 17 This belief in the 'transparency' of the signifier is what accounts for IK's dis-belief in the phenomenon of the Devil, who is both sign and symptom of IK's 'madness', with which IK's quest for knowledge is coeval. The Devil is, objectively, IK's hallucination or delirium. As such, the Devil is of the same order of reality as the orgasmic delirium of Grushenka and Dimitry Karamazov at Mokroe, just before the arrival of the law officers, when they are consummating their love in a euphemistically veiled on-stage act. The truth value of delirium is in its effect- which is the production of thought. Although the Devil is real in the sense that he claims he is, IK wants to reduce this 'real' to a condition of his own 'inflamed' (that is, presumably 'sick') imagination. What IK does not want to do is to go a step beyond this- and to see that to pronounce the Devil a 'reality of the imagination' is to posit the ultimaterealityofthesubjectofknowledge-whichisvirtuality,orthefourth dimension (of space). The truth, to which IK cannot reconcile himself, is the fact of the Devil's presence/absence. This is IK's blind spot, for he, too, represents, in the larger economy of the novel's structure, such an 'absent' presence. Initially, IK seems to function as a 'guardian' of the father. For it is only through IK's capricious decision to go to 'Chermashnya' that the necessary 'gap' or 'lacuna' (absence) is created, in which the murder of the father can take place. IK's Devil,likewise, personifies the principle of the presence of an absence - the absence of the signified, to which his presence does not extend the courtesy of an obliging 'transparency'. Thus, 'the intelligible syntax of the signifier' leaves IK completely confused in his confrontation with the absence of the signified. This 'scientific' man, who wishes to 'stay with the facts' in order to retain his mastery ('all is allowed' being the formula of mastery, under whose banner IK is said to have influenced the 'servant' Smerdiakov to carry out the parricide)- this 'scientific man', who accepts finitude and desires death at 30, cannot accept the ultimate fact- the fact of absence as the ultimate (supporting) reality of the subject of knowledge. IK is 'provoked' by this absence and even throws a wet towel (and an inkwell) at it- that is, he is moved to action by this absence. But this action, while not forfeiting any of its reality for the subject of knowledge Ivan - is virtual action. It has no other support than that of absence and delirium.
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Thus, although IK is aware that he has been hallucinating - but only retrospectively aware, and although he claims to be' sick', trying to 'void' his hallucinatory action in retrospect, the spectre of his hallucination does not go away. His 'act' (of throwing the towel) is real enough for him (and for the participating, gazing, peeping reader), even if it is not corroborated subsequently by the omniscient narrator. This means that the hallucinatory act obliges IK to descend onto the level of reality of his 'sickness', there to produce a gestural sign (which becomes synonymous with an act), which is at the same time, both objectively (from an observer's point of view) and subjectively (from the observed/ observing subject's point of view), a symptom of his condition. The symptom, as Lacan has pointed out, is a gap, synonymous with the multiple dot sign. LikeJosephKosuth's 'man',IK thus becomes a 'punctuation mark': instead of achieving transparency, the Self is reduced to a grammatical category. As soon as he is provoked to significant or signifying'action' vis- -vis this absence, IK is unwittingly drawn into the orbit of the signifying chain, or 'the web of the signifier'. Without acknowledging it, he (obligingly for the Devil) proves the pre-existence of a language which does 'not owe its truth to speech but to the gaze alone'.1 8 For it is the Devil's gaze- the Devil 'looking at IK', which provokes IK into action. Since action is coextensive with the sign (which is, in turn, coextensive with the symptom- with its attendant meaning of sumbolon as 'sign of recognition'), action, too, must be 'structured like a language'.19 However, IK manages to extricate himself from the effect of the gaze. For 'after' (during or as a function of) his encounter with the Devil, he lapses into madness. This state of 'madness', into which IK is said to have descended after Dimitry Karamazov's trial, is not madness to be taken at face value. Like Foucault's madness in civilisation, or Blanchot's Madness of the Day, it is a metaphor for a state of knowledge: the state of the subject of knowledge in the realm of the signifier. Paradoxically, while seeking out the 'facts', IK 'refuses' the signifier. He does this not only through demanding 'transparency' of the Devil. He does this also by 'refusing' 'God's world', because it, too, lacks the transparency of justice: the perfect balance between gift and debt. IKfindshimself,after his confrontation with the Devil,inastateofnonBeing: his absence from the plot, hidden away in the protective fold of the household of his mistress Katarina Ivanovna, symbolises this. IK's madness is simultaneously a state of excess - which constitutes the originating hyperbole of the subject of cogito. Like Foucault, Dostoevsky privileges madness as the ground against which cogito can indulge in its 'hyperbolic moment' of self-affirmation, by saying: 'Whether I am mad or not, cogito, sum'. 20 This hyperbole of reason, of cogito, unearthed by Foucault in his reading of Descartes, amounts to, according to Derrida, an 'unprecedented excess'- 'an excess in the direction of the non-determined, Nothingness or Infinity, an excess which overflows the totality of that which can be thought. .. ' 21 IK's madness is this instituting moment of cogito - the gap of nonmeaning, the principle of negativity (represented by IK's Devil), against which meaning or discourse is born into a 'historical' (that is, sequential, A
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linearised) existence. The novel should thus be read 'backwards' - its linearised plot being like a manifest dream, which runs from the past towards the present. The effect of the hyperbole of cogito, captured in this excess of negativity, which is coeval with madness, is transcendence. But not transcendence in the Classical sense, of the merging with a transcendental signified. This transcendence is an overcoming of a determining totality- the totality of signification, of discourse, of reason- cogito- and of certainty. The subject of knowledge, who transcends knowledge through the hyperbole of madness, is drawn into the infinite,- the infinite of finitude is how one might put it. For it is the infinite of'an undetermined totality'. This is how Derrida puts the same thought, interpreting Foucault: 'Even if I do not in fact grasp the totality, if I neither understand nor embrace it, I still formulate the project of doing so, and this project is meaningful in such a way that it can be defined only in relation to a precomprehension of the infinite and undetermined totality'. 22 The precomprehension of this infinite totality is denied IK- but not the reader. The 'state of knowledge' reached by the reader through IK's madness is that man's 'madness' consists of the 'active edge that splits [my] desire between a refusal of the signifier and a lack of being'. 23 This 'active edge', which splits the subject of knowledge, is Foucault's limit. It seems that the task of culture- according to both Dostoevsky's novel and Foucault's archaeology- is to maintain a balancing act on this limit point- the sort of act, represented by the bikini-clad, grotesque female body (a self-portrait of the artist), dancing on a tight-rope over the formally-attired crowd of bureaucratic citizens in a public space, in Tatyana Nazarenko's Conceptualist painting. The same balancing act is performed by Dostoevsky's extremely complex novel, which to this day awaits its supplementation through a fuller exegesis than it has so far had in Russian scholarship.
1 Foucault's analytic of the gaze, which is synonymous with the finitude of language and the positivity ofthe signifier, is to be found in his analysis of Velazquez's Las Meninas in the 'Analytic of Finitude' chapter of The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences. Translated from the French. Routledge, London, 1992, pp.312-318. 2 Ibid, p.319. 3 Ibid, p.313. 4 Ibid. 5 Foucault,'A Preface to Transgression', in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, D.B. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, (eds), Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977, p.314. 6 Jacques Derrida, 'Cogito and the History of Madness', in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. 7 F. M. Dostoevsky, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 30-ti tomakh. Tom XIV. Leningrad, 'Nauka', 1976, p.221. 8 Ibid, p.221. 9 Ibid, p.222 [my translation].
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10 Simon During, Foucault and Literature: Towards a Genealogy ofWriting. London and New York: Routledge, 1992, pp.45-6. 11 Ibid, p.46. 12 Ibid. 13 Compare M. I. Gorchakov, 'Nauchnaya postanovka tserkovnogo prava' ['A Scientific Approach to Church Law'], in: Sbornik gosudarstvennikh znanii, pod redaktsiei V. P. Bezobrazova. St Petersburg, 1875, pp.223-70. On close reading of the Gorchakov article, I have established that IK does not take up the real issues treated in it. Hence Dostoevsky uses a contemporary polemic as metaphor in which to couch a much broader cultural and epistemological question which preoccupies him and his fictional character. 14 Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology ofMedical Perception, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith, London: Tavistock Publications, 1973 (first published in Paris, 1963), p.38. 15 Compare the analysis of melodrama in the light of the model of 'absorption' by Jean Copjec in 'The Cogito, the unconscious and the invention of crying', New Formations, No 23 Summer (1994):1-12. 16 Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic, p.91. 17 Ibid, p.91. 18 Michel Foucault, quoted in Simon During, Foucault and Literature, p.47. 19 Simon During, Foucault and Literature, p.47. 20 Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, p.57. 21 Ibid, p.57. 22 Ibid, p.56. 23 Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: a selection, trans. Alan Sheridan, London: Tavistock, 1980, p.166.
Foucault and New Historicism in Literary Studies
CCaire Cofe6root This paper seeks to examine an apparent affinity between two methodologies: Foucault's 'ethics of the self' and Stephen Greenblatt's New Historicism. The similarity has been noted before and both practices have been attributed with causing or inspiring the other. Greenblatt cites Foucault as an influence in Learning to Curse while Foucault mentions Greenblatt approvinglyin The History ofSexuality, Volume 2 (Foucault 1985:11 ). Greenblatt's idea of self-fashioning, in which selves are nothing other than their modes of performance in a socio-cultural network, is in many ways easily linked to Foucault's description of sexual ethics as a practice in which selves produce those values and limits which shape their lives and bodies. Beginning from this ostensible similarity, this paper sets out to demonstrate a profound and radical difference. By recalling Foucault's critique of historicism in The Order of Things, I hope to indicate clearly some of the ways in which New Historicism has failed to take up a thoroughgoing critique of traditional historiography. Insofar as there are any generally agreed upon readings of Foucault's work, it is usually accepted that after Madness and Civilization Foucault became critical of, and rejected, a certain hypostatisation of madness as a pre-discursive, silent, timeless and pure 'Other'. The acceptance of madness as an object in itself is taken to be a residue of a rather naive phenomenology. With The Archaeology of Knowledge, it is argued, Foucault finds himself more appropriately in the realm of discourse. Here, exteriority and 'empiricities' are the effects, not the silent grounds, of discourse. In this paper, I want to argue that this shift from writing the 'history of a silence' to a description of discourse is more than just the casting off of an inappropriate ontology; it enables Foucault's later critique of historicism, phenomenology and the modern episteme within which they are located. Insofar as Madness and Civilization concerned the history of an 'Other' it partook to a certain extent in that project of ethnography and historicism which Foucault himself criticised in The Order ofThings. Like psychoanalysis and ethnography, historicism forms part of the final moment of an 'anthropologism' which seeks to study 'man' as a finite object at the same time as it brings to light the general conditions or grounds from which man emerges in all his diversity. Such human sciences locate man 'within' certain totalities (cultural or historical) as a finite production; but in their acts of interpretation practices such as historicism and ethnography presuppose both their object's finitude (cultural/historical location) and a transcendentalground(thepossibilityofovercomingthatfinitudeinanactofhistorical/ cultural interpretation). That is, all the differences observed between various cultural or historical totalities are made possible by referring to a
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transcendental condition: 'man' is, in his very essence'cultural' or historical. Historicity itself becomes the transcendental ground or an absolute value. According to Foucault, it is in this sense that historicism does not, and cannot, perceive its limits. Historicism both enables and becomes the object of a transcendental enquiry. Both positivism and transcendental critique, then, form the twin sides of this 'anthropologism'. 'Man' becomes a finite object of study; at the same time, he is placed in a medium, such as history, in which he can turn back upon himself, know himself and overcome his finitude. This'anthropologism' forms whatFoucaultrefers to as the' empiricotranscendental doublet'. Man becomes the object of a certain empiricism as a finite and positive object of knowledge; but he is also the subject that undertakes this very task of knowledge. Historicity, itself, becomes the very essence of 'man'. The idea of the boundedness of historical totalities, the isolated structure and determination of any historical moment, is a consequence of the empirical concept of 'man' as an object of knowledge, as a being determined by structure. But the act of this knowing, the idea of historicity itself, produces a transcendental dimension which itself cannot be reduced to historical enquiry. Renaissance Self-Fashioning, Stephen Greenblatt's first major (and highly acclaimed) work is heavily indebted to the Foucault of Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality, Volume 1. In this study of literature from More to Shakespeare Greenblatt charts a genealogy of the modern self and argues that the idea of a private and interior subject is an effect of new modes of surveillance and new performances of power which emerge in the Renaissance. This historical shift is exemplified, for Greenblatt, in the career of Thomas More who is divided between, on the one hand, a yearning for a thoroughly communitarian, socially-defined self, and on the other, a private subjectivity which is set against social performance. The torture of heretics, according to Greenblatt, in its ritual of surveillance, confession, examination and questioning produced the sense of interiority which characterised the Renaissance- an era which was both aware of the status of selves as products of performance and profoundly anxious that the self was nothing other than performance (Greenblatt 1980:102). This new sense of interiority was only meaningful when asserted against public performance; but such a private self was also an effect of, and not a creator of, its corporeal and social acts. According to Greenblatt: 'There is a powerful ideology of inwardness but few sustained expressions of inwardness that may stand apart from the hated institutional structure' (Greenblatt 1980:85). If Greenblatt follows Discipline and Punish in arguing that the self is constituted through modes of surveillance, he appears as an even more dutiful Foucauldian when he discusses Spenser's representations of sexuality. The Bower of Bliss produces a threat which must at once be contained; the discourse of sexual excess produces the same discourse of renunciation. The domain of 'civility' is constituted by a power which marks a division between the sexual and the civilised: The Bower of Bliss must be destroyed not because its gratifications are unreal but because they threaten 'civility' - civilisation - which for Spenser is achieved only through renunciation and the constant exercise of power. If
j'oucau{t and ~w Jiistoricism in Literary Studies
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this power inevitably entails loss, it is also richly, essentially creative; power is the guarantor of value, the shaper of all knowledge, the pledge of human redemption (Greenblatt 1980:73).
So much, as I have suggested, seems like orthodox Foucault until we note a shift of tone in the final phrase of the above quotation. Here, Greenblatt is not speaking about power; he is articulating Spenser's vision of power. This is made more explicit in a following sentence when he aligns Spenser with Freud 'in the great Western celebration of power' (Greenblatt 1980:174). What happens here is not that we have an examination of the self as an effect of power (as in Foucault), rather, power is an ideology, an idea or representation through which individuals (like Spenser, Bacon, Freud, Shakespeare and Marlowe) construct themselves. One could argue that Greenblatt sees Renaissance authors as particularly self-aware, such that literary texts are not effects of the workings of power but themselves manifest a Nietzschean/ Foucauldian awareness of the operations of power. But there is also a sense in which power, on Greenblatt's reading, is nothing other than a representation, or a fact of ideology. If it is a display of power which produces an inner self, a seeming distance between the subject and its performance, then it is also the case that power is nothing other than a performance. Commenting this time upon Shakespeare, Greenblatt argues that the 'theater is widely perceived in the period as the concrete manifestation of the histrionic quality of life, and, more specifically, of power ... ' (Greenblatt 1980:253). That is, power is part of the perception of the period. It is a representation, an ideology; and it is insofar as power is a representation that it is able to act in the formation of subjects. Greenblatt, who both distances himself critically from this period, at the same time as he sees his history as a history of the present, posits performance and representation- and not power- as the explanation andexplanandum of Renaissance self-fashioning, and hence of modernity. The literary mode does have a privileged specificity- not because in its awareness of power it reveals the true workings of modern life- but because literature foregrounds representation. Only in literature is that dependence of the immediate inner voice on text and discourse made explicit. A shift occurs in the historical movement towards modernity whereby the dominant form of representation alters: from the self as constituted through public performance, the modern subject is dependent upon the text; the book replaces the communal body (Greenblatt 1980:159). In this shift the self is represented in a different mode and power is nothing other than the forcefulness of representations: 'one of the highest achievements of power is to impose fictions upon the world and one of its supreme pleasures is to enforce the acceptance of fictions that are known to be fictions' (Greenblatt 1980:141). The point in articulating this difference between Foucault and Greenblatt is not in order to say that Greenblatt has misread or remained unfaithful to Foucault. It is, rather, to point out that if, for Greenblatt, power is a mode of representation and performance then the ostensible similarities between new Historicism and Foucault's work conceal far greater differences. These differences could be summarised by remarking that the idea of representation in Greenblatt's work sustains the sense of human intentionality- an idea
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directly challenged by the positivity of Foucault's notion of power. This difference can further be illuminated by examining one of the other influences on New Historicism. Greenblatt's work is also highly indebted to Clifford Geertz's The Interpretation of Cultures (1973) - a debt which becomes more apparent in his later work where he focuses more specifically on the idea of culture. Greenblatt's emphasis upon performance is also understandable given Geertz's rejection of 'culture' as a system of hidden rules or structures. On the contrary, for Geertz a culture is nothing other than a certain way of performing and practising. Rules are not mental events or unconscious patterns, but wellworn strategies. To understand a culture one engages in what Greenblatt approvingly quotes from Geertz as 'thick description'. Any event is, then, referred to socially contiguous practices and expectations in order for it to be interpreted. And interpretation is required because an action is meaningful; it is a 'symbolic action' because it forms part of a meaningful whole, and that meaningful whole is the context in which such actions make sense. According to Geertz, 'The aim is to draw large conclusions from small, but very densely textured facts; to support broad assertions about the role of culture in the construction of collective life by engaging them exactly with complex specifics' (Geertz 1973:28). Greenblatt inherits Geertz's aim for 'broad assertions' insofar as his readings serve to describe historical periods as broad as capitalism and the Renaissance. Furthermore, the examination of the modern self which in Renaissance Self-Fashioning seems so Foucauldian is also combined with Geertz's idea that selves are 'cultural artefacts'. Here, too, power is not that which produces the self, so much as a representation the self uses to perform as an individual. In the conclusion to Renaissance Self-Fashioning we can see that the idea of a distance between an interior self and its public performanceisnotentirelydoneawaywithbyGreenblatt;ratherthetwoare seen as inextricably intertwined: 'but as my work progressed, I perceived that fashioning oneself and being fashioned by cultural institutions- family, religion, state -were inseparably intertwined ... ' (Greenblatt 1980:256). Greenblatt's self, like Geertz's concept of man, is produced through culture. There is no 'man' other than its highly specific and particular formation in cultures (or, for Greenblatt, historical periods). The Renaissance is typified by an acute sense of the self as performance and therefore posits a performing self behind the social self. Greenblatt, on the other hand, demonstrates that the self is nothing other than performance. What he retains is the self as cultural artefact in Geertz's sense. Consequently, it is to the examination of cultural wholes and not individual intentions, thoughts or genius that Greenblatt's literary criticism is directed. And it is because of this that Greenblatt's examination of cultures is set within a general theory of representation and intentionality. The importance of representation is suggested in Renaissance Self-Fashioning but is made far more explicit in Greenblatt's later work. In Marvellous Possessions the European sense of history is explained as a particular from of representational technology (writing); colonialism is nothing other than 'an intensive deployment of representations' and cul-
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ture, in general, is described as a way of dealing with representations. Buying into the traditional post-Maussian anthropological idea that capitalism is characterised by an absence of symbolic exchange, Greenblatt argues that the encounter with the New World was characterised by an imposition of a single economy of representations. The native Americans themselves became tokens in this economy and were refused any' authentic reciprocity in the exchange of representations' (Greenblatt 1993:121). Whereas nonEuropean and pre-capitalist cultures engage in symbolic exchange - the circulation of meaningful objects to create social bonds- the conquistadors blocked exchange and imposed their own economy of representations, a mode of representation which did not acknowledge boundaries (Greenblatt 1993:121). The significance of the term representation here is crucial: it enables an anthropology. Representation is the mode of cultural formation; it posits a distance between something like a culture and the way it forms or fashions itself. A distance is opened up between an idea of culture in general, and the finite and particular examples of culture. Such differences can be surmounted through an interpretation which is enabled by a theory of 'man' as a representational animal. It is not surprising that Foucault in The Order of Things sees the idea of representation, anthropologism and historicism as part of the same modern episteme. What is denied is positivity - the event which cannot be recuperated in any general theory of culture or historicity. Insofar as representation explains the movement of culture in general, it reproduces a transcendental dimension or ground against which any particular manifestation can be explained. Greenblatt's work is an anthropologism insofar as it sees 'man' as a cultural artefact- a self-constituting particularity produced in finite totalities; at the same time his work sits happily in a general theory of finitude. In its explanation of 'man' and 'culture' it produces that 'fold' which resists positivity. Finite man, through the concept of ethnography or historicism turns back upon himself, takes himself as an object and explains his differences - in doing so these differences are recuperated into an interpretive whole. Foucault, on the other hand, situates his own methodology of history as itself historically determined. It cannot, therefore, provide a general ground; there can only be particular, invested and interested, or positive, descriptions. In Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality, Volume I, power is not a representation. To see it as such is to already situate it within the life of the subject. Power provides the way of thinking through a philosophy of multiplicity. There is not a self or consciousness which represents an exterior world but a single ground of multiplicities - or a 'new positivism' in Deleuze's sense (Deleuze 1988:13). To think power in this way is to attempt to move away from representation and towards empirical positivity. In contradistinction to Foucault's position, the idea of representation posits a world, on the one hand, and on the other culture, meaning or structure. For Greenblatt, the relation between the world or history and representation is dialectical - involving a continual renegotiation and adjustment. But the general concept of representation remains intact and provides a way of interpreting other cultures and periods; it provides an
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idea of culture or history in general and therefore opens the space for interpretation. Foucault's anti-interpretive stance, on the other hand, suggests that statements, words and actions are coterminous. There is nothing behind the word or action; it is not the sign for something else. There is not a general anterior ground- such as history, culture, consciousness- against which particularity is articulated. There is nothing other than particularity or positivity. This too, of course, is a positive statement; butonewhichresists recuperation into a general or transcendental ground. Foucault's antihistoricist project sets itself against questions of 'history in general'. It does so by arguing for a positivity in which the question of truth in general will remain, essentially, unanswerable.
Works Cited Deleuze, Gilles (1988). Foucault, trans. Sean Hand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Foucault, Michel (1970). The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London: Tavistock. __ _, (1972). The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language, trans. AM. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon Books. __ _, (1985). The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality, Volume 2, trans. Robert Hurley. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Geertz, Clifford (1973). The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. Greenblatt, Stephen (1980). Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. __ _, (1988). Marvellous Possessions: The Wonder the New World. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Part Two Australian History: Art, Science and Government
History and the Painted Landscape in Mid-Nineteenth Century South Australia
!RJtsse{{Staiff ...natural history has as a condition of its possibility the common affinity of things and language with representation; but it exists as a task only in so far as things and language happen to be separate. It must therefore reduce this distance between them so as to bring language as close as possible to the observing gaze, and the things observed as close as possible to words. Natural history is nothing more than the nomination of the visible. 1
The distinctions between whatever it is we consider to be the constituency of 'science' and whatever it is we consider to be germane to painting or drawing, produce epistemological categories that can be found operating, in various forms, in a number of specific European cultural contexts. Within particular historical spaces, they are often described relationally; indeed, such distinctions are rarely regarded as absolute, but in order to narrate the relationship between 'art' and 'science', the terms remain ontological entities even when, perhaps especially when, transgression is the subject of the historical description. 2 Bernard Smith's magisterial study of the relationship between scientific investigation and drawing/painting in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries- his European Vision and the South Pacific - describes an interaction which seems palpable in its obviousness and yet, in hindsight, this relationship is problematic because the connections between image making and 'science' are built on, what may be, an unsustainable series of binarisms. Smith was not unaware that central aspects of his thesis should be the subject of ongoing critical attention. Indeed in the preface to the second edition of European Vision and the South Pacific, published in 1985, he issued a challenge in the form of a regret that the two major themes explored in his work, had not received 'serious discussion'. 3 The two themes Smith identified in his challenge are described in this way. The first, expressed in Kuhnian terminology, suggested that, ...the Pacific region provided a challenging new field of experience for Europeans, one which placed unprecedented pressure upon the Biblical creation theory and provided, simultaneously, a wealth of new evidence out of which was fashioned eventually the first scientifically credible theory of evolution. 4
The second theme was written upon the belief that, The European control of the world required a landscape practice that could first survey and describe, then evoke in new settlers an emotional engagement with the land they had alienated from its Aboriginal occupants ... the conceptual underpinnings of the landscape throughout... (were) the dominating categories of the descriptive sciences (botany, zoology, geology, geography, meteorology, anthropology, etc.) by means of which landscapes
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and their inhabitants were effectively described and brought under control. Only then were the conventional categories of European landscape used to endow the new in its typicality with a familiar European gloss.s
Michel Foucault's early work The Order of Things, provides a framework for the interrogation of both of these propositions and the framework for a description of colonial visual culture that extends and deepens Smith's narrative rather than subverting it. What I would want to describe differently are the mechanisms of imaging involved in a number of site specific activities like cartography, natural history, ethnography, literature and landscape painting and, in turn, their relationship to colonial possession/ dispossession of the land. I would want to reimagine, and thus recast, the relationship between these categories by using epistemological approaches to the question of representation rather than the cognitive theories of perception6 drawn upon by Bernard Smith. The intractable problem at the heart of cognitive theories of perception is the notion of the 'essential copy' which, in turn, enables Smith to maintain throughout his work, a host of apparently stable binarisms. The narrative of European Vision and the South Pacific invariably depends on a series of distinctions, admittedly often heavily qualified; distinctions like topographical versus picturesque modes of landscape painting, science versus art, faithful or accurate versus distorted or erroneous visual descriptions and so on, all of which can mask certain continuities between what seem like quite unassailable differences within a colonial visual culture. Following the path opened up by Foucault, I would suggest that these oppositional positions are merely 'surface disagreements' because they all 'rest on the same epistemological base'.7 Indeed, these binarisms can be regarded as strands within the same scopic regime.s In the colonial scopic regime, operating at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, the relationship between representation and the empirical domains of investigation was unproblematic precisely because the signs were pure representation with no content of their own. In Foucauldian terms, the world seen was the world represented. The discursive territories explored by Bernard Smith can thus be regarded as occupying a particular historical space defined, amongst other things, by its display of characteristics associated with Foucault's classical episteme. In the specific case of the practice of natural history and landscape painting in colonial South Australia, the subject of this paper, the mid-nineteenth century was not, perhaps surprisingly, the site of an emergent modernity in the Foucauldian sense. Here was a pocket of cultural enterprise seemingly unaffected by a post-Kantian and post-Cuvier discursive climate.9 Let me begin with the contention that surfaces are made visible by culturally inscribed processes. Culturally specific actions of visuality make certain spatia-phenomenal elements highly visible, but render, at the same time, other spatia-phenomenal elements invisible to the spectator's gaze. In so doing, the visual processes and their attendant visualities, proclaim the way surfaces are to be regarded; they open up rhetorical spaces and thus points of view. 1o Consequently one can postulate that spatia-phenomenal entities are simultaneously re-invented and re-inscribed by the imperial gaze of the coloniser. Exactly how this visual process operated in a colonial
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context can be partially illustrated by examining just one visual sub-culture: the visualisations central to the natural history project as it was conducted in the province of South Australia after European settlement in 1836. The implications for the writing of colonial art history can be found in the relationship I want to suggest between the visualities of natural history and the visual conceptualisation of the panoramic landscape in a work published by the artist and naturalist George French Angas. The minutes of the Adelaide Philosophical Society11 record that on May 29, 185512 the vice president, Charles Algernon Wilson13 an entomologist, read a paper entitled The Microscope applied to Art, Manufacturing and Commerce.14 Those gathered at the City Council Chambers learnt that the microscope ...has opened to us a new and in exhaustible field of wonder and research; displaying to our astonished gaze another world of objects, of exquisite formation and surpassing beauty; so minute that without the powerful aid of optical science, we must for ever have remained unconscious of their existence.ls
The appearance of a spate of writings about mechanical aids of observation in the nineteenth century,16 was not, however, a response to the development of technically superior instrumentation nor was it due to the passing of the idea that microscopy was theologically suspect, 17 but instead, corresponded with what has usefully been called a 'new discursive order'. Words, and the taxonomies within which they dwelt, was a critical part of the process by which an object was visualised.1s The 'object' was not a randomly chosen entity but an object given visibility by the simultaneous actions of an applied optical technology and the infixion of language onto that which was being viewed at the end of a microscope, telescope or magnifying glass.19 Visualisation was therefore anything but a simple and uni-directional cause and effect transformation of the observable into word and image. Rather, the demands of site specific natural history, itself a discourse about the observable world,2° enabled mechanical observation to proceed as an interrogation of that which was not normally seen unaided by the human eye. The intervention of technology, however, made the objects of study quite a different phenomenon to the objects casually seen with the naked eye. It was language that filled the gap between the two types of looking, by immediately differentiating between the observing states; that with and that without an instrument of observation.21 Words then, and not the microscope or magnifying glass, visualised the object by bringing into being a world of objects previously hidden and yet not so hidden as to be unutterable things: the taxonomies by which observations would ultimately be known, guaranteed their visibility. Beyond the taxonomies, objects remained invisible and no marmer of optical device and its use could alter this.22 Wilson's lecture on microscopy registered several ambivalent sentiments within his praise for the 'wonders' of the optical device and its potential to serve as 'a valuable adjunct of science ... art, manufactures and commerce'. 23 Wilson spoke of the microscope as a display of 'another world of objects' which for the naturalist was the conjuring up of the minute ' ... as with the
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wand of a magician' so that the previously invisible, entered the dominion of the human gaze: ' ... multitudes of minute vegetable and animal races inhabiting the earth, the air, and the water, even to the depths of the ocean... and which, have never yielded up to any power that man is possessed of the long preserved secret of their hidden existence'. 24 Magic, invisibility and 'other worlds' were pitted against science's 'high degree of perfection'25 and therefore dispelled all three; the analogous had given way to the taxonomic under the aegis of the Enlightenment, and in so doing, had retrieved the unknown and brought it within a field of vision. 26 Taxonomy was thus a fundamental condition for the possibility of seeing the natural world27 and attempting to unite into a seamless visibility all phenomena observed with the unaided eye, with all those made apparent by optical technology.2s The articulation of the visible was the immediate concern of Wilson when he began his regular natural history column in The South Australian Register on 7 November, 1840. In his first article Wilson established that it was the classification that brought visibility and that it was the role of the naturalist to reveal that which otherwise might remain hidden. He wrote of the 'indefatigable exertions which have lately been made to remove the dark curtain which has hitherto wrapped in doubt the nature of the immense extent of the country that lies between shore and shore' and that such exertions are 'fast disclosing... (the land's) hidden stores to the naturalists of the expecting world'.29 Thus begins Wilson's description of the insect life of South Australia, the beetle being his first object of study. 'I have discovered during upwards of two years' residence in the colony, more than one hundred and fifty species of beetles, almost all strangers to Britain; and I'm convinced that there are several new genera entirely unknown to naturalists ... '. 30 Taxonomies not only made visibility possible they did so by bringing the visible into the domain of language, however this ever closer proximity of things and their representation, only worked because the descriptions written under the aegis of the taxonomy were restricted to the structures which enabled the same observation to be made over and over again. It was structure, or in this case the forms that constituted botanical description, which brought together in a simultaneous action, the visible and 'the nomination of the visible'. 31 Visual representation in natural history carmot, therefore, be divorced from the process of naming the parts of a plant or animal and describing its measurements, all under the regime of the taxonomy. Drawings- the lines, the surfaces, the forms and the reliefs of the objects brought into a state of visibility- followed the dictates of the taxonomic process and in doing so banished all obscurity. 32 The fit between object, class, structure, part, name and image was perfect enough to enable immediate recognition amongst those familiar with the study of natural history; the drawing of a plant or animal was intelligible precisely because it represented, not an unmediated object gazed upon with the eye of utter dis-interest, but one already defined taxonomically and thus already embedded in the discourses of natural history. 33
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In the journals, notebooks and publications of those practising natural history in or near Adelaide in the 1840's, the isolation of the natural history object from its surroundings was indicative of the crucial role of plotting visual differences. The search for difference underpinned the ocular application of the taxonomy, but the application itself was rendered irrelevant in the drawings, as was the material context of the object. This was expressed, through the kind of rhetoric that often surrounded mid-nineteenth century 'scientific' endeavour, for example, in a diary entry pertaining to 'eyes' and 'seeing' written by William Cawthorne, a young conchologist cum school master who arrived in Adelaide in 1842. He wrote, Seeing. What delightful pictures can our eyes not present to us, what exquisite tints it takes in. How much, how very much they add ... to our pleasure. Heaven and Earth in one sweep, in one slight glance, we see. Brings the most distant objects to our view. Shows us country miles away. Represents trees, the most appealing prospects. Makes us enjoy the sun, the moon, the stars and the earth with all its variety.34
Variety was the key. Indeed 'variety in nature' was a significant overarching description for natural history's realm. Equally, the idea of there being 'infinite variety in God's universe' provoked an aesthetic cum spiritual response; there was frequently the suggestion that one should stand and marvel at the infinite possibilities of nature. This particular intersection between religion and natural history made them, in this instance, powerful and interchangeable partners: infinite variety was, to the wonders of Creation, what difference was, to the construction of knowledges about the physical world.35 The partnership, it would appear, was central to the production of Fanny De Mole's Wild Flowers of South Australia published in 1861.36 The work consisted of twenty gilt edged, hand-coloured, lithographic plates with accompanying pages of printed text, also gilt edged. In her preface, De Mole claimed the work had no botanical pretensions and was merely a book of Australian flowers, encountered daily, to familiarise friends in England. What she then wrote, made the partnership between the pictorial record of natural history and religion, explicitly one that pertained to the magnificence of variety. .. .though we miss some of those (flowers) dear to our childhood ... the Creator has liberally adorned the land of our adoption with others of equal beauty. In none of His works, perhaps, are His beneficent desires towards us more manifest; a variety of beauty, in the form and colouring of flowers, springing up on every side, simply and wholly for our delight. May not these pictures which show such new combinations of form and colour, serve, at least in those who see them for the first time, to stir afresh a feeling of love and gratitude to Him who manifests such overflowing love towards us?3 7
Although De Mole denied it was a work of botany, preferring to emphasise the aesthetic qualities of the flowers she had observed, the organisation of the work, verbally and pictorially, indicates an intimate link with the processes of natural history. Plate I, a full-page drawing of a South Australian example of a lilac, is accompanied on the opposite page, by a description which is arranged into two parts, the Linnaean classification followed by a
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general account. The classification is given under three headings, the natural order, the genus and the variety. The general description notes that there are seven varieties, or more, of Hardenbergia, and that the differences between them lies in the form of the leaf and the colours of the flower. In her lithographed drawing she included two different coloured flower types, white and lilac. De Mole wrote that they were in marked contrast with the English lilac, were a climbing plant seen over cottage verandahs, and could be kept as a hedge or garden shrub.38 Plate VIII is a depiction of Sturt's Pea. After citing the Linnaean classification, De Mole noted that it had been first observed by William Dampier in 1699, won a silver medal from the Horticultural Society in England, had been successfully raised in several parts of Europe, and its nomenclature was ascertained by Robert Brown. 39 The significance of botanical knowledge to the conception of the book is thus obvious, but not just at the taxonomic level. There is also a studied awareness of the literature of natural history born out by her references to difference being the basis of variety, to figures like Robert Brown and Ferdinand von Mueller, and to the activities of societies like the Horticultural Society. Elsewhere in these descriptions, she writes of the distribution of particular orders of plants, not just in South Australia, but throughout Australia and beyond. 40 The compositional devices De Mole utilised in her pictures, implicated her more deeply in the natural history project, and certainly this did not run counter to the aesthetic considerations that played such a prominent part in her work. The two were never really in a dialectical relationship. Such an understanding has arisen in those art historical studies where empiricism has been distilled out from the aesthetic, and treated as an essentially different visual phenomenon. Further, in such studies, the empirical is invariably subordinated to paintings conceptualised in aesthetic terms. 41 To insist on these distinctions in De Mole's work is to argue the unsustainable. All of De Mole's pictures work in concert with the taxonomic details of each flower's botanical classification, and so the significance of the twenty flowers selected, becomes the striking way the differences, between each classification, assert themselves visually. Lines, surfaces, reliefs, and colour serve to make visible that which has been nominated as visible. Thus the almost perfect fit between the verbal description and the visual description as they spatially dialogue across the double printed page. These are simultaneous verbal and visual events, and both are bound by the conventions of botanical representation,42 in its endless attempt, to bring language and object closer and closer together. The veracity of natural history demanded it. De Mole however, claimed a sensitivity to the idea of presenting her flowers as 'beauteous forms and colours' that paid homage to God's 'adornment of the land' by inducing feelings of love and gratitude to the Creator. Her careful attention to botanical detail, as dictated by the differences observed via the demands of the taxonomy, was equally the 'delight' in the 'variety of beauty'. The empirical and the aesthetic were inseparably fused, just as God and natural history were discursively hinged together. 43 This happy conjunction was particularly evident in those natural histories where pictures of individual species were incorporated into painted land-
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scape scenes thereby subsuming the botanic object into an aestheticised panoramic view. Even though the pictorial conventions used in a botanical drawing and those used in an perspectival landscape existed upon quite different sets of assumptions,44 the painted landscape was not a denial of the taxonomic, nor a binary privileging of the aesthetic, or inventive, over the empirical,45 rather, it can be considered as something else entirely. Natural history reconstructed and reinscribed the panoramic gaze incorporated into the painted landscape. What was largely invisible to the naked eye when viewing a panoramic scene, except in the most general way, became visible when seen through a glass; that is, when ocular technology was used to magnify the panoramic. At that moment, and aided by the existence of natural history as a verbal and visual discourse, the mass of discreet entities of flora and fauna, were made visible. Knowledge that the total, viewed panoramically, was made up of an almost infinite number of individual plants, animals, birds, insects and minerals, made the landscape visibly denser. Via optical devices and their associated taxonomies, natural history enabled the viewer to penetrate the panoramic landscape; in a sense, it was made more visible than with the naked eye. The visual processes of natural history thus gave the painted landscape visual depth. 46 Understanding that the magnified structures of individual botanical and mineral entities, in their infinite variety, made up the phenomenon taken in by the eye, cast across the horizon, enabled an important discursive relationship between the visual representations of natural history and the painted representation of the landscape. At the ideological level, this exposed a powerful synthesis of the empirical with the totalising desires of an imperial gaze, ever intent on manufacturing capillaries of control. Such relationships however, had quite specific sites of occupancy and can be observed, for example, in George French Angas' South Australia Illustrated, published in ten parts over 1846 and 1847 and his two volumed work, Savage life and Scenes in Australia and New Zealand, published in London during 1847.47 In the preface of Savage Life and Scenes, Angas made it clear that the written descriptions of his 'wanderings' were conceived as the 'notes' accompanying the picture folios, South Australia Illustrated and New Zealand Illustrated. 48 He presented himself as the' disinterested observer' with a twin concern: an 'ardent admiration of the grandeur and loveliness of (Antipodean) Nature in her wildest aspect' 49 and an aim to 'describe faithfully impressions of savage life and scenes'. 5° These two interests constitute the basis of seemingly separate but, intentionally integrated, visualities that, in turn, made visual depth an essential part of the knowledges generated by Angas' journeyings. 51 It is instructive to read an example of this constant interplay between an' admiration' for' grandeur and loveliness' and 'faithful' descriptions of 'life and scenes' in his writing. The following extract from Savage Life and Scenes describes a trip from Adelaide to the Mt Lofty Ranges, the hills that form a backdrop to the city. The description incorporates a viewing process that alternates between the panoramic (and his use of the map as a potent analogy is a significant indicator of the type of gaze he is intent on constructing) and the precisely located taxonomic visualisation of specific species of flora and fauna. It is the writing that synthesises the two
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visualisations into a continuum of seeing/verbalising. As Angas himself noted, his claim for public attention rested on being a 'faithful describer of what struck the mind of the artist seeking to delineate the characteristic features of the countries and people'.52 The road becomes very steep as it ascends the Mount Loft range, and on gaining the heights, a stupendous and magnificent scene presents itself. Looking back, the plains we had recently left were stretched out far beneath us, extending to the shores of St. Vincent's Gulf; the hazy blue of its calm bosom being discernible to its whole extent, and the faint outline of the opposite coast of Yorke's peninsula bounding the horizon. From this point the scenery on all sides is enchanting; and whoever the settler may be who has perched his habitation amidst these mountains, he has certainly shown his taste in selecting one of nature's loveliest positions, commanding some ofthe finest views in the colony... We now pursued our path through the leafy shades ofthe 'string-bark' forests that clothe these mountainous ironstone ranges. They consist of tall primeval trees of a kind of eucalyptus ... Amongst the low flowering shrubs, the bulrushlike heads of the grass-tree (xantharea) impart a singular character to these Australian forests ...The singing of the cicada- an insect belonging to the order Homoptera- was loud and incessant throughout the whole forest, interrupted by the occasional notes of the musical magpie, whose shrill pipings are known to every Australian settler ... On approaching Echunga springs, the land becomes undulating, and is less densely wooded. The she-oak (casuarina ), the blackwood (acacia), and the vivid green of the exocarpus- the native cherry of the colonists - with the elegant Banksia, covered with tall cones, form a change in the character of the foliage. The 'native cherry' somewhat resembles our 'arbor vitae', and the fruit, from which it has obtained its name, is a small red berry, with the stone or kernel outside attached to the end of the fruit. 53
What is written in Savage Life and Scenes, is presented pictorially in South Australia Illustrated, a large folio work, dedicated to Queen Adelaide, published in London and consisting of sixty hand-coloured lithographic plates, each plate having an accompanying text written by the artist. In the entomological studies, Plate XXXVII for example, all the familiar elements of taxonomic visuality are present. The lithographed image of each species, arranged in a manner that resembles the display of specimens in a collector's drawer or in a cabinet of curiosities,54 is numbered. The numbers pertain to the accompanying lists of the botanical names, that is, the classification of each species. The emphasis is thus on visually verifiable differences between each of the selected butterflies, the drawings carefully arranged for an overall compositional effect, with the individual adult butterflies carefully organised by size, around an image of a section of a small branch of a tree, bearing a Iepidoptera in a caterpillar stage and two types of attached cocoons. The eye is inexorably drawn to the patterns and colours which mark taxonomic difference and encourage the viewer to engage with the infinite variations, in not only the intricate patterns and the differenttonalities of the wings, but also in the different sizes, shapes and configurations of each pair of wings. Effortlessly, the viewer is urged to visually consider the minute world of an optically aided 'reality', where aesthetic delight happily coexisted with the quest for botanical precision.
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In Plate II, the visual event has a different emphasis, and the botanical is positioned within a panoramic view. The title of the plate indicates the two simultaneous visual occasions: Grass Trees at Yankallillah with the Red Kangaroo (Macropus Laniger). What is significant here is the pressing into the panoramic, of what is considered botanically efficacious. Visually, there are doubts about the identity of Angas' background landscape, given its highly generalised appearance and the lack of any visual markers that cartographically pin it down. Angas however, not only names the place- Yankallillah - but in the accompanying text gave a precise location: 'not far from the picturesque residence ofMr Kemmis'. This geographic fixing was important to the overall effect of the visual counterpoint: the taxonomic description against and within the landscape description. As if to stress this, the text that adjoins the lithograph, concentrated on botanical and zoological detail. 55 Angas writes that, This scene represents the largest variety of the Xantharea, which is to be met with in South Australia; there are from ten to fifteen species already known, all of which are designated by the Colonists as 'grass trees'. This magnificent species occurs most frequently in the glens and gullies of the mountains about Rapid Bay and Cape Jervis; the group figured are at Yankallillah ... 56
Angas' description of the kangaroo, however, is wholly derivative and indicates the degree to which his concern for the empirically impeccable is not at odds with his elaborate knitting together of natural history sources. 57 Visual 'truth' is established not just by the 'direct' observations of the writer, or to be more precise, verifying the taxonomically nominated, but also by appealing to the' authoritative' literature of natural history where classifications were confirmed over and over again. Thus his classification of the great red kangaroo- Macropus laniger- is accompanied by a quotation from John Gould's study of the mammal. Gould, who has figured and described it in his beautiful work on the 'Macropodidae', thus writes: This noble species of Kangaroo is the largest and one of the most elegant of its race yet discovered; it is in fact the finest of the Australian Mammalia: the female is particularly attractive, from her graceful, slender, and elegant form, and from the snowy whiteness of her legs and under surface contrasted with the blue-grey tint of her sides and back. ..ss
The River Murray Above Moorundi is the title of Plate ill. The selection of the view quite clearly conforms to the dictates of the popularised version of the picturesque,59 manipulated within the perspectival schema of picture construction and suiting the demands of the panoramic so efficiently. In Savage Life and Scenes, Angas describes his excursion to the Murray, near Moorundi, in the following terms. The scenery is singular and picturesque: high cliffs of yellow fossiliferous sandstone form a basin or valley about two miles in breadth, through which the noble Murray winds in a series of magnificent reaches from side to side; at one spot the cliffs will descend abruptly to the water's edge. whilst at another the river flows on through verdant meadows, shaded by clusters of enormous gum-trees, the rich deep foliage of which casts a broad shadow on each bank of the stream. 60
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The verbal description conjures up the formulaic version of pictorial landscape scenes and emphasises the expanse of the distances between the viewer I reader and the horizon, and the dynamics of viewing where the eye moves from side to side and from the near distance to the far distance, imitating perfectly, the well known conventions of a perspectival system of representation. However the 'scenic' and the 'picturesque' do not stand isolated from other descriptions. Both the text in South Australia Illustrated and the reminiscence in Savage Life and Scenes include a veritable catalogue of natural history detail. Some of the flora can be directly observed in the picture, like the gum trees, but significantly a host of details are not visible. Both accounts mention the crested pigeon, Ocyphaps Lophotes, and' a vast variety of brilliant parrots and other birds ... enlivening the evergreens with their gay plumage';61 and both texts describe the 'fossiliferous cliffs' with their layers of gypsum, within which are embedded the glass-like transparent spiral shells of the genus turbo, and a number of other fossilised shells like pectens, echinae and corallines. 62 The text, next to the image, also refers to the Murray Cod, a 'delicious fish', swimming beneath the surface of the waters of the river. The reader of South Australia Illustrated is thus invited to imagine all these details within the scene being depicted; to appreciate that what is visible, includes a vast array of entities that are either invisible to the naked eye, or cannot be seen in the panoramic sweep of the eye across the terrain majestically spread out before the European observer/recorder. This enriched viewing of the panoramic, the result of the verbal and the visual coinciding, gives the landscape its visual density. The infinite variety in creation, taxonomically defined by a small army of natural historians collecting, recording and painting, becomes the foundation of the 'reality' presented to the eye of the European traveller/explorer, intent on assiduously knowing all commanded by his gaze. In April1844 Angas set out with Governor Grey on his expedition to the south east of the colony. 63 At Rivoli Bay, beyond the Coorong, Angas recorded the penguin colony they found there, drawings and descriptions of which, appeared in both South Australia Illustrated and Savage Life and Scenes. On a sandy reef in the bay, the expedition came across some sea-lions. One specimen was killed. Angas sketched it and then the mammal was measured before being skinned. The skin and the drawing were sent to 'be preserved for the national collection' at the British Museum. 64 On one level, these actions encapsulate what has been called the 'intellectual motions' of mid-nineteenth century natural history. These motions trace Angas' search for the legibility and commodification of nature and his harnessing together of knowledge and imperial power. Both these traces demonstrate a belief that the observer was separate from the exterior world being observed and that this was the key to the total mastery of this world of natural forms. However this imperial appropriation of the supposedly objective, never openly recognised, let alone acknowledged the perspectives of its own representation. 65 If natural history was only ever the 'nomination of the visible', then finally, it could not escape representation. 66 This was the destiny of the ocular technologies employed, but carefully elided, by the
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South Australian practitioners of natural history in their quest to know and have dominion over the 'natural' world they occupied.67 1 2
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Foucault 1973:132. I am thinking of two well known examples in art historical discourse: fifteenth century Florence and seventeenth century Netherlands. See Baxandall1988 and Alpers 1983. Smith 1989:viii. Ibid, p.viii. Ibid, pp.ix-x. As explicated within art theory by Gombrich and critiqued by Bryson. See Bryson, 1983: 1-66. Foucault 1973:144-5. I use the term in the same sense as that employed by Jay, 1988:3-23 esp. 3-4. Although the conceptual problematic of the 'nature of humanity', as a project of modernity (by virtue of its emphasis on the invisible organic structures that posited a transcendental sameness underlying all living things) was especially operative in the visual and verbal discourses constructing European notions of mid-nineteenth century Aboriginality. This would suggest that in the first half of the nineteenth century any transition from what Foucault called the classical episteme to what he regarded as the modem episteme was, as one would expect, quite uneven both geographically (within the West) and within particular discourses. Mid-nineteenth century Adelaide provides an example of discursive practices that constantly shift between two modes of representation, one a ground of knowledge, the other the vehicle of an empirical description of outward appearances. Cf. Foucault's description of representation within the classical episteme and that he terms 'modem'. Foucault 1973:217-343. Cf. Carter 1987:99-104. The Adelaide Philosophical Society was established on January 10, 1853. On October 25 of that year, at a special meeting, the 'laws' of the Society were agreed upon. It defined its object to be 'the discussion of all subjects connected with Science, Literature and Art'. Minutes ofthe Adelaide Philosophical Society: 20, Papers of the Adelaide Philosophical Society, SRG 10/1 /vol. 2. For background to the Society see Cooper 1970:1-38. Minutes of the Adelaide Philosophical Society: 47, Papers of the Adelaide Philosophical Society, SRG 10/1/vol. 2. See also the list of papers read before the Society 1853-1877, SRG 10/1/vol. 4. For biographical details and his entomological work see Wilson and Borrow 1973: 276-281, 316-317 and 346. Wilson had not himself written the paper but instead, delivered one which had been read before the Society of Arts in London on May 24, 1854 by S. W. Leonard. Leonard's work was subsequently printed in the Journal of the Society of Arts, and this, presumably, was Wilson's source. See Leonard 1854:460-469. Leonard's paper had a slightly different title to Wilson's- On the Microscope, as Applied to Art, Science, Manufacturing and Commerce. There is no indication as to whether or not Wilson adapted the London paper or whether he read it exactly as it was printed in the Journal ofthe Society ofArts. There had been a correspondence between the Adelaide Philosophical Society and the Society of Arts in London since April1854. See the Minutes of the Adelaide Philosophical Society: 35, Papers of the Adelaide Philosophical Society, SRG 10 /1/vol. 2. Leonard 1854:461. A typical and often quoted example, in the area of microscopy, is John Quekett's practical treatise on microscopes and the preparation of organic and non-
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organic specimens for an analysis of structure. This well known publication was lauded in Leonard's paper. Quekett 1852:67-148, 343-351 and 399-457. Leonard 1854:460. Also see Bradbury 1968:108-110. An important discussion about optical techniques in the nineteenth century, their place within the scopic regime and their relationship to the project of Modernity, is to be found in Crary 1990. Bradbury 1967:150-151 and Wilson 1988:85-108. Preziosi 1989:56. Cf Foucault's discussion of 'structure' as the enabling condition by which the visibility of an object seen through a microscope is transcribed into language. Foucault 1973:132-139. For an exposition of this idea in relation to other works by Foucault see Jay 1986:182-183. Foucault 1973:132-134. See also Rajchman 1988:101. Preziosi 1989:55-56. Foucault 1973:134-137 and Rajchman 1988:91-93. Roland Barthes makes a similar observation in his essay 'The World as Object'. Barthes 1964:108. Also see Elkins 1992:33-56. Leonard 1854:461. Ibid. Ibid. Elkins 1992:33-39. Or, as Foucault writes, 'the common affinity of things with language and representation.' Foucault 1973:132ff. The traces of an eighteenth century disquiet induced by an awareness of these two types of seeing and the culturally defined suspicion of the 'monsters' to be seen through the lens of a microscope are however still apparent in Leonard's I Wilson's lecture. The previously hidden is deemed 'inexhaustibly wonderful' and 'beautiful' over and over again. Such insistence seems necessary. See Elkins 1992:33-56 for a discussion of the circumstances which produced the shift from analogous to taxonomic comprehension of microscopy. The South Australian Register, 7 November, 1840. Ibid. Foucault 1973:134-5. Foucault 1973:133 and 137. The characteristics of the image described here are those suggested by Foucault but in an altogether different context. He is concerned with a visibility freed from the other senses. I have found these characteristics to be useful in defining the drawn image as it was utilised in nineteenth century natural history. And while it is tempting to collapse the distinctions between verbal and visual representations because of their shared epistemological conditions of possibility and because they are both representations of natural history's objects of study, the relationship between word and image is a good deal more complicated. Any assumed unity between the verbal and the pictorial tends to mask the paradox so eloquently summed up in Foucault's observation that ' ... it is in vain that we say what we see; what we see never resides in what we say'. Foucault 1973:9. This idea is the subject of further discussion in his essay on Rene Magritte. Foucault 1983:1-63. Cawthorne Papers, A103, Literarium Diarium, Sun. 21 May, 1843. The link was explicit in a paper Charles Wilson read before the Adelaide Philosophical Society in 1856. The text of the lecture does not seem to have survived. See Wilson and Barrow 1973:276-278. An abstract of the paper is in the Fifth Report of the Adelaide Philosophical Society, 1858, Papers of the Adelaide
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A comprehensive list of Angas' published works (both books and natural history papers) can be found in Iredale 1959:363-367. Also published in parts in folio form (60 hand-coloured lithographic plates) in London, in 1847. Angas 1847 (a):vii. Ibid, pp.vii-viii. It is not however being suggested that Angas' 'objectivity' or his 'faithful descriptions' were anything other than an elaborate stitching together of various sources, botanical or otherwise. SA Illustrated is full of quotations from published writings (eg John Gould) and from the notes made by other writers, mostly unacknowledged (eg Matthew Moorhouse and William Cawthorne). In the final analysis, Angas' texts conform to the conventions of mid-nineteenth century travel writing with an eye towards his English readers. Angas 1847 (a):viii. Ibid, pp.42-5. For example, seethe photograph of a collector's chest ofc.1820 inMoyal1986:93. However what would now be called ecological accuracy - getting the species and its natural habitat to coincide- was not, it seems, part of the integration of natural history into the panoramic view. The Great Red Kangaroo was not an inhabitant of that part of South Australia, something Angas himself acknowledges. Angas 1847 (b): text accompanying Plate II. Often not acknowledged, according to Cawthorne in some quite vehement diary entries. Cawthorne Papers, A104, Literarium Diarium, Wed. 10 July, 1844; and A105, Literarium Diarium, Tues. 1 July, 1845. Tregenza discusses other examples of unacknowledged sources in SA Illustrated with regard to visual 'borrowings'. Tregenza, unaware of Cawthorne's comments, and the nature of Angas' text, views them as 'lapses'. Tregenza 1980:17-18. Angas 1847 (b): text accompanying Plate II. The term is problematic because of the variety of contexts within which it has been used. Here I refer to those formal Claudian qualities which emerged in the picturesque construction of the landscape and by the middle of the nineteenth century had become a formula for the representation of the landscape: darker foreground, light luminous background, framing devices that focus the eye towards the centre of the picture plane and propel the viewer into recessional spaces, diagonals and other devices that carry the eye from back and forth between the foreground and background, specified subject matter located in the foreground or the middle ground. Cf. Barrell 1979:4-12 and Bermingham 1986:57-85. Angas 1847 (a):218-219. Angas 1847 (b):Plate III. Angas 1847 (a):219-220. For details of the expedition see Tregenza 1980:9-10. Angas' account of the expedition is to be found in his Savage Life and Scenes, 1947 (a):117-180. Angas 1847 (a):160-161. According to Tregenza both skin and sketch are still in the British Museum collection of Natural History. Tregenza 1980:10. I am here summarising the arguments of Levao 1992:2-3. Cf. Alpers 1983:35. Alpers reaches the same conclusion in her discussion of the artifice of Vermeer's View of Delft as the border between the world seen and the world pictured. Such borders between nature and artifice are also defined 'scientifically' in mathematics and natural history. What these borders prompt is the epistemological view that 'there can be no escape from representation'.
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Nevertheless it was already an enterprise in the throes of transition. The necessary conditions of possibility for the writing of the Origin of Species and other like texts, were already well in place in other circles, and its publication in 1859 was but one example of the articulation of a very different sort of relationship between the representation of outward appearances and the generation of botanical and zoological knowledges. The 'arrival' of Darwinian thought however, was hardly disruptive at the level of the significant ideologicallink between the generation of these knowledges and the continued veracity ofthe imperial project being undertaken in nineteenth century South Australia. Cf. Anderson 1992:509-510.
Bibliography Primary Sources: Manuscript Collections and Newspapers. Cawthorne Papers, Mitchell Library, New South Wales: A103, A104, A105. Papers of the Adelaide Philosophical Society, Mortlock Library, South Australia: SRG 10. The South Australian Register, 18 June, 1836- (Originally The South Australian Gazette
and Colonial Register) Primary Sources: Published Works. Angas, 1847 (a). Angas, G.F., Savage Life and Scenes in Australia and New Zealand, Smith, Elder and Co., London, 1847 (facs. ed. Libraries Board of SA, Adelaide, 1969). Angas, 1847 (b). Angas, G.F. (1847). South Australia Illustrated, London: Thomas McLean. De Mole, F.E. (1861). Wild Flowers of South Australia, London: Paul Jerrard (facs. ed. Queensberry Hill Press, Carlton, 1981). Leonard, S. W.(1854). 'On the Microscope, as Applied to Art, Science, Manufacturing and Commerce', Journal of the Society of Arts, 2, May 24, pp.460-9. Quekett, J. (1852). A Practical Treatise on the Use of the Microscope, 2nd edn London: H. Bailliere (first pub. 1848).
Secondary Sources: Books and Articles Alpers, S.(1983). The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the 17th Century, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Anderson, W. (1992). "Where Every Prospect Pleases and Only Man is Vile': Laboratory Medicine as Colonial Discourse'. Critical Inquiry, 18(3):506-529. Barrell, J. (1979). The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place 1730-1840, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barthes, R. (1988). 'The World as Object' (1964). Reprinted in N. Bryson (ed.) Calligram: Essays in New Art Historyfrom France, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Baxandall, M. (1988). Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy, 2nd edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bermingham,A.(1986).Landscapeandideology:TheEnglishRusticTradition1740-1860, Berkeley /Los Angeles: University of California Press. Bonyhady, T.(1985). Images in Opposition: Australian Landscape Painting 1801-1890, Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Bradbury, S.(1967). The Evolution of the Microscope, Oxford: Pergamon Press. Bradbury, S. (1968). The Microscope: Past and Present, Oxford: Pergamon Press. Bryson, N. (1983). Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze, London: Macmillan Press.
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Carter, P.(1987). The Road to Botany Bay, London: Faber and Faber. Chapman, B. (1979). The Colonial Eye, exhib. cat., Art Gallery of W A, Perth. Cooper, J.K. (1970). The Foundation of Culture in Adelaide. (Unpublished MA thesis, University of Adelaide.) Crary, J. (1990). Techniques of the Observer. On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Dixon, R. (1986). The Course of Empire: Neo-classical Culture in New South Wales 17881860, Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Elkins, J. (1992). 'On Visual Desperation and the Bodies of Protozoa', Representations, 40:33-56. Finney, C. (1984). To Sail Beyond the Sunset: Natural History in Australia 1699-1829, Adelaide: Rigby. Foucault, M. (1973). The Order of Things, New York: Vintage Books (this trans. first published in 1971; first published in France in 1966.) __ _, (1983). This is Not A Pipe, trans. J. Harkness, Berkeley /Los Angeles: University of California Press (first published in France in 1973). Fox, P. (1992). Drawing on Nature: Images and Specimens of Natural History from the Collection of the Museum of Victoria, exhib. cat., Geelong Art Gallery, Geelong. Hacking, I. (1983). Representing and Intervening, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Iredale, T. (1959). 'George French Angas: The Father of Australian Conchology', Australian Zoologist, 12(4):362-371. Jay, M. (1986). 'In the Empire of the Gaze', in D. Hoy (ed. ), Foucault: A Critical Reader, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, pp.175-204. Jay,M. (1988). 'ScopicRegimesofModernity',inH. Foster (ed.), Vision and Visuality, Seattle; Dia Art Foundation/Bay Press, pp.3-27. Levao,R. (1992). 'Francis Bacon and theMobilityofScience',Representations,40, pp.132. Moyal, A. (1986). A Bright and Savage Land': Scientists in Colonial Australia, Sydney: Collins. Preziosi, D. (1989). Rethinking Art History, New Haven/London: Yale University Press. Rajchman, J. (1988). 'Foucault's Art of Seeing', October, 44, pp.89-117. Scourse, N. (1983). The Victorians and their Flowers, London/Canberra: Croom Helm. Smith, B. (1989). European Vision and the South Pacific, 2nd edn, Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Smith, B. (with Smith, T.) (1991 ). Australian Painting, 1788-1990, 3rd edn, Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Thomas, D. (ed.) (1988). Creating Australia: 200 Years ofArt, 1788-1983, exhib. cat., Art Gallery of SA, Adelaide. Tregenza,J. (1980). George FrenchAngas: Artist, Traveller and Naturalist 1822-1886, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide. Wilson, S.C. and Borrow, K.T. (1973). The Bridge Over the Ocean, Adelaide: Hyde Park Press. Wilson, C. (1988). 'Visual Surface and Visual Symbol: The Microscope and the Occult in Early Modern Europe', Journal of the History of Ideas, 49, pp.85-108.
Foucault's 'Statement' and Paradigm Change in Nineteenth Century Australia
In The Archaeology of Knowledge Foucault offers a number of directions for
understanding the modes of operation of the enunciative modalities that define and construct discourse. He enlightens us on the enabling power and extent of the limits set by rules of formation, and emphasises the need to replace the search for origins with consideration of the more generalised surfaces of emergence. We learn a fundamental rule that governs discursive formations: the discourse constructs the object at the same time it constructs its own posivitity and episemologisation (BSH 1982:61). From comments in the Archaeology, to more clearly set out claims in 'The Order of Discourse', we discover that Foucault's'object', whether a material object or the less tangible forms of knowledge, arises, however, not through regular patterns of order or cohesive sets of unities that formed the taxonomies in The Order ofThings, but out of ruptures and discontinuities. Acceptance of a shift from rules to random irregularities as a common pattern of discursive strategies requires an initial leap of faith, yet even with the acceptance of this approach, there still remains for the reader a degree of mystification when Foucault speaks of the paradoxical unit which he claims has the chief linguistic function in the discourse. This unit is the bwnce or 'statement'. Because understanding the power he invests in the statement is one of the vital keys to understanding the workings of Foucault's genealogy, I want to focus this paper on the role and function of the statement. One of Foucault's most useful comments on the statement bears repeating: ... the systematic erasure of all given unities enables us first of all to restore to the statement the specificity of its occurrence, and to show that discontinuity is one of those great accidents that create cracks not only in the geology of history, but also in the simple fact of the statement; it emerges in its historical irruption; what we try to examine is the incision that it makes, that irreducible -and very often tiny- emergence ... a statement is always an event that neither the language (langue) nor the meaning can quite exhaust (AK:28).
While I can offer only one or two examples in this paper, I want to illustrate how the 'incision' made by statements, how the 'very tiny emergence' of certain 'events' can be seen to perform effectively as catalysts for specific moments of paradigmatic change. The relation of 'statements' to events enters into this analysis since Foucault on occasion, as in the above passage, uses the terms interchangeably or together as 'statement-event' (AK:129). In 'The Order of Discourse' Foucault asks what is the status of the 'event' as a necessary component of the discourse? His answer is revealing. He contrasts the usefulness of analysing 'events' in discourse with philo-
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sophical or theoretical problems that do not bring the practicalities of the world into consideration. The implication is that the 'event' brings action and a level of materiality into the language site of discourse. In an exegesis that sums up one of the key ideas put forward in the Archaeology, he makes a distinction between analysis of the symbolic field or the signifying structure of language, and a recourse to analyses in terms of the genealogy of relations of force, strategic developments and tactics. In the former, language 'always seems to be inhabited by the other, ... it is hollowed by absence' (AK:lll). The latter is the way in which 'events' (and we assume certain statements) can be better understood and reconstituted, the genealogical approach bringing to the statement, the action and technology of sociological and cultural relations (TP: 114). In 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, History' this understanding of the event is confirmed when he calls the event, 'the reversal of a relationship of forces, the usurpation of power, the appropriation of a vocabulary turned against those who had once used it' (NGH:154). The reference is to one of the chief aims of the Archaeology, to refrain from reading the text in terms of a subtext or reference. The analysis of thought, he says, 'is always allegorical in relation to the discourse that it employs. Its question is unfailingly: what was being said in what was said?' Instead, he wants us to grasp the statement in the specificity of its performance (AK:28) rather than look for a secret meaning that lies buried within ... ' (AK:109). Then we must ask, how do we recognise the statement? Foucault answers the question enigmatically: 'Although it cannot be hidden, it is not visible either ... It requires a certain change of viewpoint and attitude to be recognised and examined in itself' (AK:ll0-111). In an endeavour to escape the language analysis that looks to outside referents, he shifts the enquiry to the moment 'that determines its unique and limited existence' (AK:112). In other words, discovering the statement's specificity will indicate its nature. He claims not to have constructed a theoretical modet but freed a coherent domain of description: 'I have, if not established the model, at least opened up and arranged the possibility of one, if I have been able to "loop the loop" and show that the analysis of discursive formations really is centred on a description of the statement in its specificity' (AK:114). Most commentators are willing to be more prosaic and say that the statement is 'a serious speech act'. Dreyfus and Rabinow elaborate on this idea: 'what gives speech acts seriousness and thus makes them statements is their place in the network of other serious speech acts and nothing more' (BSH:58). In other words, there are rules of discourse which define whether a statement is simply part of general parole and vernacular forms of speech or is making a significant contribution to official or scientific knowledge. These aspects of the statement bear investigation, if statements are not characterised by their syntactic or grammatical forms, then representations which do not use language can also be statements (FP:37). We will look at an example of an image considered as statement later in this paper. The statement's place in the discourse has a strategic function that is related to object formation, but precisely what this function is, appears to depend on its location, it oscillates according to the use that is made of it'
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(AK:104). I want to suggest, however, that when it fails to perform in a similar fashion to other statements in the same location, then we should consider it with even greater interest, because I believe it is at that moment working as an agent of change. It is this aspect of the statement that I want to pursue eventually in this discussion, the statement's capacity to either signal when a particular discursive formation is about to be transformed, or to go beyond this function and activate the emergence of a totally new discourse. It is even possible that its power may extend beyond the local to perform as one of the instigators of paradigmatic change. Foucault provides an example to demonstrate to what degree the statement's efficacy rests in its immediate context, in its position in relation to the enunciative field. He explains that the phrase 'species evolve' does not constitute the same statement before and after Darwin. What has changed is the relation of the original affirmation to statements and propositions in a new field (AK:103). However, he insists the statement is not the same as a proposition; two identical propositions may constitute two different statements because they are located in different circumstances (AK:81 ). As I wish to illustrate later, the statement differs in having a function, it has a responsible task. Nor does Foucault consider the statement to be the same as a sentence, from which we assume that certain word groups which are not sentences are nevertheless capable of performing with the same force. The question posed by language analysis is: 'according to what rules has a particular statement been made, and consequently according to what rules could other similar statements be made?' The question we should ask instead, Foucault says, is based upon a very different register of enquiry into knowledge formation. It is more useful to ask: ' ... how is it that one particular statement appeared rather than another?' (AK:27). To ask such a question is a tremendous challenge since the significance of the statement can only be assessed if its impact on object or knowledge formation can be estimated. It requires not only epistemological enquiry into the relevant histories of the period, but also the ability to assess the importance of the information collected in relation to the appearance of the statement. For the still puzzled reader, the notion that the statement does not need to be a sentence or a proposition is a matter of some concern. Anxiety is present because of the mystery surrounding both the statement's form and its activities. While it is understood that discursive formations produce the conditions ofpossibility for knowledge, it is also assumed that their statements also assist in producing the object, whether a distinctive material object or a large and undefined 'object' such as one of the disciplines (AK:37). Yet we have to remember that Foucault questions the assumption of origins and is of the opinion there is never a single origin but always what he calls a 'threshold of emergence'. This 'threshold' includes such things as the institution, its power and influence and the effects of struggles that take place within the discourse. However, if we attempt to understand how to isolate some of these textual movements or operations then we will not find specific examples in Foucault's writings. He says encouragingly, that when the 'statements comply not only with archaeological rules of formation, but also with certain laws for the construction of propositions, we will say that
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it [the discourse] has crossed a threshold of scientificity' (AK:187). Yet he refrains from offering the reader an example of the way in which such an event might be recognised. There are many generalised instances offered and names mentioned- Cuvier, Pasteur, Locke, Ricardo and so on but no example, for instance, of something he talks about as 'a division between what is definitely or what is not yet scientific' (AK 188). Although mentioned in a general sense, it is clear that the specificities of epistemic or paradigmatic change are not explained or documented, except in the vague terms that Foucault employs when writing of, for instance, medical science (AK:33). I believe it is possible to find specific instances of 'statements' that contribute to or even instigate important shifts, statements that are directly concerned with a recognisable change in our understanding of an object, a body of information, a group of concepts or even a new discipline. When speaking of the 'discipline' in his essay, 'The Order of Discourse' Foucault sets out similar conditions to those of discourse formation: 'a discipline is defined by a domain of objects, a set of methods, a corpus of propositions considered to be true, a play of rules and definitions, of techniques and instruments'. Certain statements become acceptable as operative within the discourse (or discipline) because there is a consensus of opinion that fixes the norm, that validates the statement of the expert. The normative is then used to make decisions on the truth value of later statements and maintain control of the operations and limits of the discourse. Those who have the authority to make decisions are called by Foucault'authorities of delimitation', such individuals or institutions exercise power in the struggles to determine the visibility of certain statements. 'Medical statements' we are told, 'cannot come from anybody; their value, efficacy, even their therapeutic powers, and, generally speaking, their existence as medical statements cannot be dissociated from the statutorily defined person who has the right to make them' (AK:Sl). Yet in an area where a discipline is in the process of formation, such authority may have to arrive from a less recognised position. If we take the discipline of geology as an example, the classification of rock formations into a particular system sets up a norm. In The Order of Things Foucault analysed a similar situation with the shift from the natural sciences to the new disciplines. New theories that suggest a different set of categories be applied to regulate inclusion and exclusion must subvert the alreadyestablished norm. The authorities who want to contend that rocks should not be grouped in this particular way must introduce theoretical premises that overturn the accepted taxonomy. A power struggle ensues, debating how objects are described and categorised. The knowledge amassed and the terms of description accepted becomes part of the newly forming discipline. Revolutionary new theories and information on rock forms, gained from empirical research, helped to transform a part of natural history, (the all embracing term for botany, biology, astronomy, geology and other fields) into the power structures and 'truths' of the discipline we now call geology. While naming and categorising rock forms took place in many areas of this continent in the nineteenth century, one of the most significant operations of geologically oriented discourse formation in nineteenth century Aus-
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tralia centred on Ayers Rock. The naming process by a white Anglo Saxon explorer positioned the rock in a discursive field of exploration of the littleknown continent, his action an exercise of the power /knowledge effect of colonialism. Despite its having lain in the red sands of Arnhem land for countless millennia, Ayers Rock began its life as an' object' for this country's Anglo-Celtic population a short time after the explorer William Gosse described it in his diary on 19th July, 1873. 'When I got clear of the sandhills and was only two miles distant, and the hill for the first time coming clearly in view, what was my astonishment to find it was one immense rock rising abruptly from the plain' (ADB:276). In citing his words, it is not Gosse's authority as author that I wish to convey, but rather instance the first intimation of an object being brought into being in discourse. Before the event of the explorer's 'discovery', his diary entry, and subsequent reference in newspapers, the monolith's six kilometre long oval shape did not exist in Western civilisation. Gosse thought the rock worth documenting because geology was in the process of becoming a science and it was obvious that Uluru was an extraordinary rock. The Aboriginal name, Uluru, did not appear in any Western discourse at that date; nor were the totemic owners of U1uru, the Yankun~a~ara people, mentioned as the original guardians of the rock. When Goose's' identification became known, Ayers Rock joined with other Australian rock formations in having a conceptual attachment to a new set of knowledges. The positioning of this object within the order of the developing geological discourse was an exercise of power/knowledge in that the information contributed to the body of evidence being amassed to support the new discipline. What I would like to arrive at, however, is an event in which we can identify a specific statement as it crosses into a threshold of scientificity. Keeping in mind Foucault's definitions of object and discourse formation, we might consider what a second explorer, Ernest Giles, wrote about Ayers Rock in his journal two years later in 1874. These are some of the things he said: Its appearance and outline is most imposing for it is simply a mammoth monolith that rises out of the sandy desert soil around, and stands with a perpendicular and totally inaccessible face at all points. Down its furrowed and corrugated sides the trickling of water for untold ages has descended in times of rain, and for long periods after, until the drainage ceased ... (Giles 61 vol.2).
Giles published journal is about the experiences of his party in facing the vicissitudes of exploration in wild, little known country. But when he claims that Ayers Rock is a 'mammoth' monolith and speaks about its being 'solid granite stone' he is making a statement that is a tentative positioning of the rock in a geological discourse. The fact that Ayers Rock is composed of conglomerate in sandstone and he was therefore wrong about the 'granite' is not the issue. In his description of statements Foucault dismisses the 'truth' value as a problem for the reader: 'the investigator must remain neutral as to whether what a statement asserts as true is in fact true, he must remain neutral as to whether each specific truth claim even makes sense'
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(AK:ill). This is perhaps the most ambiguous aspect of the statement, that its function is more important than its attachment to truth. The 'form' of the stating however, enters into the definition and the visibility of the statement. Giles' use, for example, of the word 'imposing' is not the scientific language a geologist would use if talking about the rock's geological nature today - because it is not specialised scientific language. There is nevertheless enough geological speculation- especially about the drainage, 'the trickling of water for untold ages' - to show that Giles was familiar with Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology (published in 1830-32) and that he understood Lyell's claim that the world had taken billions of years to evolve. More importantly, his statement showed that he understood that causes still in action, such as the erosion from rain, proved that the world was continuing to evolve. Giles' comment on the drainage can be considered a 'statement' of a geological nature. We can position it in relation to many other sections of his published journal, Australia Twice Traversed, (1889) which describe rock formations; we can consider his various observations as aiding the construction of a geological discourse which developed the status of a discipline only in the course of the nineteenth century. Statements concerning the forms and other aspects of rocks, spoken by observers in the field, joined with the opinions of others acknowledged as authorities in newly-formed institutions. Together, these practices operated as Foucault's 'surfaces of emergence' and helped to institutionalise a section of what had been natural science into the discipline of geology. Foucault writes: 'the object does not wait in limbo the order that will free it and enable it to become embodied in a visible and prolix objectivity; it does not pre-exist itself, held back by some obstacle at the first edges of light. It exists under the positive conditions of a complex group of relations' (AK:45). What I now want to distinguish is the way in which the 'statement' does not need to be either a proposition or a sentence, but in fact can be a phrase or what is perhaps more remarkable, a single word. Giles travelled on to the Olgas and his journal speculates on the geological nature of these remarkable rocks: The great difference between it [Ayers Rock] and Mount Olga is in the rock formation, for this is one solid granite stone, and is part and parcel of the original rock, which, having been formed after its state of fusion in the beginning, has there remained; while the aged Mount Olga has been thrown up subsequently from below.
When Giles uses the phrase, 'state of fusion' he is telling those who have a new understanding of the meaning of the word, 'fusion' that the rock (so he thinks) was formed in fire. This is significant, a phrase that could be, I suggest, a very important 'statement' in Foucault's understanding of the term. To the initiated the word 'fusion' recalls Plutonist theories that claim the origin of the world in fire and chaos. If we wished to trace the discursive movements of that belief forward to the twentieth century then in the 1990s we have seen a renewed interest in the 'big bang theory' as part of a discourse whose 'knowledge' continues to rest in speculation. Foucault alerts us to yet another step which he feels we should consider: 'that beyond any apparent
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beginnings there is always a secret origin- so secret and so fundamental that it can never be quite grasped in itself' (AK:25). In this historically remote frame, the trope, 'state of fusion' could be considered a statement that helped to displace the earlier discourses of natural philosophy and natural history. In introducing specialised language and practices the science of geology also introduced revolutionary ideas and key concepts. The practical observations in the field began a system of classification and an' order' operating as a 'will to know' and a 'will to truth' (OD:56). Understanding and recording the evidence that pointed to the ancient age of the earth required a new language. Language played a part in validating and legitimising the discipline of geology, yet only certain statements survived by virtue of their meaning. Giles made rough sketches of the Olgas, and a line drawing was included as an illustration in the published account of his travels. The simple sketch can also be considered a 'statement' and one that played a significant part in formation of these incredible rocks for the gaze of the Western world. Foucault refers to the statement as 'an event that neither the language (langue) nor the meaning can quite exhaust' (AK:28). This is because it is connected to a vast field of other things, memory, references in books and so on. And also because it is linked not only to the situation it is in, but also to that which provoked it and to the statements which will follow from it (AK:28). While we realise that the particularity of meaning of the Olgas available to the reader in the 1870s is not the same as the advanced knowledge accessible to the 1990s viewer, (nor is it the same class of information understood by its Aboriginal guardians) further considerations must inform our understanding of attainable meanings. It would seem that discovering groups of similar statements and events is nevertheless a useful way of ensuring recognition of a particular discourse, and even more importantly, of being aware of ruptures or discontinuities when they occur (AK:33). Before it was published, sections of Giles' written description went through an 'improving' process at the hand of his editor, Mrs. Cashel Hoy. I mention this because either Hoy or Giles wrote, in a fever of enthusiasm, the following purple prose: The appearance of Mount Olga from this camp is truly wonderful: it displayed to our astonished eyes rounded minarets, giant cupolas and monstrous domes. There they have stood as huge memorials of the ancient times of the earth, for ages, countless eons of ages, since its creation first had birth. The rocks are smoothed with the attrition of the alchemy of years. Time, the old the dim magician, has ineffectually laboured here, although with all the powers of the ocean at his command.
Whether Giles had originally thought of an engulfing ocean as he stood surrounded by thousands of miles of heat, sand and spinifex is not clear, but this time the statement was true, wave action produced the shapes of the Olgas. The language used by Giles (or Mrs. Hoy) is metaphorical, and of a style associated with the movement in literature and art which we call Romanticism. The language in the process of being established as scientific, as geological, is barely present. Yet without the knowledge, the relatively
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new geological knowledge, that the world had taken eons of ages to evolve, had undergone epochs of extremes, the ice age, floods etc., this type of statement could not have been made. The information, the knowledge is there, but couched in language unacceptable to a scientific discourse. The writing must be seen in the shady area of discourse that is a discipline in the process of formation. Or, for those who consider the date of 1872 too late to talk of the new science of geology, then it could be considered as a statement that ruptures the romantic discourse which the language of the paragraph constructs- it could be read as one of Foucault's discontinuities. It would seem obvious from the concepts hinted at in this paragraph, that a 'statement' of any consequence must always introduce the conditions of possibility for a new discursive formation. It is possible to go back three centuries and position Giles' statement on the wave process, as having part of its 'secret' threshold of emergence in a famous hypothesis, Thomas Burnet's Sacred Theory of the Earth. With a date of 1689-90 his theory can hardly be called'geological' but it accounted for the earth's present condition as the direct result of the Noachian deluge. Burnet thought the flood occurred, however, as a result of pressure that cracked the earth's shell in several places and forced a layer of water concentric with the crust, to inundate the surface. A possible interpretation is that divine intervention had no part in a 'natural' event. While Burnet saw the worldas a result of the flood- as shapeless and ugly, he also found it 'great'. In the terminology of a later period, he found it 'sublime'. In the eighteenth and nineteenth century the two words were synonymous. Following his judgementon the flood, Burnet made a pronouncement which we can interpret as introducing a profound change of thought: 'Whatever hath the appearance of Infinite, as all things have that are too big for our comprehension, they fill and overbear the mind with their excess and cast it into a pleasing kind of stupor and admiration' (Burnet 1772:79). Burnet's phrase, 'stupor and admiration' recorded the experience of an overwhelming emotion- what we have learned to think of as an experience of the 'sublime'. His phrase'stupor and admiration' was a statement not particularly significant as an aesthetic in the seventeenth century. Not until the early eighteenth century is it possible to locate such statements positively within a grid that positions them in a discourse of the more recent and modern understanding of the sublime. New knowledges which emerged from studies of rock forms in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, proved beyond all doubt that the formation of the earth involved inconceivable centuries of endless time and amazing evolutionary processes. Thus the explorer, traveller, and the naturalist turned geologist, gazed on certain rock formations, mountains, precipices, and other more remarkable parts of the natural world, and if sensible of the new scientific theories of creation, recalled the immeasurable time involved in the evolution of the world. If they were individuals of sensibility, also familiar with the aesthetic concepts attached to Romanticism, they experienced a feeling of the sublime. This was a different sublime from that experienced by their eighteenth century cousins. What had been in the Romantic era an aesthetic judgement of the mountain or volcano which
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made no final conceptual determinations of the object, (Kant) became in this geologically oriented time, a different employment of the cognitive faculties and for some, a more overwhelmingly sublime emotion. In documenting these experiences, it is possible that a word only will sometimes indicate this momentous new knowledge and the overwhelming feeling that accompanied its recall. As I have mentioned, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century the word 'great' was synonymous with 'sublime' When it was said that the view of the mountains was 'great' the single word was a statement articulating a particular aesthetic, and indicating a whole cultural discourse. What I contend then, for Foucault's statement, is its ability to operate as a small group of words or even a single word, as we found above, in the word, 'fusion'. The capacity is present in this word or in a word-group, to disrupt an already formed discursive field and to introduce a new discourse. When the' statement' is read and understood by members of an interpretive community, that is those who already possess some knowledge of the concepts or theories involved, the conditions of possibility for the formation of a new discourse is heightened. While it is necessary to consider the institutional site as the body which retains the authority to define the statement as a special unit in the discourse, I want to suggest that the statement can nevertheless operate without that sanction when the discipline is in the process of formation. The examples above demonstrate that attempts to describe the space in which significant statements are made needs to be extremely specific, but their relationship to the institution can be vague or in the process of formation, and their identity an equally ambiguous construct, only able to be grasped in relation to other units in the same space at the same time. While it is understood that the descriptive statement is only one of the modalities present in the discourse which became the discipline of geology, the new discourse also presupposed many new practices, the most important of which was a particular way oflooking at things, an observation of the earth that had regard to a different set of regularities and rules. This was an important transformation. And as we have seen, the actual position of the new statement in a language space could also operate as a rupture to the lexical similarities and syntactical strategy of the original discourse. This is why, in Foucault's view, the relationship between the statement, the language in which it operates, and the 'thing' to which it refers, (including practice)hasalwaysahiddencontentwhichisseldomclearlysituatedinone discourse only. What is clear is that the introduction of the geological statement into a Romantic discourse was in this case the signal of something extra, something quite different, which I have outlined here in these examples, as the manifestation of the sublime. Whether the sublime considered under these conditions can meet the criteria raised by Kant; whether it remains an aesthetic when it is informed by an understanding of scientific knowledge or concepts, cannot be debated here. What this situation does also suggest, however, is confirmation of Foucault's claim that a group of statements is 'far from referring to a single object, formed once and for all, and to preserving it indefinitely as its horizon of inexhaustible ideality' (AK:32).
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Rather the 'object' undergoes shifts of meaning under an interplay of rules that make possible a specific reality of the object only under certain conditions and for a given period of time.
Bibliography Michel Foucault (1972). The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith, London: Tavistock. (Abbreviated as AK.) Michel Foucault (1980). 'Truth and Power' in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972, Colin Gordon (ed.) Brighton: Harvester Press, pp.109-133. (Abbreviated as TP.) Michel Foucault (1981). 'The Order of Discourse', in Untying the Text: A PostStructuralist Reader, Robert Young (ed. and intro. ). Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, pp.48-78. Foucault, Michel (1977). 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, History', in Donald F. Bouchard, (ed. and lntro.), Language, counter-memory, practice: Selected essays and interviews by Michel Foucault, Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, ,pp.139-164. Writings on Foucault Cousins, Mark and Athar Hussain (1984). Michel Foucault, London: Macmillan, p.88. Dreyfus, Hubert L. and Paul Rabinow (1982). Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Brighton: Harvester Press. (Abbreviated as BSH.) McHoul, Alec and Wendy Grace (1993). A Foucault Primer: Discourse, Power and the Subject, Melbourne University Press. (Abbreviated as FP.) O'Farrell, Clare (1989). Foucault: Historian or Philosopher, London: Macmillan. Sheridan, Alan (1980). 'Discourse, Power and Knowledge', in Sheridan, (ed.) Michel Foucault: The Will to Truth. London and New York: Tavistock. Shumway, David (1989). Michel Foucault. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia. White, Hayden (1978). 'Foucault decoded: Notes from Underground', in Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, edition 1985, pp.230-260. Other sources
Australian Dictionary ofBiography, Douglas Pike (ed. ), Vol. 4 1852-1890. (Abbreviated asADB.) Ernest Giles (1889). Australia Twice Traversed: The Romance of Exploration, 2 vols., London: Samson Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington. Burnet, Thomas (1772). The Sacred Theory of the Earth, London. First published as Telluris Theoria Sacra, London, 1680-1690.
Governing at a Distance: the Colonisation of Australia1
How can distant or foreign places and times be gathered in one place in a form that allows all the places and times to be presented at once, and which allows orders to move to where they came from? Talking of power is an endless and mystical task; talking of distance, gathering, fidelity, summing up, transmission, etc., is an empirical one (Latour 1990:56).
In the branch of scholarship that uses Foucault's 'Governmentality' paper as
its starting point, 'governing at a distance' has become something of a buzzword. Researchers such as Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose (see especially Miller and Rose 1990; Rose and Miller 1992) have sought to make a contribution to our understanding of practices of government in liberal and advanced liberal states by wedding Foucault's work on government and power to Latour's conception of 'action at a distance' (see, for example, Latour 1990). Briefly, both Foucault and Latour refuse 'magical' explanations of power as a possession, stressing instead the importance of studying power as the dynamic force which gets things done; following on from this, they both approach the study of power as an empirical rather than a philosophical question. In Foucault's terms, the study of power is the study of how one actor may act upon the actions of another (Foucault 1982); in Latour's terms, it is the study of how the few may dominate the many, or how some actors persuade other actors to do things for them (Latour 1986). In addition, Foucault drew attention to modern liberal forms of governing as requiring not so much a confrontation between governor and governed as a reshaping and loosening of the governmental relation. Sexuality, for example, is governed through the reshaping and realignment of desire and pleasure which requires a' distant' mode of the operation of power (Foucault 1978). And as Foucault shows in Discipline and Punish, (1977) modern power is simultaneously both absolutely discreet, in that it is invisible, and absolutely indiscreet, since it is (obviously) everywhere (Foucault 1977). This invisibility and distance in modes of governing is reflected in Latour's work, where distance between people, places and representations (and between representations and the objects they represent) is precisely the problem to be overcome by the person who wishes to dominate another. Modern forms of government, then, are necessarily to some extent 'government at a distance', in thatthey do not rely on 'presence' to guarantee efficacy. That is, the omnipresence of power does not require a physical presence. The practice of colonialism in the nineteenth century required many innovative governmental strategies to deal with the problem of distance which was perhaps rather more evident than in the efforts to govern the home nation; the' absence' of government could be compensated
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by the installation of systems of 'omnipresent' power. And it is precisely in these settings and with these problematisations that questions of confidence and fidelity came to the fore for liberal government. In the many histories of colonial government and of the formation of colonial administrative bureaucracies, much attention has been paid to the formal, legal aspects of the relationship between coloniser and colonised; many biographical and other studies, for example, have attempted to lay bare what made the colonies and colonial administrators 'tick'. Yet what is often missing from such accounts is an analysis of how colonial rule might be justified: how colonial administrators came to have confidence in what they did. Although it might be objected that the history books are full of such accounts, the 'confidence' of colonial administrators is often treated as a magical or self-evident attribute; the activities of such administrators, frequently, are implicitly or explicitly regarded as subject to a form of problematisation specific to colonisation, which often means that 'anything goes' if it fits in with the demands of the mother-country. It can be easy, then, to regard colonial administrators either as a collection of self-serving and self-motivating individuals, or as an anonymous group of bureaucrats who derive the legitimacy of their actions from the (self-evident) legitimacy of the mother-country. The last works of Michel Foucault (1985, 1986) draw our attention to the problematic nature of ethical self-justification. First of all, Foucault speaks of a possible interrelation between practices of government of the self and the government of others. This suggestion on its own might be seen as providing a justification for an examination of colonial governors' own ethics, or their rapport as Foucault puts it as a way into understanding the character of colonial government more widely. Second, for Foucault, an examination of the ethics of the ancient world was instructive because here Foucault saw examples of groups of people attempting to construct for themselves a way of life outside a set of moral'norms', a scenario which Foucault thought echoed some more modern concerns. This work is important because it allows us to throw into relief modern forms of self-problematisation which are ethical' rather than 'moral', and to allow us to understand practices of self-fashioningandtheachievementofwhatwemightcall'self-justification' in times and places when these are not simply 'given' to the individual by an externally-imposed moral code. The government of the nineteenth century Australian colonies is a field where this analysis of ethics, rather than morals, might be useful. The growing literature which seeks to understand liberalism, not simply as a political philosophy, but as a kind of permanent problematisation of the legitimacy of rule and of rulers (see, for example, Rose and Miller 1992), is suggestive here: it is necessary to understand the nineteenth-century liberal administrators who sought to govern the Australian colonies as attempting to form practices of government in situations where a simple set of moral codes was not given to them. A cursory glance at the history of AngloAustralian relations in the nineteenth-century suggests that the problematisation of rule was ever-present, for example in attempts to come up with policies regarding Aboriginal land rights. 2 0f course, the 'bad cop' approach to the Aborigines is not being denied or excused here; what is
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worth mentioning is that there was also a parallel'good cop' set of manoeuvres, and what is inescapable is the way in which colonial rule involved a permanent self-critique: a critique which concerned both power over others, and what might give a ruler authority to rule. Briefly, then, the field of nineteenth-century colonial liberalism is one in which 'rule' is not selfevident. There is a second reason why the government of the Australian colonies necessarily was a space of the problematisation of the rule over others and of one's own authority to rule: what has been termed the tyranny of distance (Blainey 1966). The problem of the distance of the colonies from the coloniser meant that administrative rule became problematic not just because of the impress of liberal thought. The everyday mechanics of running the colonies were no doubt awkward (and there was a double problem of distance with Australia- there are huge distances from London to the colonies, but there are also huge distances from the primary colonial administrative centre (Sydney) to the other colonies). However, the problem of distance also meant that a series of novel administrative solutions needed to be constructed, as will be detailed below.
Fidelity techniques How, then, might colonial administrators come to have confidence in themselves: to forge a set of ethics? The cult of Hellenism can provide some hints as to how this might work. Hellenism, or an interest in the ancient Greeks, almost as soon as it arose in England became linked to practices of government in the Australian and other colonies. Very briefly, the ancient Greeks provided colonial administrators with a variety of resources: not just codes of private and public manners (Macintyre 1991), although this was indeed the case, but also a means of conceptualising the ethics of colonisation, of thinking about the relationship between coloniser and colonised, and, through close readings of prestigious ancient texts, a set of guidelines for handling practical situations (Ogilvie 1964). First of alt we should note that the English obsession with the ancient Greeks was, as Frank Turner (1981) points out, a nineteenth-century phenomenon. Until the end of the eighteenth century, the tendency was to regard European civilisation rather as Roman and, of course, Christian (Turner 1981:81; Jenkyns 1980). At the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, there was an important shift such that the Greeks came to take the theoretical space once occupied by the Romans, and to be seen as more relevant, or at any rate as more similar to the English. More precisely, the Greeks were seen by many as providing 'a means for achieving selfknowledge and cultural self-confidence within the emerging order ofliberal democracy and secularism' (Turner 1981:xii). This was, perhaps, primarily because the Romans were regarded as instantiating a predominantly military empire, while the Greek empire was read as an empire of a rather different character. Particularly important was the supposed civilising and cultural mission of the Greeks. The predominant view of the British Empire at the beginning of the nineteenth century was much more consonant with this reading of the Greeks than with any Roman equivalent. Of course, this
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necessitated something of a rewriting of Greek history. Virtually all the eighteenth-century histories of Greece were anti-Athenian and pro- the overtly militaristic state of Sparta; an important point about the nineteenthcentury cult of Hellenism is that it was a cult of Athenian Hellenism. The Athenian experience, then, was one which seemed to speak to the Englishman concerned with problems of colonisation. Virtually everyone who writes about colonisation in the nineteenth century has something to say about the relevance of antiquity as a way of approaching contemporary problems. Most writers derogate the Roman military system of running an empire, and praise the Greek model. So, for example, an anonymous speaker in Melbourne in 1861 can claim: Their system of colonization [and here he is referring to the French] resembles the Roman, their colonists are soldiers, and the country becomes in their heads rather a military post than a commercial state. We resemble the Greeks. The Colonies which they founded in Asia Minor,ltaly and Sicily rivalled the parent state in the cultivation of literature and art; their Government was free, but they still looked to the mother country for protection and assistance, and held themselves under a very strong obligation to befriend and assist her in all her difficulties (Anon 1861:4).
John Dunmore Lang (1852) devotes a large section of his book on Freedom and Independence to an account of classical methods of colonisation. He again notes how Roman colonisation was merely the establishment of garrison towns, while the Greeks were concerned with a cultural mission. For Lang, as for so many others at the time, colonisation is a lost art; the English can regain their sense of how to practise the art of colonisation by an attention to how the Greeks conceptualised their colonising role. Edward Freeman contrasts how England has become distanced from its colonies, especially America, and he predicts the same fate for Australia; the root cause of these actual or impending colonial disasters is the fact that we are not united as Athens and its colonies were (Stephens 1895:1I:180). Many writers on colonial issues despaired of the situation in the colonies because they were not so balanced as England (see, for example, Buller 1840; Lang 1854; McCombie 1850). Very roughly, it was thought to be impossible to form a sound nation if all the constituent parts of English society were not present. It was therefore seen as important to have all classes of society represented in Australia. The model here is the Athenian colony, which by being a miniaturised copy of Athens, feels an affinity and a loyalty to the mother country which does not need to be enforced. W.E. Gladstone, in favour of Australian self government, again likened this to the Greek rather than the Roman method of empire, based on ties of sentiment and mutual benefit, allowing, as he put it, 'perfect freedom and perfect self-government' (cited in Macintyre 1991:66). Many argue in favour of the Australian colonies being deliberately constructed to have within them all classes of society, and suggest that problems in the colonies stem from the absence of an aristocracy as well as the consequent lack of an appropriate morale. Edward Gibbon Wakefield, instrumental in the setting up of South Australia, subscribed to this view, and along with influential commentators like Charles Buller and Bishop Hinds, suggested that successful colonisation depended on trans-
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planting what he called 'the whole tree' of English society to Australia (see Wakefield1849;Buller1840;ParliamentaryPapers1850:xi(CMD:1163),54ff; LetterofFitzRoytoGrey21/6/1849;C013/75:22/3/1852;C013/79:22/3/ 1852). This way of arguing is also seen in parliamentary debates on Australian immigration from the 1840s onward which routinely deplore how low the quality of most intending immigrants was. There were similar responses from administrators in New South Wales, who complained about the colony being used as a dumping ground for paupers (CO 210/443:No 3658). Experimental colonisation companies were set up to try to improve the quality of person moving to the Australian colonies, but it is clear from, for example, the private correspondence of FitzRoy that these companies still were not getting it right. What is important about these debates is that they are all conducted with explicit or implicit reference to an assumed to be successful classical practice. The Athenian colonies were bound to Athens by ties of affection precisely because they were like little Athenses. Consequently, the solution to the ills of the Australian colonies were seen in following this example and introducing the same balance that England had. The Classical influence, then, was especially important in attempts to make Australia as like England as possible. As I have already suggested, this was a technical means of governing and ensuring a particular type of citizen with an ethical commitment to the empire. There are many examples of this tendency. In 1858, Edward Lytton, the Secretary of State at the Colonial Office, set up the colonial honours system, which explicitly set out to establish a kind of Australian aristocracy, and this in spite of his known dislike for that class (Knox 1992). This invention of an honours system served the double function of making the beneficiaries of honours more faithful to England, as well as making Australian society more balanced. This was a continuation of the earlier effort by W.C. Wentworth in 1853 to make certain ranks of Legislative Councillors into an hereditary aristocracy (Knox 1992). Other writers in the period dwell on the lack of a gentry, and on the over-representation of men in the Australian colonies (The Unknown 1865; Reports of C.L. and E. Commissioners 24/2/ 1851). The argument here is that a variety of solutions to import 'balance' into the Australian colonies were made thinkable by attention to the problems of Classical colonisation practices. In slightly different vein, the planners of both Melbourne and Adelaide, which were built with streets conforming to a grid pattern, made references to the Greek use of the grid as an appropriate topography for a colony and thereby justified their own choice of the grid. It was seen to have advantages in eliminating dangerous spaces, and it made the administration of cities much more straightforward and rational from a distance. So, for example, it was argued that land sales could be more easily supervised from England when the plots of land were subjected to the standardising technology of the grid (Davidson 1991). It is possible to think of programs such as these as ways of attempting to guarantee fidelity. It must be remembered that the colonisation of Australia took place in the shadow of the perceived disaster of American independence and for many contemporary political economists, it was the lack of what we might call 'fidelity techniques' which had doomed England to lose
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one of its most valuable assets. In the same vein, we might consider the attempt to introduce British flora and fauna into Australia as attempts to induce an emotional bond between Australian colonies and the mothercountry. In 1861, for example, Edward Wilson set up the Acclimatisation Society to introduce, acclimatise and domesticate 'all innoxious animals, birds, fish, insects and vegetables, whether useful or ornamental' (cited in Macintyre1991:114).1tisveryclearthatthiswasseenasanimportantproject because of the improvement of colonial morale that it would engender. The interest in ancient Greece, then, was never merely academic, but was linked up with ways of thinking about the art of government and provided rationales for experiments in governmental organisation. The interplay between Hellenism and government can be clearly seen in the number of administrators and politicians who use Greece as a resource in this way. A good example might be Herman Merivale, who was Professor of Political Economy at Oxford and delivered a famous set of lectures on colonies and colonisation (Merivale 1861), which continually referred to Greek precedent. Merivale's credentials as a Classical scholar and as an expert in political economy meant that he was first choice to take over some of James Stephen's duties in 1847 at the Colonial Office. This pattern of an interrelation between political economy, Classical knowledge and governmental activity is very common around the middle of the century. The Greeks were regarded as providing a model for personal manners and taste, yet this code of ethics spilled out beyond the private domain. Midnineteenth-century Melbourne was characterised by a rush to collect Greek antiquities for decorating houses and for private collections (de Serville 1980, 1991), and Victoria still has a disproportionately large collection of antiquities and community of classical scholars for its size. 3 Redmond Barry attempted to extend this notion of taste to the public sphere; his vision of Melbourne University, of the State Parliament, and of Melbourne's Public Library was one in which classical styles of architecture must be used, and the values of European civilisation must be upheld. Interestingly, Melbourne Public Library made no attempt to collect any Australiana (Macintyre 1991). Melbourne University, like Sydney, whose motto was, revealingly, sidere mens eadem mutato, was from its beginnings an avowedly European institution (Hirst 1988). While Barry was very scathing about his philistine fellow-colonists, privately referring to them as the Boeotian herd (de Serville 1991:245), he still clung on to the belief that noble classical buildings could effect an ethical transformation of the citizen body. He believed that the classical style of his buildings would favourably contrast with the Gothic churches and cathedrals of Melbourne, and provide the city with a much more appropriate and modern secular feel. Barry, like many educated nineteenth-century politicians and administrators, was familiar with Aristotle's Ethics, virtually an ethical guide book for the age (Turner 1981). Most important was the Aristotelian insistence on conditioning of the will and the formation of good habits. As Frank Turner has argued, in the nineteenth century the Ethics was being read with new eyes and this rereading led to a rethinking of civics. In the eighteenth century the ethics of citizenship were the concern of the upper classes; by the nineteenth century, it was thought
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that far more people in many different social groups were capable of ethical behaviour. This conception of civics drove Barry's various projects in Melbourne. Aristotle's Ethics was not the only text which was important as a resource for colonial citizenship. R.M Ogilvie has pointed out how Thucydides was recommended as a guidebook for new colonial administrators, with the Athenian general Pericles, as described by Thucydides, the model of a good governor. Ogilvie goes as far to suggest that it was Pericles' boast that rowing had made Athens what it was that led to the sudden emergence of what we might call the cult of rowing in England and in the colonies (Ogilvie tells of an English housemaster who refers to rowing as a 'way of life'). In the same way, Plato's Republic which was unsurprisingly used as a guide to statecraft, pushes the line that games are the twin sister of work; work and games together train the soul. Ogilvie suggests that the emergence of the cult of manliness and the notion of the muscular Christian made their way into late-nineteenth-century thought via Plato (Ogilvie 1964:115ff).
Hellenism: a moment of a secular ethics These examples are all instances of a tendency to rebuild ethical life in a secular direction, a tendency forcefully identified in Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy (1965) especially chapter four. According to Arnold, nineteenth-century life was driven by two ethical tendencies, Hebraism and Hellenism. He characterised Hebraism as 'this energy driving at practice, this paramount sense of the obligation of duty, self-control, and work, this earnestness in going manfully with the best light we have'. Hellenism was 'the intelligence driving at those ideas which are, after all, the basis of right practice, the ardent sense of all the new and changing combinations of them which man's development brings with it, the indomitable impulse to know and adjust them perfectly'. The final impulse of both was 'man's perfection or salvation', yet they differ in terms of their spontaneity and their moral/ ethical flexibility. Arnold regarded Hellenism as the appropriate ethics for a new age of intellectual daring. The British had failed to realise that Hebraism should be on the decline and Hellenism in the ascendant (Arnold 1965:163-8). It should be noted that Arnold's was an idiosyncratic reading of Greek culture which stressed the Greeks' ethical rationality, yet many followed Arnold in turning to the Greeks for a way of reconceptualising ethics. No doubt there are many reasons for this move4 but perhaps the most important are, first, the consideration of the Greeks as an example of morality at its sternest without the light of the Gospel. A growing interest in the possibilities of secular democracy no doubt made the Greeks seem pertinent. Second, Hegel's concept of the historical development of Greek philosophy was seen as relevant. Many nineteenth-century thinkers who accepted his view of the passage from Greek civilisation detected a similar movement in their own age. According to this famous distinction, constituted the morality residing in the unreflective custom and religion of the ancient community. Moralitt was the reflective morality that developed as the individual subjective consciousness looked within itself to discover what objective
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truth would have moral authority over it. Seen in this light, a renewed interest in the Greeks was perhaps inevitable, and one is tempted to agree with Turner's assertion that by 1850, the effect of works like Grote's History of Greece (1869) had convinced many that England was a mirror image of Athens, and that England needed to understand better how the ancient naval power had held onto its empire if the modern naval power was to do the same.
The inextricability of ethics and government What I would like to try to do now is to link up this notion of Hellenism as a progressive moral and ethical system with a transformation in the way in which Australia was governed in the nineteenth century. I have already suggested that Hellenism and techniques of government were no strangers to each other, although the meeting of these two apparently discrete departments of existence was, no doubt, an historical contingency. As Peter Miller (1994) has recently argued, one of the characteristics of modern forms of government is less and less its insistence on confrontation, and more and more its concern with the formation of calculative regimes where only the general aims of government are specified. As Miller puts it, the logic is in aligning the actions of 'free' individuals with specific objectives by enclosing them within a particular calculative regime. Miller draws on the Nietzsche of The Genealogy of Morals when he refers to this as a process of responsibilisation- the formation of calculating individuals who are given responsibility for their own conduct. In theorising a mechanism for this process, Miller draws on Callon and Latour's notion of 'interessement, 5 'interessement' is a kind of fidelity technique, involving the persuasion of those (particularly those who are distant) who need to be governed that they have a series of shared interests with their governors. The formation of a loose and approximate alignment organised around controlling central points is a feature of this process. Now in the reconceptualisation of the British Empire as Hellenic rather than Roman in spirit, this move towards a new form of governing as described by Miller, can be seen in operation. The Hellenic model was one in which colonies were expected to self-govern, with their faithfulness guaranteed by the storge, or bond of affection, they felt towards the mother-country. 6 During the first fifty years after settlement, each colony was administered by a cadre of officials. These officials were appointed from England, paid from England, and considered part of the military. In fact, their liability was to military rather than civillaw (McMartin 1959:326). Thereconceptualisation of the Empire which was assisted by the impact of Greek thought can be seen in a new approach to governing at a distance. First of all, the setting up of a dedicated department to deal with the colonies allowed for the possibility of this new type of governing. The policy of control from the centre would not have been possible without the creation of an effective central Department of State devoted to the administration of colonial affairs. This new Department was formally in existence in 1801, when Hobart assumed office as Secretary of State for War and the Colonies. It was not, however, until1812 that effective administration began. Earl Bathhurst, who was Secretary of
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State from 1812 until1827 and Henry Goulbourn, who was his Deputy from 1812 until1821, did most of the work of constructing an effective administrative department. They built 'a central machinery which could furnish information for the ministry and parliament on colonial affairs', as Helen Taft Manning put it (cited in McMartin 1959:329; see also Morrell1966). During Bathurst's fifteen years in charge, many ordered routines and procedures were established in the colonial office. However, while Bathurst, his assistants and successors concentrated on producing an administrative superstructure and in outlining the general aims of the government of the Australian colonies, it is noticeable that government on the spot in Australia was conducted in a rather loose manner. It was quickly realised that most administration needed to be conducted by making use of local talent, and colonial civil service regulations made it a condition that the governors keep an eye out for local talent to be used in administration. For example, this line from the 1843 edition of the regulations makes it clear that 'great weight must always be attached to local services and experience. Every Governor will therefore make once in each year a confidential report of the claims of candidates, whether already employed in the public service or not, whom he may consider to possess that qualification' (Rules for Colonial Service 1843:19). The Governor was responsible for the appointment of magistrates, who were the main means of administering the colonies. These were often local men, and their responsibilities tended to be defined by a geographical area rather than attaching to specific functions. Magistrates needed to be very flexible administrators, and this flexibility in this role was continued when many of their responsibilities were transferred to the newly reformed police force in 1862. In remote areas the police were often the sole salaried officials. They enforced school attendance, checked the cleanliness of dairies, supervised the storage of gunpowder, kept an eye on orphan and neglected children boarded out with private families, gave out rations to Aborigines, newly-arrived migrants and the infirm, and buried paupers. They were also given responsibility for the collection of statistics and electoral lists. They became collectors of information for policy decisions for example, they reported on the habits of Chinese immigrants, local larrikins, and how many insane, infirm and destitute there were (Hirst 1988:252ff). Essentially, the good administration of an area depended to a great extent on the talents of local personnel. As James Stephen, in a remark typical of British administrators, putitinamemofrom 1841: 'Amanofgood sense on the spot is far more likely to judge questions correctly than any number of the ablest men at a distance' (CO 201/308:£.12). Once again, Ogilvie suggests that the use of local talent and the exploitation of existing socialcircumstancesisadevicewhichisgivenclassicalbackinginThucydides, who, as we have already seen, acted as a kind of guide book for new colonial administrators. Government was conducted by ensuring an efficient circuit of information from the periphery to the centre, but the actual minutiae of police and magistrate administration was not over-defined. The supremacy of the centre was established by a variety of tactics, including the setting up of colonial office bureaucracy which acted as a hub for the receipt of information and the issuing of orders (Davidson 1991:ch 4).
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Within Australia, the telegraph was used as a means of setting up Sydney and Melbourne as authoritative centres. The first telegraph link was established from Melbourne to Williamstown in 1854. In New South Wales, the first line went up in 1858, and by 1862 the lines reached to the borders of the colony and every substantial town was connected. J.B. Hirst points out how a new town joined the telegraph network long before its roads were made and decades before railway connection (1988:253). This system enabled rapid communication between police officers, but did not substantially affect the ad hoc nature of their practice. The organisation of authoritative centres and responsive peripheries was much more about creating realms of government within which relay points can pass on administrative power or act as a means of advising and correcting from a distance. Once again, such forms of government are consonant with a replacement of a Roman model of empire with the more subtle model derived from an historically specific reading of Greek practice. To reiterate Miller's point, the formation of realms of administrative power, loosely linked to each other and to centres allows a form of control in which direct supervision is unnecessary. In addition, the gradual transformation of the Australian public service into a rational bureaucracy(see Beaglehole 1967;Curnow 1975; Loveday1959;Parker 1989; Roe 1965) installs an additional element, that of expertise, allowing decisions made at the centres to be seen as neutral and objective. It was believed that Australia could be organised according to this centre-periphery model of government, and in addition, that one day the periphery might extend beyond the continent. There was a grander vision of the formation of a distinctively free and moral empire in which the colonies would carry on the English mission. As 'The Unknown' put it in 1865: Is not this Australia the England of the South? and destined to exercise an influence in the affairs of the world equal, it may be, with that of England itself? With Africa and the English possessions on that continent on the left hand, South America on the right, the Indian Ocean open to the West, and the South pacific with its numerous islands on the East - these highways of the world- and Australia the central point of the whole, the moral counterpart, and, perhaps, counterpoise of England, what horoscopy is requisite to predict its future? (p.4). The cult of Hellenism was one of the ways in which the question of the ethical authority of government could surface. I am not arguing that the revival of this cult and the development of a new modality of government should be seen to have a monocausal relationship with each other. If nothing else, I should be happy to problematise a notion of certain ethical comportments and modalities of government as necessarily independent, a notion which the recent work of Ian Hunter (1991, 1994) has done much to undermine. Nonetheless, the change of emphasis from the Roman to the Greek seems to me to be important in allowing a shift from a militaristic and coercive system to one which stressed the utility of moral emulation. The setting up of a model prison on Norfolk Island from 1839 is a good example of this tendency. The prison was intended to be something of a moral reformatory rather than a punishment block, and needed to be run by someone of the highest moral calibre. As Lord Normanby put it, the
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superintendent'should feel a deep interest in the moral improvement of the convicts' (cited in Kociumbas 1992:174). Alexander Maconochie eventually took over the superintendent's job, and as his extraordinary 1839 guide to prison organisation shows, he took this mission very seriously. As he stated in the preface, 'the object [of the papers in this volume] ... is ... to urge the superiority of moral influence over physical coercion, where intelligent beings are to be controlled or guided' (Maconochie 1839:i). This moral influence, which elsewhere he refers to as 'moral surgery', is primarily achieved by a system of 'training', which Maconochie distinguishes from mere 'instruction': The rule or principle, then, is alone inflexible, and must be common to all Superintendents. They must first punish, then train;- punish, if necessary, by direct physical violence or constraint, because in this stage it is desirable to subdue the prisoners' minds, and fix them, in painful retrospect, on their past guilt; - but train, if possible exclusively by means of Moral Influence, of cheerful animating hope, directed to the future. They must encourage, rather than denounce, or reproach. It is a mistake, much too commonly made, to seek Reform by making Vice painful, instead of making Virtue pleasing and advantageous. This mistake is getting expelled from Schools of Intellect, and it must also quit Schools of Morals (Maconochie 1983:100-1).
Maconochie was optimistic enough about this moral retraining of the convicts to 'anticipate a period, (not distant either, were the experiment energetically made), when every species of direct coercive discipline, without exception, might be discontinued at well regulated Training Stations'. This idea would have almost every good property as a system of management, and not one bad one as regards the prisoners themselves, for it would be in the highest degree morally coercive, yet not physically obligatory at all. Every one would think he enjoyed full freedom of will, - yet every one would be under the almost absolute control of impulses, common to all, yet personal to each, and which could not fail, therefore, of generating an esprit de corps productive of harmonious effect (Maconochie 1839:103-4).
Maconochie's optimism about this moral system and its transformative effects was such that he advocated the removal of external guards: 'I would not myself have a single soldier or professed constable with them - they should themselves enforce the regulations;- nor should I have the slightest fear of hesitation in their being enforced. For why should any hesitate, or rebel? Habita fides fidem obligat (Maconochie 1839:105). Maconochie was clearly developing a set of techniques for ensuring fidelity, in a system which by privileging self-management and training removes the conflict from prison organisation, enclosing the prisoners instead within a calculative regime where they are 'responsibilised'.
Concluding remarks: habita fides fidem obligat It seems appropriate to end with Maconochie's expression in mind. The
government of the nineteenth-century Australian colonies required the mastery of a whole series of technical problems. The technical problem of the
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morale of the colonists, and of their governors and administrators, was a problem to be solved just like any other. One solution lay in the attention to what I term 'fidelity techniques'. Fidelity techniques were used to assure the faithfulness of, at first, the administrators, who were very often not from Britain; and almost immediately thereafter, the population more generally. These fidelity techniques, however, should not be read as some false ideology imposed on an unwilling subject population. The techniques were a way of understanding the business of governing: while they gave a certain cultural self-confidence to the governors and, ultimately, the population, they must also be seen as productive techniques through which the very notion of citizenship could become meaningful. 'Culture' in general was something which could practicably be 'installed' in citizens, and in this way culture and civics could feed into each other. The important point here is that modes of ethical comportment and techniques of government cannot, in this example, be seen as separate departments of existence, but coalesce in a mutually productive relationship. For a very brief period, before an anti-classical reaction killed Hellenism off, a specific reading of the Greeks provided a way of establishing a relationship between governor and governed, and an ethics of colonial life. It is important to remember that this was only one of many possible Hellenisms that could have been and were taken up in Australian history, and that the accuracy of the nineteenth-century vision of Athenian colonisation is, in a sense, irrelevant. The contingent, localised adoption of a certain ethic allowed faithfulness to be recast in a way consonant with liberal problematisations of authority and with the problems entailed by government at a distance. 1 I acknowledge the help given by the following with the ideas in this paper: Alan Collins, Ian Hunter, Stuart Macintyre, Mike Michael, David McCallum, Rob Pascoe, Gordon Tait, Deborah Tyler, Gary Wickham. 2 So, for example, the 1835-7SelectCommitteeonAboriginesinBritishSettlements makes it clear that these populations had rights, including land rights, and needed protection from the colonists. As Morrell (1966:25-6) puts it: 'The mission of the British Empire was not to win commercial prosperity or military renown but to carry peace, good government, civilization, and Christianity to the uttermost ends of the earth'. 3 I am grateful to Rob Pascoe for this point. 4 This section relies heavily on Turner (1981), especially pp.llff. 5 Interessement is perhaps best explained/ exemplified in Calion (1986). 6 One of the interesting things about this technique is that, although it first seems to be tried out on colonial administrators, it is also pressed into service as a way of convincing the population as a whole to want to be faithful, as is clear from the discussion above of Barry. the Green noun storge, loosely meaning 'love/ respect', is frequently used in discussions of the time, and is seen as encapsulating the desired relation between Britain and the colonies. See, for example, Lang (1852:125).
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References Anonymous (1861 ). On Some Features of Colonial Life: a Lecture delivered at Queenscliffe on the 15th February 1861. Melbourne. Arnold, M. (1965). Culture and Anarchy. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Beaglehole, J.C. (1967). 'The Colonial Office 1782-1854', in M. Beever and F.B. Smith (eds) Historical Studies: Selected Articles. 2nd Series. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Blainey, G. (1966). The Tyranny of Distance: How Distance Shaped Australia's History. Melbourne: Macmillan. Buller, C. (1840). Responsible Government for Colonies. London (published anonymously). Calion, M. (1986 ). 'Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St Brieuc Bay', in J. Law (ed.) Power, Action and Belief A New Sociology of Knowledge? London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Curnow, G.R. (1975). 'Professionals in Bureaucracies', in R.N. Spann and G.R. Curnow (eds) Public Policy and Administration in Australia: A Reader. Sydney. Davidson, A. (1991). The Invisible State: The Formation ofthe Australian State 1788-1901. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. De Serville, P. (1980). Port Phillip Gentlemen and Good Society in Melbourne before the Gold Rushes. Melbourne: Oxford. __ _, (1991). Pounds and Pedigrees: The Upper Class in Victoria 1850-80. Melbourne: Oxford. Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish: The Birth ofthe Prison. London: Allen Lane. __ _, (1978). The History of Sexuality Volume I: An Introduction. New York: Pantheon. __ _, (1982). 'The Subject and power', in H.L. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Brighton: Harvester. __ _, (1985). The History of Sexuality Volume II: The Use of Pleasure. New York: Pantheon. __ _, (1986). The History of Sexuality Volume III: The Care of the Self New York: Pantheon. __ _, (1991). 'Governmentality', in G. Burchell, C. Gordon and P. Miller (eds) The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. Brighton: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Great Britain and Ireland - Colonial Office (1843). Rules and Regulations for Her Majesty's Colonial Service. London: H.M.S.O. Grote, G. (1869). A History of Greece. London: John Murray (12 volumes 1846-56). Hirst, J.B. (1988). The Strange Birth ofColonial Democracy: New South Wales 1848-1884. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Hunter,!. (1991). 'Personality as a Vocation: the Political Rationality of the Humanities', in I. Hunter, D. Meredyth, B. Smith and G. Stokes, Accounting for the Humanities: the language ofCulture and the Logic ofGovernment. Brisbane: Institute for Cultural Policy Studies. __ _, (1994). Rethinking the School: Subjectivity, Bureaucracy, Criticism. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Jenkyns, R. (1980). The Victorians and Ancient Greece. Oxford: Blackwell. Knox, B. (1992). 'Democracy, Aristocracy and Empire: The Provision of Colonial Honours, 1818-1870'. Australian Historical Studies, 99, pp.244-64.
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Kociumbas, J. (1992). A History of Australia. Oxford: Clarendon. Lang, J.D. (1852). Freedom and Independence for the Golden Lands ofAustralia. London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans. __ _, (1854). An Anatomical Lecture on the New Constitution. Sydney: Cunninghame. Latour, B. (1986 ). 'The Powers of Association', in J. Law (ed.) Power, Beliefand Action. London: Routledge. __ _, (1990). 'Drawing Things Together' InM. Lynch and S. Woolgar (eds) Representation in Scientific Practice. London: MIT Press. Loveday,P. (1959). 'Patronage andPoliticsinNSW,1856-1870'. Public Administration (Sydney) 18(4):341-58. McCombie, T. (1850). Essays on Colonization. London: Smith, Elder, and Co. Macintyre, S. (1991). A Colonial Liberalism: The Lost World ofThree Victorian Visionaries. Melbourne: Oxford. McMartin, A. (1959). 'Aspects of Patronage in Australia 1786-1836'. Public Administration (Sydney) 18(4):326-40. Maconochie, Capt. A. (1839). Australiana: Thoughts on Convict Management and Other Subjects Connected with the Australian Penal Colonies. London: John W. Parker. Merivale, H. (1861). Lectures on Colonization and Colonies. London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts. Miller, P. (1994). Unpublished MS, History of the Present, London. Miller, P. and Rose, N. (1990). 'Governing Economic Life'. Economy and Society 19(1):1-31. Morrell, W. P. (1966). British Colonial Policy in the Age ofPeel and Russell. London: Cass. (1st edn 1930 Oxford). Ogilvie, R.M. (1964). Latin and Greek: a History of the Influence of the Classics on English Life from 1600 to 1918. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Parker, R.S. (1989). 'The Quest for Administrative Leadership'. Political Science 41(2):18-29. Roe, M. (1965). Quest for Authority in Eastern Australia 1835-1851. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Rose, N. and Miller, P. (1992). 'Political Power Beyond the State: Problematics of Government'. British Journal of Sociology 43(2):173-205. Stephens, W. (1895). The Life and Letters of Edward A. Freeman. London. Turner, F.M. (1981). The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Prospects and Considerations of a Future for the Australian Colonies: a Pamphlet. Hobart: J. Walch and Sons. Wakefield, E. G. (1849). A View of the Art of Colonization. London. (ed. J. Collier, Oxford, 1914).
Foucault, Ideology and the Social Contract in Australian History
This paper is divided into four sections. The first examines Foucault's remarks about ideology, and what I consider to be their limitations. The second section discusses the value of ideology as a theoretical tool, and draws on theworkofSlavoj Zizek. The third section explores possible points of connection between Foucault's project and the construction of ideology informing Zizek's understanding of ideology. The final section relates this connection between Foucault and ideology to a particular historical context, the convict colony through which European occupation of Australia was established. Foucault's reservations about the value of ideology as a theoretical tool are well known. He was at pains to distinguish his project from studies which focused upon systems of meaning, signification and consciousness. As a thorough going materialist, Foucault was interested in struggles rather than a system of language, in relations of power rather than relations of meaning. From the many passages in which Foucault expressed his distance from studies of ideology, I choose one as an example: The philosophy of the 'Ideologists', as a theory of ideas, signs and the individual genesis of sensations, but also a theory of the social composition of interests- Ideology being a doctrine of apprenticeship, but also a doctrine of contracts and the regulated formation of the social body - no doubt contributed the abstract discourse which sought to coordinate these two techniques of power (that is, disciplinary and bio-power) in order to construct a general theory of it. In point of fact, however, they were not to be joined at the level of a speculative discourse, but in the forms of concrete arrangements that would go to make up the great technology of power in the nineteenth century (Foucault 1978:140).
Accordingly, when Foucault wrote of liberalism, he constructed it in terms of practices rather than ideology: that is, in terms of the various arts and techniques of government, involving both a reflection upon and critique of government and also a rationalisation of its activities, rather than an articulated political project. There are certain limitations attendant on Foucault's dismissal of ideology. In this context, it should be emphasised that the status of Foucault as a contemporary thinker requires qualification. He died ten years ago and his critiques of ideological studies were outlined in the 1970s, when the shadow of Althusserian Marxism loomed large over the theoretical battleground. Thanks in no small measure to Foucault's examination of the connections between power and knowledge, the sort of Althusserian structuralist model of false consciousness, predicated upon a distinction between real and imaginary relations to material conditions, no longer seems intellectually
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tenable. Accordingly, it might be argued that one of the legacies of Foucault is to consider, in the light of recent theoretical work, to what extent Foucauldian thought might be reconciled with studies of ideology. The first point to consider here is why such a rapprochement might even be attempted. Is not a range of genealogical investigation of various discursive and non-discursive practices enough? In response, it is worthwhile considering some of the debates surrounding the governmental practice of liberalism. So-called 'liberal' thinkers such as Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham were less interested in what are conventionally regarded as the fundamental principles of liberalism - freedom of choice, open market, a spirit of competition and small government- than with how good government might be achieved. The ostensible paradox of private enterprise is that it requires an extensive state apparatus. It is worth remembering in the early Victorian period in Britain - an era marked by the rise to political influence of the classical utilitarians- a mass of legislation was enacted, covering for example the regulation of mines and factories, poor relief, education and public health (Eccleshall et al. 1984:55). These initiatives were a manifestation of the state's role as a constituent agent in the construction of morally upright citizens commensurate with the interests of liberal, bourgeois, propertied values. One of the characteristics of liberalism (and a central factor in its global influence) is that it is a form of government that occurs when one appears not to govern. 1 (A kind of Clayton's principle of government). What liberalism establishes is a narrative from government by the state to government by the self, so that individuals, in a sense, enact the ideology in their modes of being. Thus, the very success of liberalism as a practice of government throughout modern Western society is in part related to the disjunction between its articulated principles and actual operation. While this disjunction might be read as a contradiction (even a dialectic), perhaps a more theoretically enabling response would be to regard it as a creative tension. Foucauldian analysis on its own is inadequate in terms of exploring this tension. But Foucauldian analysis complemented by studies of symbolic and political capital and ideology is in a better theoretical position to wrestle with the complexities of this disjunction between practice and articulation. We can begin this complementary study with an insight from Foucault himself. In the first volume of The History of Sexuality, he suggests that one of the reasons why the juridical notion of power has been so readily accepted is because power is tolerable only on condition that it masks a substantial part of itself. Its success is proportional to its ability to hide its own mechanisms (1978:86). The tension between liberalism's articulated principles and its actual concern with governmental practices might be read as an example of how the concealment of mechanisms of power which Foucault refers to is secured. There is a political dimension to the argument I have been pursuing. This involves a contention that 'meaning' emerges from the retroactive act of naming, and provides opportunities for the performance and construction of alternative meanings. That is to say, that in a society which pronounces itself to be liberal and democratic, and which articulates the values of
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freedom and equality as principles of its governance, there would tend to exist more of an opportunity for marginalised groups to appropriate these signifiers in defence of their own cultural identity than there would in societies without such principles.2 This is not to provide a naive defence of liberal humanism, but to suggest that as part of the process of reflecting on ourselves as subjects constituted from certain practices of discipline and government, we should engage with the effects of symbolic capital and the opportunities these provide for creative resistance. An historical ontology of ourselves ought not to stop at an analysis of the material conditions of the emergence of certain relations of power and modes of being, but ought to take account of the various articulations and signifying practices which accompany these forces. In bringing the Foucauldian notion of a historical ontology into line with studies of signification and ideology, a few points might be stressed: 1. Signification is not a simple effect of the operations of a system of language, but always the site of a struggle. 2. The distinction Foucault makes in the early 1970s between an interest in relations of power and relations of meaning is not tenable, because the performance of meaning, quite as much as of knowledge, is imbued with operations of power. 3. In light of Foucault's studies and other recent theoretical work, a study of ideology should no longer focus primarily on the struggle between competing systems of thought, such as Marxism and Liberalism, CatholicismandProtestantism,nationalismandindividualism.Rather,itis useful to understand ideologies as overlapping and interacting performances of meaning. Accordingly, the primary focus of study should be shifted to the struggles and tensions between the interactions of ideologies and their constitutive (and effaced) others, variously conceived as bodily forces, the Real, heterogeneity, difference and life. This position might be clarified with reference to the positions of Zizek and Foucault. Zizek regards everyday life as an ideological fantasy space marking a rupture between our subjectivity and the real of our desire. The formation of the symbolic order suspends reality, and yet at the time contains the violent drives of the real in every symbolic form. The real, then, is a kind of absent presence haunting the symbolic order through which we make sense of our lives. From a Foucauldian perspective, the other is the heterogeneous materiality of bodily forces which various discursive and non-discursive practices mark out as an inscribed surface of events to form a mode of being recognisable as tempered subjectivity. For both Foucault and Zizek, the Other exists within the production of subjectivity and forever threatens to disrupt this process. As Foucault stressed, there can be no power without resistance. I want to substantiate this argument with reference to the context of Australian history and the ideology of the social contract. This social contract, articulated in the thought of various Enlightenment philosophers, had various ideological dimensions: Tory paternalism, Protestantism, liberalism, utilitarianism, and a faith in the rule of law. Historians who have studied the first European settlement in Australia- the convict colony- have
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emphasised the social contract as an integral principle (especially Hirst 1983 and Neal1991). Convicts were aware of their status as subjects with certain fundamental rights, some of which had been temporarily ceded by their conviction, but which might be recovered. Institutions such as the press and the courts were sites in which political disputes were fought out, in which emancipated convicts were successful in defending their rights against the 'Exclusives', that class of free settlers and military officers who sought to concentrate all political authority within its ranks. There was also a concern with ameliorating the capricious effects of certain arrangements. Most convicts transported to New South Wales were assigned to private masters or to government service. Some masters were benevolent, others were brutal. In response to the deleterious effects of such an arrangement, Governor Macquarie (1810-1822) arranged to have most convicts assigned to government service, engaged in an impressive programme of public works such as to lend the colony a sense of ordered and permanent settlement. Macquarie also arranged for an increase in the exploration of new territories with a view to extending the settlement. Thus stated, the narrative of Australian settlement reads like a fine example of social progress; the move to produce order and permanence of settlement and the utilising of work relations and legal institutions to ameliorate the tendencies towards capriciousness and disorder. Indeed, it seems to establish a narrative of Australian settlement as the transition from the abnormal to the normal. Having been established as a convict colony marked by arbitrary and brutal acts of punishment characteristic of a less enlightened age, and having concentrated extreme authority in the person of the governor, under Macquarie (who tends to be lauded by historians from all political persuasions) the settlement was introducing order, justice, a recognition of the rights of emancipated convicts, and the precursors of civilised living: schools, buildings, roads and so forth. And, particularly after Macquarie's departure, recidivist and' dangerous' convicts were being removed to penal colonies on the outer rim of the expanding settlement. The practice of government and the interaction of various ideological values Protestantism, paternalism, Enlightenment reason, the rule of law- had ostensibly set the colony of the path towards freedom. Indeed historianJohn Hirst (1983) felt bound to conclude that New South Wales was a society that did not really have to become free, because freedoms were well established from its very beginnings. It is in order to interrogate the basis of such 'freedom' that we might draw upon Foucault and thinkers employing concepts of ideology, notably Zizek. This is to suggest that the social contractual relations ostensibly underlying the social progress of the colony- the notion that in expiating their crimes through work and orderly behaviour the convicts might 're-enter' society as subjects with certain codified rights - operates to efface the originary act of violence upon which the society was established. That is to say, a social contract is imposed retroactively upon a historically contingent act in which a diverse array of people(s) are co-opted into a community, a process which is codified in systems of law and social organisation.
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This process can be substantiated with reference to the debate emerging from the High Court's Mabo decision in 1992, and the Native Title legislation enacted last year. While the legislation emerging from Mabo is conceived, from some quarters at least, as correcting the fundamental injustice enshrined in the concept of terra nullius, and as providing the grounds for reconciliation between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians, this position overlooks the fact that there was no conciliation between these peoples to begin with, and that the European settlement of Australia involved acts of invasion and dispossession as well as incarceration. One of the significant features of the High Court decision and the Native Title legislation emerging from it is that they are based upon the assumption that the Australian territory was colonised and not invaded by European settlers in the eighteenth century. This is because the principle of colonisation provides grounds for the extension of English common law as a mechanism regulating legal relations in the new colony. As Henry Reynolds writes: Once sovereignty was claimed over the various parts of Australia the indigenous people became British subjects protected by the law in the same way as the immigrant English. Immediately on acquisition, Gustice) Toohey explained, 'indigenous inhabitants became British subjects whose interests were to be protected in the case of a settled colony by the immediate operation of the common law' (Eddie Mabo and Others vs. The State of Queensland, High Court of Australia p.179 cited in Reynolds 1992:188).
When commentators and historians describe terra nullius as a legal fiction, they forget that the term 'legal fiction' is a tautology. Such forgetting has the effect of constructing terra nullius as an anomaly within the majesty of the law which the High Court decision corrects, providing the basis for a narrative of national reconciliation. Far from being anomalous, terra nullius played a constitutive role in Australian history, providing a legitimate basis for the violent appropriation of territory which, through cultivation, exploitation and alteration, supplied the economic base for the settlement. It was the Aboriginal peoples' perceived failure to 'mark' their territory (actually the white settlers' inability to 'read' and recognise their marks of settlement) which informed the rationale for terra nullius. Enlightenment thinkers from Locke on maintained that where evidence of cultivation and occupancy of territory was not evident the right of external powers to claim ownership of this territory was justified. Here is eloquent substantiation of de Certeau's point that entry into the 'scriptural economy' in which modern Western society is written and legitimated is contingent upon three factors: the colonisation of space into a place of one's own; the production of a system of objects by a dominant subject; and the transformation of a 'natural' world (de Certeau 1984: 134-6). The settlement of Australia could only proceed on the basis of writing out the original inhabitants, so that they were accorded a precarious status as existing both inside and outside the community. Conversely, the reformation of the convicts involved writing them in as subjects of law involved in the appropriation and transformation of territory (the territory of both their own bodies and that of the land in which they were inscribed).3
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Indeed, the originary acts of violence establishing the Australian community supports Zizek's case that At the beginning' of the law, there is a certain 'outlaw', a certain real of violence which coincides with the act itself of the establishment of the reign of law: the ultimate truth about the reign of law is that of an usurpation, and all classical politico-philosophical thought rests on the disavowal of this violent act of foundation. The illegitimate violence by which law sustains itself must be concealed at any price, because this concealment is the positive condition for the functioning of law: it functions insofar as its subjects are deceived, insofar as they experience the authority of the law as' authentic and eternal' and overlook 'the truth about the usurpation (Zizek 1991:204). Zizek's argument bears comparison with that which Foucault made in 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, History': 'Humanity does not gradually pass from combat to combat until it arrives at universal reciprocity, where the rule of law finally replaces warfare; humanity installs each of its violences in a system of rules and thus proceeds from domination to domination' (Foucault 1971:85). If we accept, following Foucault, that technologies of power constitute the
fields in which power is exercised (disciplines, forms of knowledge, and other discursive and non-discursive practices), and, at the same time, enable the space from which voices who temporarily function as social subjects can speak as' authors', we begin to understand the sense of crisis underlying and constitutive of Australian historiography. For this field is charged with negotiating, by effacing, the fundamental act of violence upon which it, and the society of which it is a part, functions. We might also recognise that the sorts of violent acts (marking the body, terror) which comprised the penal technology of the ancient regime discussed in the opening section of Discipline and Punish, disappears into the act of writing the culture of modern society (the scriptural economy) to reappear in the form of scandalous excess and atrocities setting out the parameters or limits for the normative policing of society. From this perspective, terra nullius is viewed as a scandal which has been identified and corrected, such that the ideological fantasy of Australia as a just and humane society is maintained. This paper has sought to demonstrate the efficacy of exploring points of connections between Foucault's project and theorists employing notions of ideology, within particular historical contexts. One legacy of Foucault's thought is to challenge fixed dichotomies such as idealist/materialist, mind/body, order I violence. From this perspective, the challenge to studies of ideology is less to render them obsolete than to recast them from a focus on the supposed struggle between various world views, to a consideration of the mechanisms and practices informing the constitutive relationship between ideological values and their others. 1 My discussion on liberalism draws upon ideas put forward in David Burchell's paper, 'Liberalism and Government: Political Philosophy and the Liberal Art of Rule' (included in this collection), and the discussion which ensued.
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I am indebted to the ideas of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's book,
Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, London: Verso, 1985, in framing these views. 3
Although, in the context of this paper, Aborigines and convicts are treated as abstract entities, this is not to disregard the gender, class, race and other politics informing the process of reformation they experience as subjects of law.
Bibliography De Certeau, M. (1984). The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley, trans. S. Rendall, California: University of California Press. Eccleshall, R., Geoghegan. V., Jay, R. and Wilford, R. (1984). Political Ideologies: An Introduction, London: Hutchinson. Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. A. Sheridan, London: Allen Lane. __ _, (1978). The History of Sexuality: Volume 1 An Introduction, trans. R. Hurley, London: Penguin. __ _, (1984). 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, History', in P. Rabinow (ed.) The Foucault Reader, London: Penguin. Hirst, J. (1983). Convict Society and Its Enemies, Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Laclau, E. and Mouffe, C. (1985). Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, London: Verso. Neal, D. (1991). The Rule of Law in the Penal Colony: Law and Power in Early New South Wales, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reynolds, H. (1992). The Law of the Land (2nd Edition), Ringwood: Penguin. Schirato, T. (1993). 'Mabo and the Politics of Community', The Voices of a Margin: Speakingfor Yourselfconference, Central Queensland University, Rockhampton, December9. Zizek, S. (1991). For They Know Not What They Do, London: Verso.
Part Three Art, Architecture and Cities
Art, Politics and the History of Change
In this explorative essay I develop some diagnostical ideas designed so as to
give, once more, new content to the idea of an end of history and a turn to postmodernity. I argue that modern times are characterised by the rise and deployment of a discourse of change in history. This discourse, and ensuing discursive practices, are formative in the development of modern art and politics. I also arguethatcurrently,inartas well as in politics, we can witness a dedramatisation of the discourse of change. The dedramatisation, I somewhat paradoxically suggest, is linked to a sense of acceleration of the speed of change in history. Consequences for and programmatic options in contemporary arts and politics are highlighted. In addition, this essay suggests a perspective from which some definite content might be given to the insistent but notoriously vague idea that it is meaningful to distinguish between 'early', 'high' and 'post-' or 'late' modernity. But I will first approach my topic via a detour:
Philosophy and the modem era of change One aspect of the shift from the culture of medieval Christianity to the culture of modernity lies within philosophy. One could date the shift to the mid-eighteenth century and Rousseau's early discourses. Since then philosophy has shown an incessant interest in the changing, the contemporary, the momentary; things brushed aside quite confidently, and contemptuously, from the area of philosophical investigation by Plato and Aristotle and their medieval heirs.l With this new focus on change, philosophy was not heralding modernity, but only coping with it: the important novum in philosophy was not a new sense that philosophy is changing in its subject matter or method, although this may have been the case. More novel and important was the idea that philosophy could, and even ought to reflect on the new and changing issues of contemporary times. It is a crucial key to any descriptionofwhatispeculiartothemature,modernera,thatitwasthefirst era to define itself as the new age.2Itis trivial to say that this new epochal selfunderstanding emerged against the background of dramatic historical changes. But it is not trivial that those who understood modern times as the new age always thought of this age as being inescapably heading for further change. Philosophy, therefore, when it attempts, as I do here, reflections towards a' diagnosis of its times', is modern in two senses. Its subject matter is modern: only a culture which understands itself as constantly in flux needs to diagnose itself constantly. And its self-understanding is also modern: a philosophy which gives up its exclusive concern3 with the unchanging, becomes a discipline which accepts change as part of its selfdescription. Given this background, it is rather surprising how little attention the question of how historical change enters into the philosophical quest for
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eternal truth has attracted. Changes in the subject matter and methods of philosophy have been prominent and much discussed (the 'linguistic turn' discussion), but they have been interpreted as learning processes internal to philosophy. The question as to what extent the conception of philosophy itself is undergoing change through the new philosophical interest in diagnostical issues- in what Foucault called'an ontology of the present'- has rarely been raised. 4 I suspect that this reflects ideas about what is 'internal' and what 'external' to philosophy which might be worth further scrutiny. If one looks at art and politics the situation is different. Here we have two areas of culture which in their self-understanding have very definitely been affected by the early modern experience of changing historicat existential and cultural conditions. They also share the characteristic that changes in the way people have thought that art and politics should relate to historical change are an important part of the modern career of these notions. It is my claim that is illuminating to look at art and politics from this perspective. I also suggest that there are striking parallels in how art and politics have dealt with and been changed by change. In the 'discursive practice' organised around change in both modern art and politics we can identify three distinct phases. These we can call the early modern, the mature or high modern, and the contemporary, late or postmodern phase. This may appear trivial. But the fact that we can identify parallel developments and points of rupture in the history of modern art and politics when we look at how their respective discursive practices are formed by change provides a new rationale for this periodisation of modernity.
Change in early modernity - the time of choice From the Renaissance up to the late eighteenth century it seems that contemporary art largely defined itself through its relation to the works and ideals of antique art and art theory. This relation had become controversial and the controversy was regarded as important for the self-image of art and the self-understanding of the age. 5 The key issue then was whether contemporary art should model itself on the aesthetic ideals and norms defined in antiquity or define its own means of valorisation. The debate led to questions about the timelessness of art and its search for eternal beauty. In defining themselves and their tasks in relation to antiquity the artists of early modernity were asking whether change in cultural conditions requires change in the aspirations of the arts and the artists. Change had become an issue, finding its way close to the centre of the works of art and the understanding of art. Something similar happened in politics during roughly the same period. The question of the relation between ethics and politics, and the individual and society, together with the ideas of the social contract and progress occupied some of the most fertile minds of the period. Simultaneously popular social movements and revolutions started modelling European history. Practice produced change and theory tried to understand how people should rationally come to terms with it. In politics, as well as in art, the sixteenth, seventeenth and most of the eighteenth century remained thrilled by the novelty of change although stability and returning to the old order still seem to be real options for the
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European church and secular authorities. A rule of the mightiest (Machiavelli, Luther) or a social contract (Hobbes) which could guarantee unchanging authority and a once-and-for-all social order still figured as real possibilities in praxis-oriented social theory. The dream of permanence was challenged of course by believers in progress but even such a quintessentially modern thinker as Rousseau still contemplated the possibility of an escape from social change to the harmony of social life existing before private property and division of labour produced a demand for complex, and vulnerable, political organisation. 6 So, change was a key issue for early modern political thinkers but other options still seemed to lie open. By the latter half of the eighteenth century this was no longer the case. In the discourse produced by those such as artists, art critics, political activists, philosophers and intellectuals, who regard themselves as the interpreters and spokespersons of their times, change had become an inescapable horizon.
Change in high modemity:change as a dramatic experience With the experience of the British and French revolutions, American independence and the division of the Church in Europe, with the rise of the capitalist economy, with colonialism in a period of rapid expansion, and the rise of the bourgeoisie, change was no longer something that could be regarded as an anomaly that should be left behind. The experience of change as an inescapable, new and dramatic cultural, social, economic and political horizon lies at the heart of modern politics. The core issue of politics, from the French revolution up to the late twentieth century, has been how to deal with change, not how to escape it: social movements have fought for their kind of change; political theories, programs and parties have tried to define their version of its direction, how to master it and its goals. It has been a period of political drama in at least three ways. Firstly, politics became an issue for large sections of the population. Universal suffrage brought the task of engaging in politics before all citizens, first in the sphere of ideas, but later also in practice, at least in all countries following the Western liberal democratic model, and in countries with significant leftist revolutionary movements. So in the societies of the mature modern age everyone has had to concern themselves with politics. Secondly, the concern for politics has been loaded with hopes and fears of a most dramatic nature: the well-being of all people has been seen as intimately connected with the political direction members of each society choose. Political movements have promised progress, and the fulfilment of utopian promises. In this restricted sense it may be quite correct to call the modern age the age of progress. 7 But it should be noted that very few philosophers or political movements have regarded progress as something easy to achieve. Socialists, liberals, fascists and conservatives of all varieties have promised a better world but only if people through their action and active organisation were able to cope wisely with the challenge of change. So, in this period, which could be called modernity proper, mature or high modernity, progress has certainly been the key political issue. The third decisive way in which change defines the modern discourse on politics is through the characteristically modern sense of crisis. Change
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happens all the time. In the era of change each new moment provides possibilities which are new and bewildering. Change gives those of the modern age all the immense satisfaction and inspiration of historicised (ie. this-worldly) and secularised (ie. human-made) utopias. The flipside of this coin is that change that comes fast also brings questions and problems which are always new and which therefore constantly call for innovation and challenge the utopian dreams. This is the sense of crisis which accompanies modern politics. Time has become a scarce resource; only through right action at the right time can we see the resolution of problems which always lurk behind the scenes and threaten the realisation of the utopian potential of modern times. Modern art, or art in the period of mature modernity, is also deeply embedded in change. In this area of culture, as well as in politics, one way of looking at things is to say that artistic creativity and the discussion about its goals and criteria of success, are areas in which the modern age makes efforts to come to terms with the experience of change. It can easily be seen, if one looks at the discussion about art in romanticism, in the work of such writers as Baudelaire or Walter Benjamin, or in most of the aesthetic discourse of our century, that the experience of change in life-conditions, society, artistic goals and so on is seen as a dramatic event, and as a crisis, in the sense that the experience of change poses challenges to the old ideals and aspirations of art. I would like to point out four different ways in which the dramatic experience of change has been dealt with and has organised the discourse on art, its goals and tasks. There is, however, one important difference between my interpretation of the relation between change and modern politics on the one hand, and change and modern art on the other. Whereas the roles played by change in shaping modern politics can co-exist and build on each other, the ways of dealing with change in art, which I want to present, are typically mutually exclusive alternatives. First, there is the reaction to change expressed in the works of art and the aesthetic programs of German romanticism. 8 The mature modern era, which dawned in Europe with the Enlightenment, changed social and existential conditions bringing individuality and liberty, or at least the promise of these goods, at the expense of community and a sense of purpose. 9 For the German romantics and for Hegel this experience was an experience of crisis. The reaction by the romantics to this crisis can clearly be seen as an effort to cope with it. Art is not only an area where the moderns express their experience of living in a time of change. In the key programmatic statements of this time, art resembles politics in one important respect. It takes on the burden of giving people the means to come to terms with, or even solve, the problems that change brings along. Schiller's letters on aesthetic education are of this kind, and such is also the fragment towards a Systemprogramm which the young Hegel and his friends at Frankfurt produce in 1796/97.1° This kind of aesthetic program of course overlooks any specificity in the domains of social, economic and political life. Therefore they also overlook the need for any mediation between aesthetic experience, education and political and social organisation.
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This naivete remains a feature of what during the past hundred years has been the most visible and dramatic meeting-point between art and change (and also a major meeting point of art and politics), namely the avant-garde. The history of modern art is unthinkable without the avant-garde. And the idea of the avant-garde is that in the innovative works of art change is not only coped with, but actually created. In the premonitional gesture of the great artist the future is anticipated, embarked upon and, thereby, mastered.11 So, what in romanticism started as a problem that had to be dealt with - the fact of new social, cultural and existential conditions and the experience of confronting an ongoing challenge of change - in the avantgarde became reinterpreted as the specific space in which art can grow into heroic significance: the artist leaps into the unknown future, thereby sieging it instead of submitting to it. Change which produced a sense of crisis becomes, in the avant-garde interpretation of the role of the artist, an arena of fulfilment. The avant-garde movements which flourished in most parts of Europe especially in the early twentieth century, give ample evidence of this kind of exhilarating meeting between the experience of change and crisis on the one hand, and the creative power of art on the other. The third way modern art has dealt with the experience of change was given paradigmatic expression in the 1850s by Charles Baudelaire. As Baudelaire saw it, modern art was to be the meeting point of the changing, and therefore contingent with the eternal. 12 Ever since, the task thus assigned to modern art by Baudelaire has been one of its defining possibilities. Baudelaire's program, and more particularly, the significance others have attributed to his program, must be seen against the background of what is arguably the most unique feature of modern culture, namely the loss of metaphysical certainties. If 'God is dead', the memory of the experience of transcendent sources of meaning is still alive and many have searched for new semantic resources which, under the pressure of change, could make life meaningful. This challenge can, as so many artists and art critics have thought with Baudelaire, be taken on by modern art. Modern art, in Baudelaire's definition, is assigned the task and the power of overcoming one aspect of the modern crisis, namely the crisis of the loss of a given sense of a purpose in life. This third 'high modern' conception of the place of art in culture, with the first (romantic) conception shares the view that art can play a heroic role. Where religion and tradition leave people at a loss, art takes on the function of providing meaning. But Baudelaire's position differs from the romantic position in the sense that, for him, the function of art is not educative and not social- the work of art can meet with individual experience and open this up to communion with something eternal, but it is not within its power to unite people. Compared with the second avant-garde position, the baudelairian stress on the creative possibilities opened by change is a common feature. But the baudelairiannotion does not promise command over time- Baudelaire does not assign himself the task of conquering the future; he only deals with that, which opens up and fades away in each strange and unique moment. There remains one more relation between the modern experience of change and modern art for me to explore. This is also arguably the most
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important one. The concern with the individual, self-determination and realisation of self is one of the singular feature of modem culture. For the modems it is not clear where man can go to find meaning. It is also not clear where s/he can find the semantic resources to speak about her search. But one way of looking at modem art is to look upon it as the dimension of culture in which the modems' search for their individuality and for meaning gets articulated and embodied. 13 When seen from this angle, art becomes an arena where change and the different possibilities and threats opened up by changing conditions are explored. I would contend that the bulk of modem art lives in this mode. It differs from the three previously mentioned areas in being less heroic: art, in this view, is not an area in which meaning once lost is regained. Neither is art an arena of resurrection, creation of purpose or domination over time. But even according to this less ambitious interpretation the modernity of art is defined essentially in terms of the concept of change and crisis. Only where changing life-conditions confront men with new ethical, social, cultural and existential conditions can the artistic 'staging' of experiments with various possibilities of meeting these conditions become an irreplaceable resource for us in our search for an identity. Let me conclude, therefore, that modem art, as well as modem politics in all its varieties, is partly defined by its relation to the experience of change in the human condition. I also want to assert that the essential role played by the experience of change in shaping modem politics and art shows that the experience of change lies at the heart of the modem experience and gives mature modem times much of its probably unique sense of crisis and drama. 14 Iwillnowtakealeapforwardandexplorewhatlthinkisanewway of looking at cotemporary art and politics through the concept of change.
Change in late modernity - the end of history, or de-dramatising change In many areas of art the first decades after the Second world War were
strangely unproductive. - The promise that the artist would cope with or master change started looking quite obsolete- for what did art produce that was really new in this period?- Postmodem art is the ambiguous answer. I will propose a distinction, which I believe is new and important, between two concepts of the postmodem in relation to art. On one reading, postmodem art gives expression to, or articulates, the new experience of life, culture and society under postmodem conditions. Taken this way, postmodem art is a direct continuation of what I characterised as the fourth and perhaps dominant way in which art has related to the modem experience of change. Postmodern art continues, in postmodem times, the modem task of interpreting the new and changing conditions under which people live. I would suggest that, all works of art which during the past decades have occupied themselves with the experience ofloss of self are good candidates for the title 'postmodem art' in this sense.lS A second sense in which art could be called postmodem turns on a change in the role played by the discourse of change in art. If one looks at postmodernism as a style in architecture, literature or dance for instance, two features serve as its defining features. One is the rejection of the
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ambitious distinction between high and low presupposed in the bulk of modern art and the discussion about it. Postmodern art often protests against the call for being heroic and exclusive and turns towards the ordinary. The other defining feature of postmodern art, in this second sense of the term, is its careless attitude towards time. Time in postmodernism is not a scarce resource; the past is not outdated and the future is not important to strive for. Change is of course still acknowledged as a fact, butpostmodern art strangely distances itself from it. It does not try to cope with change. It does not try to master it, overcome it or even interpret it. It interprets and plays with anything -be it old, new or timeless. This, to my mind is the great, emancipatory achievementofpostmodernism in art. Change, which was seen as the bearer of threats and problems, is dedramatised and this way people can, at the important level of individual experience, reach a new sense of reconciliation between themselves and history. This achievement must be seen against the back-ground of the sense of an intensification, or acceleration of change, which has been a key experience of the period which has seen the rise of the debate over postmodernity. The environmental crisis and the threat of nuclear holocaust have been the most obvious new phenomena in bringing about this new sense of speed, and, simultaneously, of danger. The idea, finding expression in (some) postmodern art, that change, which has threatened to over power our minds and our political steering-capacity in the most definitive way, can be dealt with carelessly at the level of existential and cultural reactions, is, I repeat, a novel and constructive one. The parallel reaction in politics however at least to me seems to be a most dangerous phenomenon. Speaking about Western Europe, as I do here, one can indeed regard the abandonment of the utopian ambitions of politics as one of the main tendencies over the last ten years. 16 I would, however, wish to push this important diagnostical thesis still further and say that in politics one can discern a tendency to break not only with the utopian horizon, but with any ambition to cope with change. Politicians, economists and the public at large seem rather eager to hand over the tasks of politics to the autonomous, anonymous steering mechanisms of the market and the 'ironcage' of goal-rational bureaucracies, both of which are supposed to bring about co-ordination of social action, but neither of which needs to be linked to ethical and political discussions among citizens. This is the point of the Western European integration, and this is also the point of the key documents (the so called Agenda 21) setting the tone for another widely publicised political event in these times, the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development.17 It could hardly be claimed that it is because the capitalist world economy has proved so constructive and promising at dealing with the environmental crisis or other areas of accelerating change in our social, economic and cultural environment, that it should be trusted more, and political efforts less, when looking for the means to deal with change at the societal level. So the question is: how is it possible that the experience of accelerating and ever more dangerous change, paradigmatically exemplified by the experience of the environmental crisis, is not accompanied by growing ambitions
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in politics, but rather by lessening concern and effort? I thinkJean Baudrillard, in his version of the thesis of an end of history, has captured the essence of an insight into why politics, which was born out of the modem task to cope with, and perhaps master, or even 'grandmaster' (in revolutions) change, fades away at the exact moment when change has become more rapid than ever. I take Baudrillard's most important claim to be that we can talk about the end of history, because we have entered times when change in our social, economic and cultural conditions comes so rapidly, and happens in so many arenas at once, that no sense can be made of what happens in culture and society, and no stories about it told. If narrativity lies at the centre of our understanding of history, 18 then modem politics has been the history of the efforts to bring human intentions into these narratives. With the explosion of change into accelerating forces producing only unconnected fragments, history, and with history, modem politics, would (in a sense) come to an end. Fatigue and exhaustion with the ever-increasing pressure brought by change can therefore really produce (and has indeed started producing) an end of history and politics. Change is rapidly becoming dedramatised, not because it does not happen, nor because people think it does not happen. In politics, there no question of dedramatising change in the way in which it dedramatised in art, where artists seem to say: change is important -let's play around with it- but change isn't everything -let's not be too deadly serious about it. In politics one carmot give up the old modem idea that change has to be dealt with without giving up the idea of responsible citizenship. Perhaps there could still be a place for high modem politics in these times of speed. One option might be to slow down change: change in social, economic, environmental, cultural and existential conditions is at least partly human-made. The changes peculiar to modem times do indeed, at least partly, arise from the changes in science, technology and other fields of activity in which conscious efforts at producing change and tools for change are made. It is therefore a real option that change could be coped with, instead of surrendered to, through the metapolitical move of conducting politics with the basic intention of slowing down change. But of course, as we approach an unknown new millennium, perhaps my proposal is more marginal than ever to what wise people sometimes call'real politics'.
1
Cf M. Foucault, 'Un cours inedit', Magazine litteraire, 207 (mai 1984), pp.35-9.
2
SeeR. Koselleck's article "'Neuzeit", Zur Semantik moderner Bewegungsbegriffe, in his Vergangene Zukunft, Suhrkamp, Ffm, 1970, esp. p.310.
3
Cf. Plato's Republic 484b and Aristotle's Metaphysics, 1026a, 10-32.
4
Recently the picture has started to change. Cf. J. Margolis, Historied Thought, Constructed World: A Conceptual Primer for the Turn of the Millennium, University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London 1995.
5
One of the important debates was the 'Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes' in the French Academy which lasted more than two decades starting in 1687. See Hans Robert Jauss's 'Literarische Tradition und gegenwiiriges Bewusstsein der
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Modemitiit', in his Literaturgeschichte als Provokation, Suhrkamp, Ffm. 1970, and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, 'Modem, Modemitiit, Modeme', in 0. Brunner, W. Conze and R. Koselleck (Hrsg.): Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, Band 4, Ernst Klett Verlag, Stuttgart 1978 (pp.93-131). 6 See J.J. Rousseau's 'political writings' ie. The Discourse on the Origin and Foundations ofInequality Among Men (1755), The Discourse on Political Economy (1755) and On Social Contract (1762). 7
For some interesting perspectives on modernity viewed through the notion of progress, see G.H. von Wright: 'The Myth of Progress', in Architecture and Cultural Values, Report ofthe 4thAlvar Aalto Symposium held inJyviiskylii, Finland, on August 19-21, 1988. Printed in Lievestuore, Finland, 1991.
8 See especially Schiller's Briefe uber die iistethische Erziehung des Menschen (1793-94). Cf. the writings collected under the title Fruhe Schriften, in the Suhrkamp edition of Hegel's Werke (vol. 1), Charles Taylor, Hegel, Cambridge UP, 1975 (esp. ch.1), J. Habermas, Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne, Suhrkamp, Ff, 1985 (esp. ch.1-2), M. Theunissen, Selbstbewusstsein und Allgemeinheit, Zur Kritik des gegenwiirtigen Bewusstseins, de Gruyter, Berlin 1981. 9
Cf. C. Taylor, Hegel, ch.l., Cambridge UP, Cambridge 1975.
10 See Hegel, Werke 1, Fruhe Schriften, Suhrkamp, Ffm. 1986, pp.234-6. See also the note by the editors, ibid, p.628 and the references in the footnote there. 11 Cf. Donald Egbert, 'The Idea of 'Avant-Garde' in Art and Politics', American Historical Review 73 (December 1967). 12 See Ch. Baudelaire, Oeuvres Completes, vol. 3, 'L' Art Romantique', Paris 1889, and Walter Benjamin's essays on Baudelaire in his posthumously published Passagenwerk, vol.1, and in Zeitschrift for Sozialforschung, VIII, pp.1-2, Ffm 1939. 13 M. Theunissen goes as far as making this task definitional of modem art. He says: ' ... allewirklichmodemeKunstinszeniertdasExperiment,dasdersichunbekannte Mensch mit sich selbst macht' (1981:10- roughly: 'all truly modem art stages the experiment which man who does not know himself performs on himself'). See also Habermas, Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, chapters II and III, and his article: 'Die Modeme- ein unvollendetes Projekt', in J. Habermas, Die Moderneein unvollendetes Projekt, Philosophisch-politische Aufsiitze 1977-1990, Reclam, Leipzig, 1990. 14 On the dating of crisis as a key feature of modernity from the late eighteenth century, seeR. Koselleck: Kritik und Krise, Suhrkamp, Ffm. 1973. 15 I suggest that the best candidate for giving content to the idea of an epochal shift from modem to postmodem times is the changes that could be analysed in the way people understand their identity or self-hood. Reflection on and articulation of the experience that anything that deserves the name 'personal identity' is hard to find or unreliable is a common theme in contemporary literature, film, theatre etc. Given the importance of the ironic play with the idea of identity in popular music (eg. Madonna, Bowie) the critique of the idea of a self is certainly not a privilege of 'high' culture and philosophical seminars. 16 Cf. Habermas's 'Die neue Uniibersichtlichkeit', in his book with the same title, Suhrkamp, Ffm, 1985. 17 This is not the place to substantiate my claims. Some of the background analysis is provided in my 'Remarks on the Brundtland-Report', Lokayan (Delhi), 2/90. 18 See P. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1984.
A Panoptic Art History? The Dilemma of Context
A basic antinomy exists in art-historical methodology between claims of formal autonomy and claims of context (whether these be socio-historical or stylistic). On the one hand, it is claimed that art is an autonomous activity which cannot be explained away in terms of external determinates. On the other hand, there is the argument that art always emerges from a particular set of circumstances or given conditions - after all, artists do not live in isolated cocoons- and therefore such circumstances must provide some understanding of the art. Donald Preziosi has summed up this conceptual dilemma neatly in his book, Rethinking Art History: 'the true meaning of an artwork can be translated (into discourse) and ... the true meaning of the work of art is untranslatable') The ambivalent foundation of art history has its realisation in the pivotal guise of the masterpiece which is art history's paradigm of a non-paradigmatic paradigm. Simultaneously, the masterpiece serves as the exemplar of that which is irreducible to context and yet undeniably derives from, and even - quite paradoxically - adds meaning to, its context. Contextual accounts tend to challenge the aestheticist-connoisseurial gloss associated with the aura of the masterpiece. The social history of art has been the most critical in this regard- it has also been the dominant paradigm of a contextual understanding of art in recent decades. But lately the social history has been challenged on quite a few fronts. The aim of this challenge has not been to annihilate the social history but to renew its challenge. What is interesting about this is that the work of Foucault has been pivotal in informing both the critique and the potential renewal of the social history of art's critical impetus. In the volume entitled the New Art History the editors, Rees and Borzello, pinpoint some of the shortcomings of 'traditional' art history which the social history of art sought to overcome. They list its 'claim to be value-free, its belief in the impartiality of historians, its refusal to admit aesthetics and criticism as part of historical study, its suspicion of theoretical reflection, its obsession with fact-gathering and its blindness to class and gender'. 2 If the social history does address most of these issues, then it also has its blind spots. Chief among them is the thorny issue of aesthetic autonomy. A general suspicion of aesthetic matters limits the potential of its theoretical reflection, much to the discomfort of Rees and Borzello: Social art history tends to see any claim that art has a special language of its own as a smoke-screen for the deeper social reality that supports it. By stripping art of its autonomy, social history is able to regard works of art as illustrations of sexual oppression, class war, imperialism or the ruling ideas of a particular age.3
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Works, in this case, tend to be read off as emblematic of deeper, more fundamental processes. Interpretation is relevant only in so far as one needs to trace the symptoms of these processes through the work. Whereas traditionally aesthetic autonomy had been made absolute, the social history reacts by virtually obliterating it. This rather extreme switch of orientation derives from its concern to stress the historical, material nature of art over idealist understandings. 'Art as a single unit does not exist', Nicos Hadjinicolaou declares in his programmatic Art History and Class Struggle. What follows from this understanding, he contends, is an emphasis on production because all paintings - not just those deemed masterpieces 'belong as of right to the history of the production of pictures'. This is largely achieved by replacing the idealist question 'What is beauty?' or 'Why is this work beautiful?' with 'the materialist question, 'By whom, when and for what reasons was this work thought beautiful?'. 4 This questioning shifts the focus of art-historical inquiry to art production but it diminishes the capacity to consider a work apart from the dominant forces conditioning material production. Thus, the work tends to be viewed more as a reflex of these processes and this marks its major failing as an arthistorical method. And the failing is structural, not an incidental aberration. A method utilising the base-superstructure model has great difficulty broaching the question of autonomy in general. The philosopher Gyorgy Markus has explained its reductionism this way: For to give meaning to a notion of autonomy (however relative it be), one must be able to indicate not onlyfrom what, but also to do what is a given form of practice 'autonomous'. The dichotomy of basis I superstructure, however, lacks precisely this ability: to specify what are the sui generis characteristics that constitute the various superstructural practices and institutions.5
The social history of art inherits this problem and it flounders in its attempt to provide a contextual understanding of art due to its inability to conceive of autonomy in the practices it analyses. Autonomy is unfathomable, inexplicable. Yet the original critical motivations behind such concepts as base-superstructure and ideology were aimed at disclosing 'those anathematised, taken-for-granted assumptions' of theories- and those 'paradigmatic closures of thought which transform historically conditioned practical constraints into the untranscendable limits of thinking and irnagination'.6 There are few critical tendencies that do not aspire to such a level of critical acuity and vigilance. And attempts to maintain this critical vitality have resulted in the often ambivalent critiques of the social history of art which point out its problems but aim as much as anything to salvage its critical challenge. This leads to a different type of questioning that emanates from the second challenge to the social history which probes issues 'around representation as a structure ... , and the social disciplining of technologies and regimes of power ... ' 7 It is in this new orientation that the influence of Foucault is most apparent. Perhaps the most stark account of this new focus occurs in Craig Owens's polemical essay, 'Representation, Appropriation and Power'. Art history, Owens asserts, 'believes representation to be a disinterested and therefore politically neutral activity' whereas poststructuralism regards it as 'an
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inextricable part of social processes of domination and control'. 8 Interpreting artworks as integral to systems of representation transforms an art historian's critical emphasis and this is not only due to the fact that works are no longer viewed as neutral, autonomous aesthetic phenomena. The aim of analysis thereafter is no longer to uncover the implicit power relations residing within a work but to see how representation is 'an integral part of social processes of differentiation, exclusion, incorporation and rule' (RA&P:lO). Owens declares that Foucault and Marin are his models because they deny interpretative neutrality. They subscribe to a 'performative view of cultural production', according to Owens, meaning that they display an interest in what works do rather than exposing the deep layering of determinations that inform a work. The elaboration of these important differences leads to Owens' claim that processes of representation, and of representing, implicate art historians in power relations. This claim links representation to power and thus to possession. This agenda vaguely echoes the social history of art but it differs in the way that it implicates the very practice of art history: Thus, we can identify the motives of art history, at least insofar as it is practiced as a humanistic discipline: a desire for property, which conveys man's sense of his 'power over things'; a desire for propriety, a standard of decorum based upon a respect for property relations; a desire for the proper name, which designates the specific person who is invariably identified as the subject of the work of art ... (RA&P:ll).
This sceptical response to the humanistic basis of art history can also be associated with Foucault. He views humanism as entangled with a 19th century 'theologising of man'. This theologised man, Foucault asserts, is god 'incarnated in humanity' - 'man as subject of his own consciousness and of his own liberty is really a sort of correlative image of god'. 9 Owens, therefore, not only wants to show that the humanistic discipline of art history is caught up in economic and social determinations but he also claims to expose an assumption of a godly power to represent. In effect, Owens assumes the mantle of radical critique within art history and broadens it to include the power of appropriation in interpretation itself. Such an approach therefore does not assume, as the social history of art supposedly does, some neutral, exterior interpretative position from which a critique can be made. Yet Owens then proceeds to bluntly equate representation with appropriation -which, of course, includes the critiques proposed by the social history- and it is this appropriative propensity that isseenasdistinguishingrepresentationasanapparatusofpower(RA&P:17). The effect of such an overarching analysis of power is to outline a horizon of determination that appears more complete than ever. Ideology critiques at least propose a limit which can be breached, whereas the critique of power and representation poses an limitless web of manipulation and subjugation. If representation always involves the exercise of power, then what alternative can be proposed? What lies beyond representation? And where would an alternative position emanate from?lO If art history cannot escape interpreting, and by necessity representing, then it will always be guilty of
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appropriation and thus forever complicit with the apparatuses of power. The art historian is left in the role of an intellectual flagellant perpetually seeking to expurgate guilt. If Owens' argument is informed by a Foucauldian reading of representation as an assertion of power, then Preziosi takes his cue in Rethinking Art History from the Foucault concerned with the disciplining of desire. The difference is quite subtle but it allows Preziosi to forge an understanding of 'the history of the desires disciplined by art history' (RAH:158). A starting assumption is that 'structural connections among guiding metaphors' determine both the scope of the discipline and its attitudes toward such issues as ' ... the problem of the limits and boundaries of the discipline; ideas concerning the roles and directions of disciplinary practice (who is served? toward what ends?); and assumptions regarding the roles and relationships among artist, critic, and historian (who speaks? to whom? under what conditions?)' (RAH:157). This line of questioning would also appear very closely related to that asked by Hadjinicolaou and the social history of art in general. Questions about 'who is served? toward what ends?' etc., echoes the materialist questioning - 'by whom, when and for what reasons?' Preziosi, however, disputes the assumption that social art history amounts to a disruption of a 'traditional' art history. He views its supposedly radical challenges as framed within a 'dream of scientificity' which marks out art history as a modern discipline desiring scientific precision. For the social history of art, this aspiration reveals itself in a search for 'paradigms of a science of art history along materialist lines'- thus revealing a common ambition with the bourgeois methods it would seek to displace. The search for this materialist science of art history was compromised from the beginning, according to Preziosi, because Marxist writings on art history 'seem to have become immediately mired in a nostalgic nineteenth-century positivism' (RAH:162). 11 If the social history of art falls into this trap, then it can be traced to its goal of overcoming idealist aesthetics by striving to be definitively contextual- that is, by giving the definitive account of context in art history. The attempt to fulfil this goal leads the social history to overstep its original ambition of anchoring artistic practice securely in its material circumstance. Here Preziosi identifies the deterministic tone accompanying the scientific aspiration; an example being T.J. Clark's comments of 1974: It ought to be clear by now that I'm not interested in the social history of art
as part of a cheerful diversification of the subject ... For diversification read disintegration. And what we need is the opposite: concentration... This is what the social history of art has to offer: it is the place where the questions have to be asked, but where they cannot be asked in the old way (RAH:166).
Preziosi discovers a 'peculiarlypanopticistmentality' lurking in this method which he relates to such inclinations as' a causal, historical narrative' and an 'unfailing literalism in reading the historical record' (RAH:165). Thus the point of these Foucauldian critiques is to show that a neutral interpretative position does not exist in art history. 'Relations of power', Foucault argues:
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are not in a position of exteriority with respect to other types of relations (economic processes, knowledge relationships, sexual relations), but are immanent in the latter; ... relations of power are not in superstructural positions, with merely a role of prohibition or accompaniment; they have a directly productive role, wherever they come into play.U
This panoptic mentality is discovered, according to Preziosi, in the arthistorical propensity to forge 'an illusory unity and coherence; an ideological matrix of projections from disparate sources onto a common screen' (RAH:157). Panopticism constitutes a logic of power, Foucault contends, deriving from a mechanism that 'automatizes and disindividualizes power Ein a certain concerted distribution of bodies, surfaces, lights, gazes ... ' 13 Preziosi's dispute with art history can be traced to his belief that it does accede to this modern disciplinary logic of power which Foucault describes as an: ...enclosed, segmented space, observed at every point, ... a fixed place, ... in which all events are recorded, in which an uninterrupted work of writing links the centre and the periphery, in which power is exercised without division, according to a continuous hierarchical figure .. .l4
These critics assume that the insistence upon context is necessary and unavoidable though- and even constitutes the most valuable feature of the social history's challenge. The most serious problem they identify in the social history's method is the naive view of representation and interpretation that accompanies the thought of context. The social art historians would appear to contend that the discovery and plotting of a socio-historical context amounts to the final word in issues of representation and interpretation. But the burning question is how does the ensuing emphasis upon the appropriative power of representation and of art-historical interpretation overcome these difficulties? Despite the subsequent plethora of challenges to the social history of art, the key issue still remains the same one that has plagued it: how do these revised critiques account for, inJohn Tagg'swords, the 'specificity of material practices of representation?' The lingering question of specificity or autonomy remains- autonomous from what? and to do what? If these questions sound familiar, then it stems from the fact that these critiques of the social history of art still have not addressed them. Such critiques address another issue entirely - that is, the often overlooked question of the power relations involved in representation and representing as well as in art-historical interpretation. Preziosi concludes Rethinking Art History with an appeal to an alternative practice that is not prefabricated and where 'there are no metalanguages, only infralanguages that, like waves on an ocean, are vantage points, which are always part and parcel of what they arise for or against' (RAH: 179). Yet if these vantage points are infralanguages and thus part and parcel of what they arise for or against, then can one appeal to a place above and beyond the prefabricated sites of art history? If these vantages points are truly part of the fabric, then they must inevitably come up against the panoptic logic of art-historical thought. How does such an analysis then resist being seduced by this drive? Does Preziosi's own analysis resist this seduction?
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The difficulty with analyses of art history that borrow from Foucault's thought is that their assessment of disciplinary determination is total- it knows no bounds. Yet if one looks at Foucault's account of immanent relations of power, then one finds that an elaboration of resistance plays a part in his analysis. Thus he argues: 'just as the network of power relations ends by forming a dense web that passes through apparatuses and institutions, without being exactly localized in them, so too the swarm of points of resistance traverses social stratifications and individual unities'. 15 My aim is not to dismiss analysis that examines the relation between power and representation - but I do want to reject its totalisation. Owens appeals to an authentic order beyond the mire of representation. A yearning for any form of authentic underlay or 'natural' order cannot be found in Foucault, nor does it feature in Preziosi's account.1 6 Where Preziosi and Owens find common ground is in questioning the unacknowledged investments which undermine the radical status of the social art history's project. Preziosi's reliance on the Foucauldian paradigm of panopticism means that his focus tends to be fixated on the first half of his equation concerning the simultaneous translatability and untranslatability of art - that is, he focuses only upon how artworks are translated into art-historical discourse. As such it makes for illuminating criticisms of the social history of art notably by exposing its methodological propensity to determination- but it fails to provide an adequate assessment of the second part of this equation. This is significant because this' curiously double disciplinary postulation' is more revealing of the inherent theoretical intrigue implied by art history than panopticism. It is only this double postulate that successfully captures the perennially unstable and unwieldy coupling of idealism-formalism and materialism-contextualism that art history strives to put into some working balance- or, as is often the case, which art historians hope to resolve by privileging one or the other side of this equation. In effect, I contend that these recent, Foucauldian-inspired methodological critiques have sidestepped the issue of this paradoxical conjunction of autonomy and context in art history, and more or less ended up with as broad an account of determination as one could ever find in the social history of art. 1
Donald Preziosi (1989). Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, p.16. Hereafter RAH.
2
A. L. Rees and Frances Borzello (eds) (1986). 'Introduction'. The New Art History, London: Camden Press, p.7.
3
Ibid.
4
Nicos Hadjinicolaou (1978). Art History and Class Struggle, trans. Louise Asmal, London: Pluto Press, pp.179, 183.
5
Gyorgy Markus (1990). 'Marxism and Theories of Culture', Thesis Eleven, No. 25, p.94.
6
Ibid, pp.93-5.
7
Bird, 'On Newness, Art and History', in Rees and Borzello, (eds), New Art History, p.37.
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8
Craig Owens (1982). 'Representation, Appropriation and Power',Art in America, May, p.9. Hereafter RA&P.
9
Michel Foucault (1989). 'Foucault Responds to Sartre', Foucault Live (Interviews, 1966-84), trans. John Johnston (ed.) Sylvere Lotringer, Serniotext(e) New York, pp.41,38.
10 At this point it is possible to suggest that Owens has totalised a power to appropriate. One can refer to Foucault's own concerns about such a tendency in social systems: ' ... a system of constraint becomes truly intolerable when the individuals who are affected by it don't have the means of modifying it'; Michel Foucault, 'Sexual Choice, Sexual Act', Foucault Live, p.220. For a critical reply to Owens' essay, see Svetlana Alpers, 'More on Art History and Power', Art in America, October 1982, pp.S-7; and for a more general review of his work, see Stephen Melville, 'Contemporary Theory and Criticism' (a review of Owens' posthumous publication, 'Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture', Art and America, July 1993, pp.30-32. 11 Preziosi refers to Hubert Darnisch's remark (which he believes was directed at Hadjinicolaou) that 'Marxist theory had entered into art history only in its most reductivist and caricatured forms'; RAH:161. 12 Michel Foucault (1980). The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, New York, p.94. 13 Michel Foucault (1979). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan, New York, p.202. 14 Ibid, p.197. 15 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, p.96. 16 See the discussion of Foucault in Megill (1987). Prophets of Extremity: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, p.254.
'Making Facile Gestures Difficult': Artists, Criticality, and the Politics of Publicness
1
!R.96 (jamtt On the first of April 1991 then National Government Minister of Social Welfare Jenny Shipley stuck it to tens of thousands of New Zealanders by cutting social welfare payments. In the month prior, in Dunedin, a multimedia arts collective was established called Super 8, that has subsequently been represented by its bohemian participants as manifesting the 'need for collective activity in the face of social adversity'. 2 The Super 8 venue was subsequentlycloseddownbytheDunedinCityCouncilasafirerisk,butthis year the collective was relaunched on the third anniversary of the benefit cuts, in the Zenith Catacombs, one block from the city centre. What follows, in the nature of a murmured hesitation, is a brief examination of certain representations of the artist-personality local to my situation in Dunedin, New Zealand, and their implications for the articulation of a radically democratic vision. Paradoxically, the artist as a neo-avant-garde mannerist and variously as a neo-romantic figure simultaneously underpin art practice, criticism, and education in New Zealand; and in their contestatory relation, these two broad types, as competing modes of identification, map aspects of the terrain of cultural politics that interests me. I am particularly interested in how neo-romantic inscriptions and identificatory formations might participate in techniques of social hygiene, through small procedures of affirmation and denial, restricting the dangerous public operations of moral autonomy and contestatory speech, to bohemian ghettos and carnivalesque borderlands, ensuring the stability of a status quo in which individual political agency is radically constrained. In Dunedin, a small southern city of 110,000, artists are complicit with minute symbolic and actual practices that fashion and regulate, and the artist is daily confirmed as the still legitimate site of a lively and invigorating danger. With the insidious gentrification of the city centre proceeding along international models, but on a smaller scale, artists play a paradoxical role. While Dunedin's public art gallery will find its new home in a redeveloped retail site at the very heart of the city's business, civic and tourist district, and some galleries and artists' collectives are part of the redevelopment drive, often providing the necessary first step in the appropriation of waste sites, Dunedin's poorer alternative artist community is periodically policed from The Centre through Fire Department and City Council evictions, and through the increasing privatisation of space in the city. The very centre of the city, the Octagon, has been recently redeveloped as a plaza bisected by the main street, and surrounded by cafes, bars, a theatre, a 6-cinema complex, the civic chambers and tourist information centre, the Anglican Cathedral, and soon, the relocated Dunedin Public Art Gallery, all in concert with the Dunedin City Council's vigorous promotional campaign which
'Making j'acife (jestures 'DifficuCt'
129
proclaims 'Dunedin. It's all right here' (see glQficlU~ Rhodod<:nd.r()fl ~ll an-d Fig.l). As an accompcnhcmses., ::~rc- .'\: fitqwm~ ku~Jt ()f Pmrida';;. f-M" .urist who '!ipcdaliw ir1 plice in the redevelopment of the city, and Jtls.t out ofi(W,'Jl ~w.r ''f.n·oodtc pond'' also a threat to its is home Ocx:k of <:amid Puktk:o,. smooth homogeneity, Thh pe~nliar hini wlrh iv> di~tinaiw blut/bla{k pltam~. is ,a n&s~thj!.\."1" for the artist constitutes a Patrida's- -paiot:U1g. Nhny O{l!.t-.nlntqudy danger which is manN~·?...':ahnd bktis ll:.wt- alrt.tdy hren aged across the twin .trt;l.ny t-o axes of desire and M• not ha~ to st>l'! why,~ l\ltddrt, dread. Such city sites as the ~tmfirm£d Patric-~'s low ofho- new hlhtllt'. ·~Ibe .dcV'-dopen.l"td pW:Jt'd do~ the jv~.~ Octagon evoke an an~
elonglng to-ft communitarian ideals o.f :m.:I CMtnJI yout' of civic belonging and I lif'l.'. lt·m.lh-10 itt'!f'3t r;:h;m~;· I '""""""'"'· · . · _. . ?h~,a.::~....~......,......."................... "' participation. City plaI Dunedin. It's all,tlgbthere. zas, malls, and Dunedin's Octagon, with their wide open spaces, ease of pedesFigure 1: Artist Pat Altman in Dunedin promotional trian access, and high adertisement, "Does changing your view, change your views? incidence of cafes and It's all right here." North and South, (April1994):33; restaurants are inCourtesy of Dunedin City Council. tended to encourage certain classes of people to linger, perhaps to meet and to talk. These are spaces of intense (and usually displaced) desire, often involving a nostalgia for a communal togetherness and participation on the model of an imagined pre-modern European utopia. Yet in practice, and instead, they facilitate the exercise of possessive individualism and the unfettered pursuit of privacy: the market participation of dedifferentiated and anonymous consumers who are addressed as if possessing pre-existing identities. This is the epitome of liberal pluralism, in which the market substitutes the idea of publicness, of speech and action, with the private consumption of spectacle and nomination of choices. City malls most persistently offer pre-packaged options for which there are predetermined appropriate responses- the options of the market place mitigate against answering back, despite the seductive simulacra of participation in the question and answer formats of market surveying, and brand-name differentiation. One example of the privatisation and loss of space can be seen in the absence of legal street sites for posters. Last year in preparing for a public meeting on art politics in the community, our poster distributors were not Th~ 1.\ntt.tlit thrdem;, w~~h
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unexpectedly hassled by the police: this denial of a public sphere is achieved under the rhetoric of public safety and cleanliness. But the public defended is one much reduced in its representativeness. What is encountered in the aggressive policing of poster walls around the city, apart from the privatisation of city streets, is their designation as 'defensible space' in the face of imaginary dangers. The danger lies in the very idea of a crowd without a name, the crowd without identity- the very epitome of a radical democracy -the not-yet-packaged, not-yet-imagined 'people's voice(s)'. According to this logic, 'security' has less to do with personal safety than with insulating individuals in their 'residential, work, consumption and travel environments, from "unsavoury" groups and individuals, even crowds in general'. 3 This privatisation of the rhetoric of 'public safety' is a smoke screen which plays on the fear of the spontaneity of the masses, or the risk of the unexpected in the performance of public appearance. Symptomatic of the regulation of everyday life are Dunedin's over-policed parking meters, the 'clear-flow' one way traffic systems, and the graffiti clean-ups which have culminated in a proliferation of 'happy walls': murals and 'Keep Dunedin Beautiful' exhortations on fences, the walls of vacant lots, and bus shelters throughout the city, many of which have been produced by organised groups of school children, constituting a technique of prohibition in the name of innocence and purity. Predictably too, the skateboarders who have recently occupied the Octagon are being required to negotiate with the City Council over their forced relocation away from pedestrian areas. And most recently, last month, the Police have declared they want 3 am closing of all licensed premises in The Centre to reduce 'disorder in the central city'. 4 The publicness construed in this discourse of security, and the public approved for travel within the intensively capitalised central zone of the city, is very limited indeed. Within this regime, the disease-carrier is permitted at the periphery, but constrained by a solemn edict, under a prohibition on leakages which might contaminate the public body. And it as such, as a sanctioned viral carrier, or muta(ge)nt, that the body of the artist is construed. 'He' is a reservoir, and translated as feminine by recourse to epidemiology5 and an archaeology of creative genius. 6 A body at once chaotic and unstably bounded, the cultural inscription of the Dunedin artist is as both passive and at the same time latently dynamic, indolent and yet with the potential to be excited to spontaneous outbursts of expressive passion and the dangerous release of toxicity. In a recent Dunedin newspaper article, there is a photograph of local 'Painter Kelly Michael' (see Fig.2). He is pictured preparing for a forthcoming exhibition, standing at an easel, ostensibly working, with a palette in one hand and a brush poised as if stroking the canvas. Superficially, in the text and the photograph, the emphasis is on the 'work' of art, the artist says: 'In a way I am in a factory- it's the daily grind of a painting factory? As well as the artist and his easel in the photo, parts of the studio are visible, revealing the clutter of other work, painting rags, and paint-splattered walls in the theatrical cast of light from a skylight. Yet it is the artist's gaze which distracts me, a gaze that must be imagined because his eye sockets are deep
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Figure 2: Painter Kelly Michael, in Charmian Smith, "Artist just likes pushing paint around on canvas", Otago Daily Times, (15 February 1994):17; Courtesy of Otago Daily Times.
in shadow. It is the passive-receptive gaze of the feminine male. It is the gaze ofthepermeableandleakingimagination.IsthisagazesignifyingFoucault's 'abyss of the [art]work's absence'; a feminised 'void' all darkness and chaos around which the 'lyrical halo' is cast; the 'moment of silence' the work of art opens?S The painter's gaze is not directed at the canvas or the palette, in contradistinction to the newspaper text's emphasis on labour, neither does the gaze overtly acknowledge the photographer's and viewer's presence in the manner of the publicity photograph. Rather, it is a simulacrum of the waiting pre-requisite to creative inspiration. His gaze is directed into the inbetween, downwards into the space beyond the palette resting in his hand, into the space between his body and the other bodies framing this view of the artist. Cast down, this gaze becomes a sign of his feeling (and waiting) rather than his seeing and thinking. It is this pictorialised gaze which resignifies the studio as imagination's chamber, as the void of potential in which the artist waits, and which re-signifies the artist as the reservoir and tributary of inspiration and the gift. The reporter's text inscribes this space and the artist's waiting with the twin markers of romantic creativity: the void and the trace, the emptiness of waiting and the cluttered detritus of activity, the sign of passivity on the one hand, and of spontaneity on the other. Such readings impute to the artist personality a true or deep prelinguistic self-hood receptive to, in the artist's own words, the 'rollercoaster' ride of inspiration. This kind of romantic rhetoric is not confined to the self-definitions of a few artists in the Dunedin milieu, it also appears in the writing of some local critics, and resonates in art teaching practice nationally; and while such sentiments may not dominate, they do circulate as an accepted legitimising practice. Even practices that might elsewhere be nominated as typifying postmodern appropriative irony, in Dunedin, often get translated according
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to discourses of romantic creativity. By such means, for example in the case of Auckland artist Peter Gibson Smith, (see Fig.3) in Dunedin on a one-year Fellowship, the artist's particular techniques become the signifiers of creative originality; and appropriation, re-textualised as the manipulation of other people's images, is made to signify the artist's expressive intentionality, and the transformation of the raw into the cooked. Local art writer, Charmian Smith, legitimises the appropriative strategies of Peter Gibson Smith's work in terms consistent with notions of the artist as originator, and the artwork as gesture and trace, by emphasising the manipulative. She describes the artist as 'mixing' other people's images with his own, and she makes it clear that he copies by hand and not mechanically, thus displacing attention from the rubber stamps, and computer and fax generated imagery he employs. The writer goes on to devote most of the feature article to an explanation of the artist's techniques as experimental and novel. The accompanying photograph shows the artist apparently 'at work' on a detail, he is pictured working with his hands holding materials and applying pigment to the surface of his work, much in the same manner as manufacturing corporate images show technicians demonstrating the use of materials and equipment for publicity and product manuals. 9 Though it might be possible to read Gibson Smith's appropriation of a number of canonical European and New Zealand works as critical of notions of authorial originality, the local reading enunciated here evokes a rhetoric which instead claims certain
Figure 3: Artist-in-Residence Peter Gibson Smith, in Charmian Smith, "Manipulating images of others for installation", Otago Daily Times, (8 February 1994):15; Courtesy of Otago Daily Times.
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artists possess a unique spontaneity, and which imputes to the artwork, as the trace of the artist's life, a rejuvenating power. Such attributes are claimed to be in marked contrast to the compulsive and conditioned activity of nonartists, and the pseudo creativity of artists whose work is perceived to be theory-driven. These practices rest on a set of presumptions about the existence and integrity of a pre-linguistic expressive and self-healing subjectivity in dichotomous relation to the socially conditioned and alienated subject. The artist's spontaneity is constituted in opposition to the conformity of the regular worker and the constraining power of work's regular hours, requirements for attention, and obligation to produce a result. In this, there is something of an antipodean translation, almost a mythology, of Situationist philosophy and something akin to Henri Lefebvre's Critique of Everyday Life.lo Yet, perhaps in the spirit of a hybrid Situationist detournement, many of these Bohemian artists claim their art is more individual, more energetic, and more connected to life by its spontaneous and creative revolt. While the artist is unproblematically characterised as both a reservoir and creative originator, as a receptive but also resisting free agent, difference continues to be mapped as a borderland, a refugee enclave, and the raw material for the formative work of desire as an unfillable absence, 11 with political consequences that are regressive and nostalgic. However this romanticism does not go unchallenged in the local milieu: frustrated by the promise and denial of effective political critique, one young woman artist I spoke to was critical of the adolescent escapism which she claims motivates many to drift from one distracting extravaganza to another, across an ocean of sleep and waiting. Why is spontaneity so important in the mythology of Dunedin's Bohemians? So dangerous to the techniques of discipline? Is it because it relies on an essential passivity as its precondition? Or because it is the opposite to compulsive activity, and seemingly beyond discipline, outside the limits of governance? Is it because it is the opposite to work, both manual and mental labour, in its unrestrained exercise of the imagination in complicity with the passions and the desires? 12 In the tradition of the avant-garde there is claimed an intrinsic link between this spontaneity and criticality. A criticality that can be both metaphoric and actual, founded upon the assumption of the primordial immediacy of the artist's expressions. But this criticalityisfundamentallydifferentfromthatwhichFoucaultpracticesand proposes, for his is predicated on a claim of solidarity, that 'after all, we are all governed'. 13 Avant-garde criticality however assumes that spontaneity is a relatively rare phenomenon. The implied moral aesthetic in dichotomising spontaneity and conformity, the primordially expressive and the conditioned subject, is not as useful in thinking through the need for, and means of, deep transformations of political agency, as is a Foucauldian criticality. 'Marginal by imposition, by choice, by necessity', 14 this ghetto-dweller may, at one time or another, or in one relation or another, be critically engagedbut not so intrinsically. And why would the artist find the margins hospitable anyway? Is this the romance of the outlaw? What are the pleasures of the ghetto, of daily crossing its threshold bearing its mark before others? What
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Figure 4: Photographs and program notes for 'Fatigue', created by Jules Novena Sorrel and Ozzy B.S. Y. Act 3 of 'Black Umbrella', a Super 8 performance event held at Zenith Cafe, 9-12 June 1994; Catalogue text reproduced by the kind permission of Jules Novena Sorrel.
hybridity promises here? Perhaps the tenacity of the arts collective Super 8, closed down once already, and currently under Police surveillance in the hope they will breach licensing laws and grant officials the opportunity to close them down again, perhaps Super 8 currently exists as an effective site of 'psychogeographical experimentation' in the spirit of Situationist ideals: in the hope that such sites (to quote the spirit of '68) 'enable people to stop identifying with their surroundings ... to jam their messages, to turn their songs inside out'.15 While romantic formulations of the artist's role circulate within the Dunedin bohemia of artists, poets, musicians, and art writers, they do so among other competing self-definitions. The Bohemia has also fostered a neo-pagan carnivalesque and an anarchic communitarianism that, despite the romanticism, appear to be informed by some astute political understandings of the dominating effects of new right economics. In the establishment, moth-balling, and recent re-establishment of the artists' collective Super 8, and in various carnivalesque festivals and theatrical events (see Fig.4) there is a hard-headed pragmatism about the kinds of social and cultural politics that are effective in organising and maintaining communitarian programs that can sustain a cultural collectivity. Though neo-romanticist, the carnivalesque territory they have established and maintained, serves the dual functions of opening 'spaces of withdrawal and regroupment' in response to 'exclusions within dominant publics', and providing 'bases and training grounds for agitational activities directed toward wider publics.'16 Dunedin's bohemians, the bearable poor, many subsisting on the tattered shreds of state-welfarism, on the state-subsidies of
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unemployment and domestic purposes benefits, maintain a carnival zone within the central city, wherein it may be politic to be a romanticist, or to be a neo-pagan communitarian as a strategy of resistance and as a means of providing a glimpse of pluri-vocal and anarchic possibilities, or simply as a supplement to the disciplines of poverty and a desire for collectivity. To call this community of artists, poets, musicians and art writers carnivalesque also invokes the paradoxical recognition that all carnivals act as a safety valve for the status quo, fulfilling the role of the dominant's other, confirming the fallacious logic of the Same/Other dichotomy. And in the Dunedin context, it is young women who are establishing a power base with the re-opening of a Super 8 venue, and it is perhaps paradoxically women who have the most to gain and to risk from the transgressive and experimental haven of a Modernist bohemia, given that which has emerged in Dunedin has expanded the space accorded to women in relation to categories of artistic greatness and chains of influence which serve to legitimise and unify an artist's work into an oeuvre. Paradoxically, because the conservative romanticism pervading Dunedin's Bohemia serves to perpetuate the myth of the feminine male as the creative genius, and finds the neo-pagan eco-feminism of many young artists unproblematically essentialist and reassuring. It is a risky double-bind for these women in that male participants insistently map the sexual terrain of this Bohemia heterosexually, in contradistinction to the bisexuality of many of the women. Yet these readings are too facile without the recognition that Bohemian Dunedin also constitutes a discursive sphere that coheres on integrationist, cooperative and non-hierarchical practices in resistance to dominant discourses, within a context of values debate. (Values which include the ideal of work without self-interest, and a largely non-careerist orientation, althoughsomewithinitstillflirtwiththeromanceofmarket-place'discovery' on the model of Dunedin music's international cult success. 17) A bohemia within which, and by which, counter discourses are being invented and circulated in response to the exclusions within dominant publics - much in the marmer proposed in Nancy Fraser's notion of'subaltern counterpublics' .18 By these young artists assuming a publicist orientation (as they have through performance art, writings, interviews, various collective actions and programs, and the manners of their very appearance in public 19) discursive space is expanded. But spontaneity and moral autonomy are aestheticised by their association with the artist. Thus neutralised, on thearguablyfallaciouslogicthatthe symbolic forms a dichotomous pole to the social, they can be released into the public body in benign forms, as traces, effecting, at best a marmered rejuvenation that is skin-deep. In the reification of the art process and object as commodity, and as fetish trace, and the postmodern proliferation and pluralism of consumer and lifestyle choices, there is an oscillation of promise and denial, a schizophrenic dance between the promise of change and the inadequacy of the fetish. The promise of profound transformations of bodies-politic and public territories is both tantalisingly offered, and at the same time denied, by the often plenteous opportunities for voicing indignation while nothing changes, and in the recurring rituals of nominat-
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ing political choices in talk-back shows, opinion polls, and the electoral ballot. And in the realm of the symbolic, there is enacted an art-cargo-cult, a border trade between the apparently private realm of choice and desire, and constructs of a unified body politic which seeks to possess and incorporate its imaginary other in fetishised and sanitised form, seeks to supplement its lack without disrupting its imagined unity, and homogeneity. But the cleanliness of this border trade is much over-rated. Exchanges that reify and fetishise the artist's supposed spontaneity and criticality do not guarantee the hygienic impermeability of bodies politic and spaces public. This artist-as-such is the differend, precisely that which cannot be reduced and remains left out of the consensual body politic and betrays what is really at stake in the contestatory domain of politics, betrays even the very source or occasion of political dispute: betrays the 'startling unexpectedness' of speech and action. 20 I propose it is this unexpectedness, which of itself can signal the opening of a public space, which must become the stuff of the politics of publicness. A publicness that manifests itself as a plurality of competing publics rather than as a single, comprehensive public sphere, and a politics that is constituted in the constant collision and tension between claims for freedom and demands for rights. While art practices, readings, and education in New Zealand rest on the unquestioned assumption that both unexpectedness and critique are located in the moment and movement of art making, in the body and works of the artist, and in the cargo-cult fetishism of art as the trace of the artist, these practices will also participate in the limitation of political subjectivities and the idea of agency. They will be complicit with strategies which limit the danger and unexpectedness of mere appearances in public and the perils of speech, and thereby, the neutralisation of publicness and any idea of a participatory democracy beyond the nomination of choices and the voicing of indignation. Yet in the Dunedin context it is possible to witness the complex association of these romanticisms with the formation of a subaltern counterpublic that has tenaciously achieved a fragile and transgressive publicist occupation in the central city, and which is participating in the critique of dominant logics. Such a reading of Dunedin's Bohemia seeks to avoid the facile gesture of dismissing its contesta tory status on the grounds of its romanticism, and refuses to assist in the validation of any rhetoric which sacralises the social as the only political reality. It is, finally, to claim that visual culture can and must participate in the diffusion of politics, and the proliferation of competing publics across all domains, both symbolic and actual, with any means at its disposal. 1
I am grateful for helpful comments from Robin Craw, Sarah McMillan, Linda Tyler, Mandee Wilson, and Katy Yiakrnis. The title phrase of this paper ('Making facile gestures difficult') is borrowed from Michel Foucault, 'Practicing Criticism' with Didier Eribon, in Lawrence D. Kritzman, (ed.), Michel Foucault Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977-1984, Routledge, New York and London, 1988, p.155.
2
Super 8 Newsletter, 1(April1994), unpaginated; see also 'Super 8, An Ode To the Shakers and Movers', SPeC, 3(Winter 1991), p.6-7.
3
Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, Vintage,
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London, 1990, p.224. Steve Addison, 'Police want 3am closing in Dunedin', Otago Daily Times, (17 June 1994), p.l. 5 A case can be made for a conceptualisation of the porous body as female, and as endangering the hegemonic body, in the identification of AIDS-at-risk groups as the hazardous perimeters and thresholds of the continent of 'The Public Health'. In its use of hydraulic models to explain the transmission of disease, Catherine Waldby argues that epidemiology characterises the transmitters as fluid, and the transmission processes as a leaking or see page. The contagious cells, bodies and populations are conceptualised as reservoirs and tributaries, both metaphors of containment with the risk of spillage, and lacking fixed boundaries. As such it is only the receptive body that is conceptualised as the threat in that it contains the contagion, and it is women, homosexual and bisexual men who are seen as receptive, borderless, and leaking. Conversely, the heterosexual male body is the only one imagined not to have permeable boundaries, it is penetrative, not receptive, it is in fact rigidly bounded. Catherine Waldby, 'AIDS and the Body Politic', HRC Regimes of Sexuality conference paper, Canberra, July 1993. 6 By the end of the eighteenth century genius had acquired Romantic grandeur: transformed from a kind of talent into a superior type of being who walked a sublime path between sanity and madness, between the monstrous and the superhuman. To be a genius was to be like a madman, but not a madman; and to be like a woman, but not a woman. The male genius was inspired, a shamanic mouth-piece, and feminine, instinctuat emotional and capable of giving birth metaphorically. See Christina Battersby, Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics, The Women's Press, London, 1989. 7 Charmian Smith, 'Artist just likes pushing paint around on canvas', Otago Daily Times, (15 February 1993), p.17. 8 From Michel Foucault's discussion of art and madness with which he concludes Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, Richard Howard, trans. New York: Vintage Books, 1965/1988, pp.287-88. 9 Charmian Smith, 'Manipulating images of others for installation', Otago Daily Times, (8 February 1994), p.15. 10 Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, trans. John Moore, Verso, London and New York, 1991; originally published in 1947 as Critique de la vie quotidienne. In typifying the regular worker as constrained and conformist, and the artist as spontaneous, these artists and writers rework a construct familiar in the writing of Lefebvre and the philosophy of the Situationists. For instance, in Lefebvre's claim that festivals contrast violently with the alienation of everyday life, but that they are not separate from it, 'his critique of everyday life is a dual reading, at once a rejection of the inauthentic and the alienated, and an unearthing of the human which still lies buried therein'. (Michel Trebitsch, in the Preface to Lefebvre's Critique of Everyday Life, p.xxiv.) In Dunedin artist Emily Buttle's Wellington performance entitled 'the fabulous non-event', timed to coincide with both the International Arts Festival and the Fringe Festival early in 1994, three performers employed the Situationist strategy of derive (drifting in costume throughout the city, and occupying friends' homes) until they could stand it no more. See 'emily buttle', SPeC 14(Auturnn 1994), unpaginated. 11 Such a claim recognizes desire can be conceived as lack and the drive to supplement the perceived loss through the fetish, a notion derived from Freud's conception of desire. However desire need not be construed negatively: alternatively it can be conceived, in the tradition of Foucault and others, as a positive force of production, as the drive towards a vision, or a sense, that something better is attainable. Such desire is that which articulates and produces the not-yetrealized. And, it is such a desire which I claim is at work in the Dunedin Bohemia when I argue later that artist's collectives such as Super 8, among other things,
4
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constitute counterpublics, and, in their dual character as places of withdrawal and launching pads for the dissemination of their discourses, produce'oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs'. See Nancy Fraser, 'Rethinking the public sphere: a contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy', in Francis Barker, et al. (eds) (1992). Postmodernism and the re-reading of modernity, Manchester and New York, Manchester University Press, p.210. 12 Michel Foucault makes this assertion in Madness and Civilization, p.248; and Donald Kuspit makes a similar connection between the artist and freedom from work in The Cult of the Avant-Garde Artist (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993, p.120, n.51) in the context of discussing avant-garde art as a process of perpetual therapy when he cites Philip Rieff who describes 'the therapeutic [as] a man of leisure, released by technology from the regimental discipline of work. .. ' in The Triumph of the Therapeutic: The Uses of Faith after Freud, New York: Harper and Row, 1968, p.236. 13 Michel Foucault, 'Face aux gouvernements,les droits de l'Homme', a document written and read by Foucault at a press conference in June, 1981, on the plight of the Vietnamese boat people; first printed in Liberation, (30 June-1 July 1984), p.22; cited in James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault, Harper Collins, London, p.316. 14 Trinh T. Minh-Ha, 'Cotton and Iron', in Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh-ha and Cornel West, (eds), Out There: Marginalisation and Contemporary Cultures, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, and The MIT Press, York, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, 1990, p.330. 15 Attila Kotanyi and Raoul Vaneigem, 'Elementary program of the bureau of unitary urbanism', in Ken Knabb, (ed.), Situationist International Anthology, Bureau of Public Secrets, Berkeley, California, 1981/1989, pp.65-67; cited in A. Bonnett (1989). 'Situationism, geography, and poststructuralism', Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 7:136-7. 16 Nancy Fraser, 1992, pp.210-211. 17 For local research on the Dunedin sound, see Craig Robertson, It's 0 K, it's all right,
oh yeah': The 'Dunedin sound'?: an aspect of alternative music in New Zealand 19781985, 1991, an unpublished thesis for a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) degree in History at the University of Otago, Dunedin; held in the Hocken Library, (#090280555). 18 Nancy Fraser, 1992, p.210. 19 I am thinking particularly of such artists as Emily Buttle, Jules Novena Sorrel, Donna Demente, writer Louise Wilton (now in Auckland), artist, designer and publisher Caroline McCaw, and the existence of collective studios and practices such as 'Moonscream Studio' (Demente's studio space which functions as a centre for neo-pagan experimentation in performance, music and costume, and the base for 'The Theatre of Alchemy' founded by Demente),'Fidias Fortisse' (a group of four artists who make collaborative paintings), the collective 'Super 8' in their new home in the Zenith Cafe, also the publishing platforms of SPeC (the Otago University Students Association Radio One Magazine), and SNAFU (an occasional publication by members of the 'Super 8' collective). See Emily Buttle and Danny Butt in conversation, 'emily buttle', SPeC, 14(April 1994), p.unpaginated; Jules Novena Sorrel and Louise Wilton in conversation, in Louise Wilton, (ed. ), SUBstance/subSTANCE, SPeC, Dunedin, (September 1993), pp.9-11; and various speakers in Rob Garrett, (ed.), Beautiful and So Inexpensive: A Town Meeting Project, South Island Art Projects and Rob Garrett, Christchurch and Dunedin, 1993. 20 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1958/1971, p.178.
Foucault's Gaze
Introduction This paper is about space, about power and about death: it is about seeing, the gaze (adapted from The Birth of the Clinic 1973:ix). Michel Foucault's exploration of the gaze developed from his empirical investigations of madness and medicine. The gaze is a technique of power /knowledge that creates and exploits a new kind of visibility, of organising people so that they can be seen, known, surveilled and controlled. The gaze gives power to the all-seeing so that they might cure the ills of the gazed upon. The gaze means death to the private: the transgressing and resetting of the boundaries between private and public. In this paper I demonstrate, by surveying the spaces of the central business district and residential suburbs of Perth, Western Australia, that the gaze implies both looking and being looked at. The self gazes, but is also dependent on the gaze of the other, a notion threatening to the self. In the CBD security cameras gaze upon passers-by who, in turn gaze into shop windows at images or fantasies of themselves (their bodies both as they are and as they would like to be). In the new residential suburbs, often contained by walls and gates, high status, high-tech castles are gazed upon but protected from the other by security systems which monitor and watch. Inside, the occupants gaze at their television sets, watching representations of the 'real' world outside. In the complex interaction between the gaze and power, power and space, space and social subjectivity, identity is contingent. We gaze and are gazed upon, private and public, controlling and controlled, sane and insane, alive and dead. 'The Gaze that envelops, caresses, details, atomises the most individual flesh and enumerates its secret bites is that fixed, attentive, rather dilated gaze which, from the height of death, has already condemned life' (Sheridan 1980:42). The 1994 Burswood Casino scandal in Perth testifies to Sheridan's statement. In what has been termed 'rape by camera' (Watson 1994:3), surveillance camera operators in the Casino zoomed in on, taped and passed around the video of women's breasts and genital areas, women changing clothes and urinating.
The Gaze The eyes are found to have acted as a social signal from early in the evolutionary scale. Whenever organisms use vision, the eyes become signals as well as channels of sight (Argyle and Cook 1976). Mutual gaze is well known to be emotionally arousing. Depending on the situation, mutual gaze or awareness of being observed may lead to attack, encouragement or withdrawal. Gaze is often used or reacted to as a signal of threat. An incapacitated subject may prefer to withdraw or modify their behaviour
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rather than challenge the actual or perceived power of the gazer. A subject who feels that they have more power than the gazer, may, alternatively, choose to attack. Gaze thus plays an important function in reflecting social hierarchy. It is only in the primates and humans that gaze functions as an affiliative signal (Argyle and Cook 1976). Women and men can exchange glances of friendship, love, conspiracy and so on. In other species, gaze is primarily a signal of aggression. It is this aggressive interpretation of the gazewhichFoucaultinheritedfromSartreandLacan.Sartre(1956;1960),for example, tells of the watcher in the park whose gaze is initially unchallenged, the sovereign surveyor, but the idea of a centralised subject becomes progressively dismantled when the watcher becomes threatened by the entrance of another. The gazer is in turn gazed upon, and becomes not a viewing point, but viewed, objectified. The master becomes the slave, the Other. Lacan (1978) reworks Sartre's story, dispensing with the idea of the personalised Other. He suggests that between the subject and the world are the discourses of visuality, a cultural construct influencing how the gazer interprets what s/he sees. The viewing subject, therefore, does not stand at the centre of a perceptual horizon and cannot command the unfolding visions. We stand, instead on the field of the other. This form of seeing on the field of the other, Lacan terms 'seeing under the Gaze' (Bryson 1988:94). For Lacan, the Gaze is full of menace and the viewing subject's 'entry into the social arena of visuality is intrinsically disastrous' (Gryson 1988: 107). Lacan's vocabulary is that of menace, terror, capture and death. The Gaze is essentially powerful, menacing. Lacan's ideas of the Gaze thus naturalise menace and terror, itself a terrifying notion. From Lacan's portrait of the menace of vision, Foucault has drawn his analysis of how power uses the social construct of vision; how power conceals its operation and how power exploits this new visibility to see, know, survey and control. In The Birth of the Clinic (1973), Foucault links the gaze to the development of clinical medicine after the end of the eighteenth century. 'The clinic is born in a gaze whose domain is the threat of destruction - The clinic necessarily entails death and transgression' (Lemert and Gillan 1982:71). The individual body is held in subjection by the gaze. As I will demonstrate below, the surveying gaze in our cities may be regarded as an attempt to cure the body of the city (the city corporate) from the social ills (disease) that threaten it with violence and destruction. The gaze watches for (potential) acts of transgression on the part of individual subject bodies, threatening them with an institutionalised response if they do not conform or withdraw. The act of seeing generates knowledge about the seen. Power (the gaze) and knowledge are thus intertwined in the concept of power /knowledge. The gaze is asymmetrical. It is unidirectional in that the gazed upon do not know when they are being watched. It is a technique of power /knowledge which enables administrators to 'better' or 'more effectively' control their subject populations. Foucault uses Bentham's plan for the Panopticon as a paradigm of the gaze. The original Panopticon was an architectural figure: an annular building surrounding a central tower. Both constructions were pierced with
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corresponding windows enabling constant surveillance: 'the Panopticon mechanism arranges spatial unities that make it possible to see constantly and to recognise immediately' (Foucault 1977:200). Through disciplinary spatial ordering, the Panopticon brings together power, knowledge and control of people through the dual imposition of axial visibility and lateral invisibility (Berko 1992). I will demonstrate this concept, in particular, with reference to the city centre and suburbs of Perth. I read the Panoptic on at two levels; of architectural brick and stone and of its imagery, of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form. It is a figure of political technology, 'a type oflocation of bodies in space, of distribution of individuals in relation to one another, of hierarchical organisation, of disposition of centres and channels of power, of definition of the instruments and modes of intervention of power' (Foucault 1977:205). The idea of the Panopticon reverses the principle of the dungeon as an instrument of control and terror. Depth is replaced by height, secrecy and hiddeness by transparency and openness, dark by light: 'the majestic violence of light, which is in itself supreme, brings to an end the bounded, dark kingdom of privileged knowledge and establishes the unimpeded empire of the gaze' (Foucault 1973:28-29). Panopticism is a form of power that has not disappeared since Bentham's time, but has for transcended its original conception. The notion of 'the eye of power', 'eyes that must see without being seen' (Foucault in Rabinow 1984:189) and 'a faceless gaze ... thousands of eyes posited everywhere, mobile attentions ever on the alert' (Foucault 1979:202, 217) is now apparent in the micro- and macropractices of surveillance cameras, spotter planes and satellites. Inspection functions ceaselessly, the strength of its power emphasised by its invisibility and the fact that its subjects are uncertain whether they are being observed at any particular moment. We are deprived of privacy. All our actions are made public. We accordingly surveil ourselves, becoming relatively docile bodies. Compulsory visibility and the gaze thus regulate or normalise behaviour without recourse to violence. 'The object of power is everywhere penetrated by the benevolently sadistic gaze of a diffuse and anonymous power, whose actual existence soon becomes superfluous to the process of discipline' (Jay 1986:191). The legacy of the eighteenth century 'discovery' of continuous, functional surveillance has been a movement from the state using it as a simple disciplinary blockade given to negative functions) (to neutralise dangers, to keep useless or agitated populations in their place and to avoid the problems caused by assemblies of too great a number (Foucault 1977) to a more supple and subtle process of control, a mechanism capable of being used by virtually anyone. In this paper, I look at the physical exercise of the gaze as surveillance in both the city centre and suburbs of Perth. It is a mechanism used by the state, private institutions and individuals to monitor and control behaviour of the other. The gaze incorporates the intolerable into the controllable (Sorensen 1994). The gaze is thus fragmented into an extensive network of power structures. The increasing number and forms of new instruments of surveillance has expanded both the pools of surveillors and subjects for surveillance and produced the possibility that everyone may 'not only be the object of surveillance, but its subject as well' (Berko 1992:63).
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In looking at the gaze in the city, I recognise that the notion of the gaze as power and that of space are intertwined. 'Space is fundamental in any exercise of power' (Rabinow 1984:252). The gaze consists in using the disposition of space and architecture within space for social, economical and political ends. The normative mobilisation of space and architecture rests on the ideas of visibility and surveillance, both being seen and seeing. In response to Ewald's (1992:171) suggestion that we should find out why architecture, stones and walls are so important in the normalisation of space, I offer the duality of an architecture that is no longer built solely to be seen, but to observe those both within and without. Stones can make people docile. Walls confine and exclude. In contrast with the physical heaviness and visible bulk of buildings, stones and walls, the lightness of hidden cameras and surveillance equipment renders spaces and passages transparent. High-tech surveillance is always alert. It establishes presences and absences, knows where and how to locate individuals, sets up communications, interrupts others, and is able to supervise the conduct of each individual, to assess and judge (Foucault 1977:143). Similar to Foucault's notion of the gaze is Debord's (1983) conception of the spectacle. Debord (1983:4,3,1) suggests that 'the spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images'; it represents the' deceived gaze' and 'false consciousness' in which 'everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation'. I will demonstrate how such images, represented through video camcorders, TV screens and dummies in shop windows all serve to coordinate and profound a' chilling metaphor' (Caws 1991:242) of anomie in the contemporary urban environment. Before I turn to the examples of the central city and suburbs of Perth, I need to introduce briefly the concept of the flaneur. The flaneur is the impassive stroller, the man (sic) in the crowd who moves about the streets and places of the city observing but not interacting, gazing at people and sights (Benjamin 1973; de Certeau 1984). The flaneur has unconstrained freedom to look at without being watched or even recognised in the act of looking. The flaneur is a voyeur. There is a hierarchy of flaneurs in the city. The network of surveillance equipment is itself a flaneur, gazing at others, without interacting, while the others themselves are in turn flaneurs, strolling through the city centre or suburban streets gazing through shop windows or across garden walls at commodities. As Wolff (1985) and Pollock (1988) both argue, the flaneur is intrinsically male. It is men who are free to walk around the city, staring at others, unconstrained by domestic duties. The male nature of the gaze is unchallenged, based as it is in the hierarchy of the sexes. There could not be a female flaneur, a flaneuse. The act of gazing is a masculine act, that of being gazed at is feminine.
Perth, a surveilled city centre The Central Business District is the heart of Perth's retail and office space. On weekdays and Saturdays the shopping streets, arcades and mall are crowded with people purchasing, strolling and gazing. After the shops close in the evenings and at weekends, there are no local residents to populate this
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monozoned area, gates are locked across arcades and spaces public by day. The only inhabitants appear to be commuters hurrying to the railway station, groups of young people wandering aimlessly, or the homeless. The core area of the CBD is known as Citiplace. It comprises two open pedestrian malls (Hay Street and Murray Street), a paved open space (Forrest Place), a major shopping complex anchored by Myer and several small arcades linking the parallel malls together. Overhead walkways connect Citiplace to the main railway station and a bus terminal, car parks, and the art gallery, library and museum complex. Within Citiplace pedestrians rule and traffic is relegated to roads at the boundary. Citiplace symbolises Western consumer society. It is a place where spending and consumption are encouraged; a veritable 'paradise for shopping' (Winchester 1992:146), a vision of 'shoppingtown as Eden' (Morris 1993:303). Citiplace sells the image of a comfortable lifestyle, wining, dining and wearing the latest fashions. Shops and major department stores focus on clothing and footwear, predominantly for women. The concept of women as consumers is part of the complex patriarchal structure of society as a whole, the city centre and the gaze in particular. Women purchase for their families and for themselves. Shop windows tell the world what items 'good' mothers are buying for their children and partners and also reinforce the image of women as sexual objects to be beautified. 'The focus of prime-site stores on female fashion indicates and perpetuates the notion of the woman as adornment, a decorative adjunct to the real business of the city which is conducted by men' (Winchester 1992:149). Women gaze into shop windows as palaces of dreams, fantasy images of themselves/their bodies both as they are, reflected in the glass, and as they would like to be. Bodies instantly become slender, tall, young and white, exuding vitality and independence. Women are normalised into ideal types, sporty and fun or stylishly professional, by chain store looks. Store windows offer an (albeit temporary) escape from reality into a new identity, offering the promise of curing all ills, as being becomes degraded into having and having into appearing. Over fourteens (in size) or over fifties (in age) have no place in shop windows, exemplifying the tension
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between the production of a body to be looked at and a body in which to live. How many women are seduced by such fantasies? How many spend amounts they can ill afford, incurring the threat of debt? How many diet and over-exercise to fit into an idealised shape, risking anorexia, bulimia or even death? In such instances the gaze is not all-powerful and controlling, but has been seduced and manipulated by careful marketing strategies. The shopper's gaze may be unidirectional, but it is met by the stony dead stare of the other, in this case, the models who, touting their wares, tempt the gazers and threaten their very selves. Although engaged in the act of gazing, shoppers do not have the liberty of the flaneur. How many realise that they, in turn, are being gazed upon? There are surveillance cameras in many shops, in the casino, in banks and automatic teller machines, at the bus station, in car parks and in the streets of Citiplace itself. Allen (1993) documents that in 1991 Perth City Council installed Australia's first public shopping mall video surveillance system. There is an integrated network of over fifty cameras, mounted in opaque perspex domes about three metres above the street. The cameras are monitored from a central control room where Council operators can pan, zoom, playback scenes or produce still photographs twenty-four hours a day. It gives real meaning to the Council's logo 'see you in the City'! Most Citiplace users, according to Allen, seem unaware of the cameras' presence. They are accepted as part of the cityscape and may be mistaken for lighting fixtures. The surveillance apparatus in Citiplace was intentionally designed, not to protect the safety of the public, but rather to protect the shops and their contents from the violations of the public. Place is hierarchically valued higher than people who are categorised as being either 'good' or 'bad' by virtue of their behaviour in an urban space. 'Good' shoppers spend money. They consume. They do not steal or damage the commodities for sale or the urban infrastructure itself. In contrast, 'bad' subjects, using the area for nonconforming, non-consuming purposes, are to be swept away like litter, moved out so as not to disrupt the legitimate ambience of consumerism. Davis' (1992) account of Los Angeles illustrates the steps the city 'fathers' have taken to reserve an idealised CBD for those able to consume. Barrel-
Perth CBD
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shaped, bumproof, benches make sitting uncomfortable and sleeping impossible; overhead sprinklers operate at random at night, programmed to drench sleepers in parks and doorways; while a seafood restaurant protects its refuse in a cage 'made of three-quarter inch thick steel rods with alloy locks and vicious outturned spikes to safeguard priceless mouldering fishheads and stale french fries' (Davis 1992:233). While Perthmaynot (yet) resemble Los Angeles, people entering Citiplace have no choice in becoming subjects of surveillance. The gaze means death to their privacy, death to their unconstrained liberty. Freedom of speech, freedom of association and freedom of assembly no longer exist. Every action is observed and recorded by officials in the privacy of the control room; officials with the power to repress undesirable or take pin-up photographs of desirable individuals. (See Allen's (1993) account of the secret photography of Craig Turley, sex symbol of the West Coast Eagles football team.) The gaze is objectifying and alienating. Were we aware of being gazed at in such a manner, Wilson (1988:205) suggests that we would feel' anguish and shame in thus being deprived of one's freedom, one's transcendence, and fixed and limited by the look of the other'. Does the surveillance system, as suggested, cure the ills of the gazed upon? Allen (1993) suggests not. Whilst retailers may feel themselves and their premises to be more secure, statistics on crime rates are inconclusive and notoriously unreliable. It would also appear that graffiti artists and others are discovering new ways by which to outwit the cameras. Resistance may be possible. In conclusion to this section I believe that the gaze of the Citiplace security cameras cannot be analysed separately from the ideology of consumption. The cameras are part of the construction of a site for consumption in which people themselves gaze, become normalised and threatened or menaced by consumption itself. The self thus gazes, but it is also dependent on the gaze of the other, a notion threatening to the self.
In Burswood Casino On Monday July 4th 1994 Channel7 television network's Real Life program
showed parts of a two-hour videotape of revealing close-ups of women at Burswood Casino which security camera operators had filmed between 1987 and 1990. Operators monitoring cameras located in women's toilets and artiste's changing rooms as well as in the car parks and main body of the Casino had zoomed in on women's exposed breasts, genital areas and buttocks, together with couples fondling each other or having sex, generally behind large indoor plants, and a woman urinating in the car park. Individual sequences from the 4-year period had been edited onto one tape and shown locally at house parties by the operator(s) responsible. Cameras in the casino are hidden in ceiling fittings and under gaming tables. Patrons are kept unaware of their existence because: 'if people knew that their activities both inside and outside the casino were being recorded, they might be dissuaded from patronising the premises' (Archer 1994:3). It is interesting to note that Stephen Archer, speaking here on behalf of Burswood Resort Management, is more concerned with the possibility of a financial 'downturn in business', than the potential decrease in 'criminal
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activity' that self-policing would create. Media coverage of this incident with headlines such as 'Tape "rape by camera"' (The West Australian 1994a) and 'Sharp eye in the sky tracks you on the sly' (The West Australian 1994b) has caused major public outrage in Perth, not solely over the You ne\·er know who'll be watching. hidden cameras in the casino, \light as well look your best. but also on discovery of the The Bt·a Bur cameras in Citiplace and elsewhere. There are some 200 private companies in Perth Advertisement for lingerie boutique day after operating in a booming secuBurwood Casino video appeared on television rity industry in which some $4 m. is spent on 'security' cameras each year (The West Australian 1994b:3). Public comments have focussed on the Burswood incident as' a gross misuse of the surveillance system' (Gibson 1994:3) as people have realised that there are no national privacy laws nor industry standards for the use of surveillance cameras. Opposition to security cameras is mounting as people recognise the extent of surveillance and its potential abuse. The Burswood Casino incident raises the question of whether surveillance cameras should be overt or covert, real or fake, and whether the surveillors should themselves be surveilled. Would people self-police their 'docile bodies' if they knew (or thought) that they were being gazed upon? If so there might well be a case for conspicuously locating false cameras together with notices warning of surveillance in operation. The other important issue is that of public and private. What constitutes public space and what constitutes private activity in a public space? In the case of the casino whose chief function is gaming, there is probably a case for surveillance of activity at gaming tables. Are women's toilets and changing rooms to be constituted as public spaces however? Is a private kiss behind a large plant an activity for public consumption? Boundaries between public and private have clearly been transgressed and reset by those in control without consultation. A kiss, a call of nature and a change of clothes have become public spectacles as women are menaced by the unseen gaze of the cameras. The'gaze' has thus become the remotely intimate, remotely revealing caress of threat.
Out in the Suburbs Davis (1992:244-50) tells of 'the security-driven logic of urban enclavisation' in Los Angeles where' defence of turf' takes on a new meaning and 'fortified mansions' and 'suburban bunkers' are protected by 'systems' packages including alarm hardware, monitoring, watch patrols, personal escorts and armed response as necessary. Similarly, in Hidden Valley, some 56 km north of Los Angeles, residents have installed a $70,000 (US) hydraulic device that
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shoots metre-long metal cylinders from underground into the bottom of unauthorised vehicles (Pertman 1994). Although Los Angeles is in a league of its own, some 30,000 suburban developments in other cities in the United States alone (Greinacher 1994; Pertman, 1994), in Britain (Planning Week 1994; Finlay 1994) and throughout the world, are following suit (Hillier and McManus 1994). In Perth, the erection of new, walled elite suburban developments as enclaves which penetrate or gentrify areas of existing lower or middle-class residences, represents a violation of those areas, forcing existing residents into a condition of other, excluded, outside of the macho bastions of capitalist power. Characterised by hilltop sites and special statements of design, these new exclusive residential ghettos commodify the search for personal and collective identity, 'the search for secure moorings in a shifting world' (Harvey 1989:302). In order to provide some form of certainty within contingency, place-identity and security become important issues. Space must be defended in order to stop crime before it can occur. Defensible space means space over which we have control. It also tends to mean observed space. The theory of defensible space (Newman 1972) suggests that where public space is open, well lit and surveillable by those inside the private spaces of homes or workplaces, crime rates decrease. 'Panoptic architecture is central to the defensible landscape in which private space is synonymous with surveillance and public space with movement' (Morgan 1993:394). The architecture of surveillance or the gaze includes the use of mirror glass to permit the unidirectional gaze of seeing without being seen, removing obstacles to observation (trees, shrubs etc), installing 'good' lighting and setting up security cameras in unobservable areas, to watch people who are unaware of being watched (Geason and Wilson 1989; Daley 1987). In Perth, in addition to incorporating some or all of the above features,
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The Bay is not all that is viewed
new suburban areas for the aspiring rich are often built on hilltop sites and with particular street and lot configurations which enable surveillance not only of those within the walls, but especially those without. A person's home really begins to resemble the proverbial castle, and it becomes easy to make comparisons with medieval counterparts. In a new lakeside (moated?) subdivision in Perth, Mumford's (1961:350) statement about a medieval town becomes realised today: 'when the portcullis was drawn and the town gates were locked at sundown, the city was sealed off from the outside world'. New suburban developments resemble fortress cities, complete with encompassing walls, restricted entry points with guard posts and privatised roadways. Access to one estate in South Perth is gained after passing closed-circuit television monitors at the walled and gated periphery and having the correctidentificationcard. As yet there are no 'neotraditional;' castle-like suburban developments in Perth, but time will tell. No matter that there were never any castles as such constructed in Western Australia, the so-called 'tradition' in neotraditional architectural design is predominantly invented (Til11993). There are striking oppositions in today's suburbia between those within the walls and those without, between us and them, seeing and seen, rich and poor, empowered or capacitated and disempowered/ incapacitated and between men and women. Such oppositions in contemporary society, however, exist less in the form of overt repression, but rather as avoidances, aversions and separations enacted by the privileged in relation to the oppressed. Kristeva (1982) offers us the useful concept of abjection; the feeling of loathing and disgust in encountering certain alien matter, the other. The abject, however, resides only just on the other side of the border, 'next to it, too close for comfort' (Young 1990:144). These abject others include blacks, unemployed, gays, disabled people etc. They are not so
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unlike the enclave inmates as to be obviously 'different'. Gazed upon outside through windows, mirror glass and by security cameras and guard dogs, and kept at bay by walls, fences and gates, the others intrude nevertheless into the privacy of the fortress' lounges via television and other media. Securely protected from the reality outside, residents gaze at their television sets, watching images and media representations of that same 'real' world. Whilst the gaze of the security apparatus threatens and menaces those outside the house, gazing at the television set often threatens and menaces those within: 'reality rises up within the spectacle, and the spectacle is real' (Debord 1983:58). There is thus a kind of 'geometry' between the abject others, ostracised and excommunicated by the wealthy, and in the middle, the wealthy themselves, suffering from, but perhaps nevertheless, attracted by 'the vertigo of proximity, the hope of the renewal of ties, the house at dawn' (Serres in O'Farrell1989:69). The image of the house at dawn may represent both that liminal state between night and day, between sleeping and waking which electronic eyes never experience and the state between security and threat which human eyes perceive. Where are the women in these new estates? Many are in paid work; others are not. Virtually all are unseen except to emerge through wrought-iron gates or entry statement cocooned in the privacy of a hermetically sealed car. Yet it is traditionally women who surveil and are surveilled. Today, however, the slight movement of net curtains suggesting women's eyes covertly surveilling the street has been replaced by the automatic gaze of electronic eyes, symbolising the failure of trust that neighbours will perform the basic functions of community (McManus 1992; Richards, 1990). Perhaps the neighbours are too busy maintaining/ enhancing their own material lifestyle. The movement of women into the paid workforce, while often increasing individual independence and self-fulfilment, has left the material possessions of each household vulnerable. This trend is reinforced by possession of commodities such as the telephone, television, video recorder
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and high-tech interactive equipment which virtually eliminate the need to leave the home and also reduce knowledge of neighbours. Into this void come land developers with walled suburbs and security companies with surveillance products and services. The new residential areas in Perth, with their walled fortress-like appearances, thus offer exclusivity and inwardness, a private respite and h(e)aven from the other world outside of contingency, disruption and disadvantage. Safety has become 'security', commodified as a personal good defined by income, access to private 'protective services' and membership in some 'restricted suburb' (Davis 1992) where urban design, architecture and security apparatus have merged to ensure (and insure) personal insulation from 'unsavoury' groups and individuals. Houses are built both to see I gaze and be seen/ gazed upon. They make bold statements of status and identity, the manifestation of group values. Such statements are valueless unless they can be heard, or in this case, seen. Yet stories and experiences of burglaries, murders, rapes and so on have created a sense of vulnerability in residents' minds which has entrenched a fortress mentality. What must be gazed upon now are not symbols of wealth and prestige but rather symbols of security and protection. Those inside the house are able to gaze with unsleeping electronic eyes at the others outside, whilst remaining invisible from the human eyes in the street.
In Retrospect The idea of the gaze implies a god's eye view, an external vantage point from which the tangible world is replaced by a selection ofimages and from which all problems are solvable and all ills are curable. Space is appropriated by the gazer who, in surveilling, knows and controls. The gaze turns everyday life into'a theatrical spectacle' (Denzin 1991:8), whether it is the shopper gazing at montages of models in shop windows, the suburban resident watching television, or hidden video cameras, voyeuristically peeping at the comedies and tragedies played out in our cities. The boundaries between public and private are transgressed and reset. What were once public spaces (street, malls, arcades) where people projected their own private subject-selves become public subject-selves territories in privately 'owned' by the videocamera controllers. I have attempted to demonstrate, by surveying the spaces of the central business district and residential suburbs of Perth, that the gaze implies both looking and being looked at. The looking gaze may be powerful and controlling, but the gaze of the other presents a threat. We move between gazing and being gazed upon as we stroll through shopping malls or suburban streets. Our identity is contingent. We are at once and by turn, private and public, controlling and controlled, threatening and threatened, alive and (in still photographs) dead. Do my stories of Perth then represent 'just a gaze. An inspecting gaze' (Foucault in Gordon 1980:155) at the urban areas or are they something other? Whether from the control tower in Perth's central business district, the room in Burswood Casino or the lounge at home, people gaze like omniscient but invisible gods (Jay 1986). The gaze protects empires of capitalism. The gaze signifies control. It signifies power,
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'the benevolently sadistic gaze of a diffuse and anonymous power' (Jay 1986:191). We should not forget, however, that Foucault believed that wherever there is power, there is the possibility of resistance. Can the gaze of the other be stronger than that of the one? Can the gaze of the Medusa head petrify that of the Master culture? (Wilson 1988) Game (1991:74) points out that there is the potential for a substitution of a subject who sees for the object seen 'Seeing-the-other' becomes 'being-seen-by-the-other'. Can the gaze be resisted? The gaze objectifies, limits possibilities, denies freedom; there is seemingly no escape from its menace. Yet both Sartre and Lacan suggest a way out. Through sleep (inactivity or death?), love (community-spirited behaviour would obviate the need for surveillance?) or the mirror we can escape from the all-seeing gaze. Physically, the use of mirrors would turn the gaze of surveillance cameras back on themselves. Mentally, via self-reflection we can put ourselves in the place of the other in an attempt to control absence and understand presence. The space of the gaze is thus rearticulated as the locus of relationships (Pollock 1988). The idea of turning the gaze of surveillance back on the surveillors and reconceptualising the roles of surveillor and surveilled is explored by Berko (1992:72-3) who suggests that the Panopticon can be subverted. She gives examples of the videotaping of the arrest of Eric Johnson by the Sacramento police and of the bashing of Rodney King by the LAPD, to illustrate the 'democratisation of surveillance', the ability of everyday citizens to turn the camera on others and to show the results to the world. In so doing, the ideological framework of Panopticon-like surveillance breaks down as 'cameras expand their vision, (and) the viewers at home witness the other side of power, power out of control' (Berko 1992:78). Further instances of resistance and subversion can be found in the 'freedom' and jouissance (Lefebvre 1974) of youth 'performing' for the camera, whether it be that of the media or a personal video recording. Displays of gang warfare, rioting, joyriding or rapping and break dancing might well be as much a response to the camera's attention as to any deeper stimulus. Campbell's (1993) account of the 1991 urban 'riots' in Britain tells how personal video recordings of joy rider mates were passed round amongst young people in admiration. Campbell writes of the youth subculture of hand-brake turn joyriding which almost demands a police audience for its fulfilment. It is a subculture which has formed 'in the space between surveillance and the evasion of surveillance; it translates the fact of being under scrutiny into the pleasure of being watched' (Hebdige 1988:35). The joyrider's self image becomes a function of being seen. In contrast to the idea of the surveilled as unwitting 'victims' of the Panopticon, resistance transforms the surveilled into performers who demand an audience to witness and certify their performance. 'Visibility ceases to be a trap. You want to be seen and it is precisely the possibility of not being noticed that is frightening' (Berko 1992:88). In a system which obviously expects us to act like criminals (why else, install so much surveillance technology?), some of us have turned crime into performance, whether it be waving or giving the v-sign into security cameras, joyriding before cam cording mates, or recording instances of police going over the top.
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But is there really a gaze, or is it only an hallucination? 'We see 'everything', yet it means less and less' (Wilson 1988:208). In a world devoid of values, voyeurism and surveillance are devoid of moral meanings. Is the gaze sane or insane, or both at once? In suburban areas such as St. John's Wood/Mt. Claremont where a walled estate of up-market residences has been constructed on land formerly belonging to the Graylands mental hospital, one ponders the meaning of walls and surveillance. Do such walled suburbs, replete with the technology of surveillance, represent an image of physical and ideological power, a neo-medieval fortress within which the drawbridge can be raised and surveilled freedom from contact with those outside maintained? Or rather, do they represent a neo-medieval ship of fools, in which the insane were herded onto a ship to sail the seas of Europe? We need also to publicly open the debate over the issue of public versus private. The examples above, all demonstrate the privatisation of the rhetoric of 'public safety', but in whose interests? We need to debate what constitutes a private activity in a public space (as in a casino) or a public activity in private space (rambling on a public right of way across private land?). These contestations should be made public and participatory. Furthermore, public space should be democratised. Users should be aware of who is gazing upon and surveilling whom, when, where and why. Surveillors, such as 'security' camera operators should be publicly accountable, i.e. they should be gazed upon. Democratic accountability should mean that knowledge is available to the public, and since knowledge is power, according to Foucault, resistance is possible. If the old idea of 'freedom of the city' is to regain its meaning, we need to rethink the apparatus of the gaze. We need to resubstitute human eyes for those of video-cameras, human interaction for electronic surveillance, to rediscover the meaning of community in neighbourliness and positive interaction. Utopian? Perhaps, but we shall see!
References Allen, M. (1993). 'Maps and explorations of Citiplace: Perth's micro-society of surveillance', in Watson, S. and Gibson, K. (eds) Postmodern Cities Conference Proceedings. Sydney: Sydney University, pp.1-16. Archer, S. (1994). quoted by Gibson, R. in 'Casino fails to block lewd video'. West Australian 5/7/94:3. Argyle, M. and Cook, M. (1976). Gaze and Mutual Gaze. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Benjamin, W. (1973). Charles Baudelaire, Lyric poet in the era ofhigh capitalism. London: New Left Books. Berko, L. (1992). 'Surveying the surveilled: video, space and subjectivity'. Quarterly Review of Film and Video. 14(1-2):61-91. Bryson, N. (1988). 'The gaze in the expanded field', in Foster, H. (ed.) Vision and Visuality. Seattle: Bay Press, pp.87-108. Campbell, B. (1994). Goliath. London: Methuen. Caws, M. (1991). City Images. New York: Gordon and Breach. Channel7 TV, (1994). Real Life. Program screened on 4/7/94.
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Daley, P. (1987). The Neighbourhood Crime Prevention Handbook. Sydney: Angus and Robertson. Davis, M. (1992). City of Quartz. New York: Vintage. de Certeau, M. (1984(. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Debord, G. (1983). Society of the Spectacle. Detroit: Black and Red. Denzin, N. (1991). Images ofPostmodern Society. London: Sage. Ewald, F. (1992). 'A power without an exterior', in Armstrong, T. (ed.) Michel Foucault Philosopher, New York: Routledge, pp.179-175 Finlay, I. (1994). 'Britain's most sophisticated urban closed circuit television security system'. Beyond 2000. Channel Ten. TV programme screened 12th May. Foucault, M. (1973). The Birth of the Clinic, trans. Sheridan, A., London: Tavistock.
__ _, Discipline and Punish, trans. Sheridan, A., New York: Pantheon. Game, A. (1991). Undoing the Social. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Geason, S. and Wilson, P. (1989). Designing Out Crime. Canberra: Australian Institute of Criminology. Gibson, R. (1994). 'Casino fails to block lewd video'. West Australian 5 July 1994, p.3 Gordon, C. (1980). Michel Foucault: Power/Knowledge. Brighton: Harvester. Greinacher, U. (1994). 'The new reality: media technology and urban fortress'. Paper presented to Making Cities Livable Conference, San Francisco. Harvey, D. (1989). The Postmodern Condition. Oxford: Blackwell. Hebdige, D. (1988). Hiding in the Light. New York: Routledge. Hillier, J. and McManus, P. (1994). 'Pull up the drawbridge: fortress mentality in the suburbs', in Watson, S. and Gibson, K. (eds) Metropolitan Australia, Sydney: Pluto Press. Jay, M. 1986, 'In the empire of the gaze', in Hoy, D. (ed.) Foucault: a critical reader. Oxford: Blackwell, pp.175-204. Kristeva, J. (1982). Powers of Horror: an essay in abjection. New York: Colombia University Press. Lacan, J. (1978). The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis, trans. Sheridan, A. New York: W.W. Norton. Lefebvre, H. (1974). La Production de l'Espace, Paris: Anthropos. Lemert, C. and Gillan, G. (1982). Michel Foucault: Social Theory and Transgression, New York: Colombia University Press. McManus, P. (1992). This is where I live. Report presented to Feilmans Planning Consultants, Perth. Morgan, G. (1993). 'Acts of enclosure: crime and defensible space in contemporary cities', in Watson, S. and Gibson, K. (eds) Postmodern Cities Conference Proceedings, Sydney: Sydney University Press, pp.386-98. Morris, M. (1993). 'Things to do with shopping centres', in During, S. (ed.) The Cultural Studies Reader, London: Routledge, pp.295-319. Mumford, L. (1961). The City in History, London: Penguin. Newman, 0. (1972). Defensible Space: crime prevention through urban design. New York. O'Farrell, C. (1989). Foucault. Historian or Philosopher? London: Macmillan.
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Pertman,A. (1994). 'Accessdeniedinneighbourhoodofthe90s'. West Australian, Big Weekend. 2nd April. West Australian, Perth, WA. Pheby, K. (1988). Interventions. Washington: Maisonneuve Press. Planning Week (1994). 'RTPI voices concerns over 'fortress mentality". Planning Week, 13th January, p.4. Pollock, G. (1988). Vision and Difference. London: Routledge. Rabinow, P. (1984). The Foucault Reader. London: Penguin. Richards, L. (1990). Nobody's Home. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Sartre, J.P. (1956). Being and Nothingness, trans. Barnes, H. New York: Philosophical Library. __ _, (1960). 'The other and his look', in Treller,J. (ed.) To Freedom Condemned. New York: Philosophical Library. Sorensen, R. (1994). 'Why is becoming other always becoming leather?' Paper presented at Foucault The Legacy conference. QUT, Surfer's Paradise, 4-6 July. Till, K. (1993). 'Neotraditional towns and urban villages: the cultural production of a geography of otherness'. Environment and Planning D. Society and Space 11:70932. Watson, J. (1994). quoted by Fitzpatrick, C. in 'Tape 'rape by camera". West Australian, 5 July, p.3.
West Australian (1994a). 'Tape 'rape by camera". West Australian, 5th July, p.3. __ _, (1994b ). 'Sharp eye in the sky tracks you on the sly', 6th July. p.3. Wilson, E. (1988). Hallucinations. London: Radius. __ _, (1991). The Sphinx in the City. London: Virago. Winchester, H. (1992). 'The construction and deconstruction of women's roles in the urban landscape', in Anderson, K. and Gale, F. (eds). Inventing Places, Melbourne: Longman Cheshire, pp.139-158. Wolff, J. (1985). 'The invisible flaneuse; women and the literature of modernity'. Theory, Culture and Society. 2(3):37-48. Young, I.M. (1990). Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
'Architectural Irregularities': Discourse and Technique in a Foucauldian History of the Picturesque Cottage
Jolin Macarthur In architectural history the uptake of Michel Foucault's work has been strangely limited. On the one hand we have an ignorant deployment which
limits Foucault to 'what he found out', and which misunderstands his historiography. This rather boring Foucault tells us what 'the body' or 'representation' really was so that architectural developments can be put in a context of 'ideas'. On the other hand, those architectural historians who do work faithfully in the manner of Foucault, generally find that there is nothing that corresponds to the 'architectural-ness' of such a history. And indeed some of the most interesting analyses of buildings using historical materials are being produced in 'Cultural Studies' not in 'Architecture'.l Therefore, wecouldsaythattheuptakeofFoucault'sworkhashad the effect of deepening the paradox of the practices of a history of a discipline, which must always define itself, in general, against a context, while listing a history of specific effects between the discipline and a general history. This should not be the case. Foucault's sophisticated concepts of context and of technique ought to take us beyond simple models of reflection between the history of an art form and a totalised history. Foucault asked: 'What in fact are medicine, grammar, or political economy? Are they merely a retrospective grouping by which the contemporary sciences deceive themselves as to their own past?'2 In this case Foucault answers no: although these disciplines do not have separate autonomous histories, they have the regularity and relation to the 'figure of man' pointed outinTheOrderofThings. Thesehuman'sciences',arenotpositivities:which is to say that they do not have epistemic structures which transcend their institutional settings. Nevertheless, the Human Sciences possess their own regime of counts as truth, and this is organised within a coherent discursive formation which can be the object of an historical inquiry. But could we claim the same level of epistemic and discursive structure for architecture? Foucault's challenge to the self-evidence of a disciplinary history still bites in architecture, where history generally means a rhetorical demonstration that architecture is something given, whole and coherent which can be revealed beneath the tribulations of its long career. Architecture is clearly not an historical discursive formation as were the Human Sciences. There has been, of course, a 'discourse' on architecture which is often falsely said to be a positive form of knowledge because it consists in texts which are on or about architecture. But in fact if one tries to read (for example) Kruft' sA History ofArchitectural Theory: from Vitruvius to the present, it becomes clear that these discourses on architecture are at a
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remove from their referents and, in their own series, are historically discontinuous on a short cycle. 3 One cannot read John Ruskin together with Le Corbusier (let alone Vitruvius) without being obliged to model the difference of both their discursive economies and their imbrication in a larger strata of discourse on the social. Knowing that they are both 'about' architecture is no help. Now, one might object that the problems of someone like Kruft inquiring into the 'discourse' on architecture are the result of a too narrow, linguistic, account of discourse. Indeed Foucault is sometimes invoked at this point to imagine that a unity of architecture could be grasped if we were to extent the concept of discourse to include spaces. It is demonstrable that the units of discourses (their statements, objects, and even concepts) are not limited to natural language. Jeffrey Minson gives a good example in considering the confessional as involving a specialised language, a training, a cosmology, furniture, and body posture. But it is much more difficult to imagine what a discursive formation would be if large parts of its structures and economies were not 'linguistic'. 4 Panopticism is an architectural concept, but what would it be to inquire into its forms of availability if Bentham had not named it and opened a metonymy between the device and concepts of governance in his pamphlet? A Foucauldian architectural historian might expect to have something to say about the relation of the Panopticon to built nineteenth century prisons and to neoclassicism. Perhaps something could be said to disrupt and redirect the notions of identity in form which are typical of architectural history discourse; but there is nothing to remark here except discontinuity. This seems to be a matter of fact as is demonstrated by Robert Adam's design of the Edinburgh Bridewell, where after a correspondence with Bentham, Adam managed to produce something rather like Ledoux's expressiveplanimetrics in a clear misunderstanding of discursive referents and techniques of the 'disciplinary regime'. 5 Of course there are many other things that an architectural historian could have told Foucault about the Panopticon, for example that its viewing structure is an inversion of the opera theatre, but what would this be a telling of? Such a history would be a list of misappropriated techniques; and failed conceptualisations. And this is (in a somewhat better light) is what I suppose that the history of architecture can be. Foucault insists that techniques cannot be described in some originating intention nor as the extension of ideas but rather as something like their property, which can be: constructed, but also appropriated, inherited, repolarised, and re-named. It is this line of thought which I intend to pursue as the operative question of an 'architectural' history. The history of the prison is that it is designed to reform, fails, and is reoriented as a point of inspection of the lower-classes. But what was the prison at the moment when it had failed and before it was reinvested by power? In Discipline and Punish the relation of techniques to discourse and power is unclear to the extent that 'technique' becomes metonymic of 'power', a mere qualifier which reminds us that we are to be disinterested in the question of the possession and interests of power. Discursive formations are where power and knowledge are organised, where techniques are named and what counts as their effectivity is calibrated. Yet if techniques have these relatively
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autonomous histories, this supposes that they are in some way non or prediscursive. At this point my argument is contentious, because one of the major lines of the development of Foucault's thought claims that there can be no non-discursive realm without reintroducing an ontology of language and large epistemological claims, which Foucault set out to avoid. Paul Hirst persuasively argues that one should consider buildings and architectural ideas as a form of statement and specify their relation to discursiveformations. 6 HirsttakesFoucaulttohaveshown thattherewasno general distinction between discourse and non-discourse, nor between language and non-linguistic statements in a discourse. Thus there could be no realm of architectural things defined in their materiality nor any a priori concept of architecture. What architecture is, or was, is specific to particular historical formations. The paradoxes of contextualising architecture then only arise through a failure to understand that the discipline of architecture is an historical and political contingency of little significance in itself. If we follow Hirst we would have to be sceptical about architecture, not about the conceptual density of buildings or their specific histories, but any analysis which had recourse to a History of Architecture would begin to look like a mythology, the production through endless examples of a supra-historical concept of architecture. Robert Adam's correspondence with Bentham would not be an issue for Hirst as it would be for an historian who began by assuming a unified architecture which could be accounted for against its context. Adam would be of only antiquarian interest, confirming Foucault's dictum that, the while the past is replete with documents and voices, the 'statements' which are discursively regular (and which thus allow us to understand historical structures) are rare. Hirst suggests that one should take up the style or manner of Foucault's practice in a commitment to specific analysis of statements, remembering their rarity and in regard to their formation, forgetting any a priori division of documents into texts, buildings, bodily practices, forms of order, or images. Contrary to Hirst I will argue that there are general forms of division of historical documents into discursive and non-discursive materials. My argument is not that this division is a priori, an issue of the material form of historical documents as linguistic or otherwise. Rather, I follow Gilles Deleuze'sschematisationofFoucaultinwhichadivisionofthingsarticulable and things visible is an empirically observable aspect of particular historical formations, related to their regime of truth effects and to the formation of techniques. I will first look at what it might mean to look at such a nondiscursive structure in a specific historical context and my example will be the picturesque architecture of the pattern books for ornamental cottages in the decades around 1800. Here I claim we can see something like the modern concept of architectural'planning' having a kind of sub-conceptual exercise immediately prior to its discursive structures. My point is that without supposing some trans-historical spirit or material proper to architecture we can nevertheless speak of it as a series, as Architecture, when there is evidence of such genealogy of techniques. HI have a conclusion then it is that techniques, their formation and uptake, which provide the operative question for any architectural history.
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Ornamental Cottages Eighteenth century European gardening relied heavily on ornamental buildings which directed views of the landscape. The buildings were mock temples and pavilions which recalled the setting of classical stories, or sometimes exotic visions of the Orient. Their role in any case was one of transporting the viewer who, seemingly fortuitously, would come upon the marvellous and the distant, offered up as a picture into which one could walk. Around 1800 rustic cottages suddenly became a genre of ornamental buildings, often used as gatehouses in the place of what might have been a triumphal arch a generation earlier. A conceit based on the reach and power of the architect and gardener's abilities with illusion, became instead a conceit based on the fine discrimination of the viewer. The visitor had to distinguish the cottage which ornamented the visual and ideational complex of the landscape from the disgusting hovels of the workers who generated its wealth. Not that the distinction was difficult to make at a simple level, but it represented a challenge to evince a competence which had to juggle a political iconography with the old doctrines of mimesis and the new aesthetics of disinterested judgment. This new game of genre interpolation in landscape park design is contemporary with events which put the agricultural workers' cottage near the centre of political debate. In 1796 Pitt's government launched a pre-emptive strike against civil disobedience in the countryside in the belief that the Revolution was about to cross the channel, and during the Napoleonic Wars there were more troops engaged in policing dissent in the countryside than there were fighting on the Continent.7The cottage was an important socioeconomic category because common rights (to pasture) were held to be attached to cottages, and tenancy in a cottage was grounds for a claim of settlement in a parish, and settlement was the basis of public assistance to the poor. Large land holders appropriated and enclosed the common lands and as grain prices inflated during the wars, both the schemes of public assistance to the poor and access to land for subsistence agriculture failed. The cottagers' response was to take over grain markets and insist on customary prices, to re-occupy enclosed land and to read Paine's Rights of Man in the village ale-house. The cottages which housed these people were mud walled, thatched roofed hovels without floors, or flues for the fires, and it is clear from contemporary commentators that a disgust at the living conditions of the poor complements disgust at their 'disloyalty'. The building of cottages as ornaments in landscape parks, sometimes for gardeners and workers in the park, but sometimes also for the family to 'retreat' to, seems almost inexplicably perverse. How could it be elegant to picnic in the simulacrum of a grimy tricolour? There is a sub-school of art history (following John Barrell) which has examined the land holders' taste for paintings of poor beggar girls, rabble in ale-houses, and occasionally labourers at work in the fields. s While the patterns of reference and the contemporaneity of the cultural forms and political changes are clear, the model of power is not. It is unclear whose interests are served by ornaments founded out of rural poverty, and Barrell loosely suggests that this ideology is a sort of psychic recursion, a sublimation of political animosity into the ambiguously charitable charms of the picturesque.
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If such an ideological relation were at work we might expect to find it explained in the theory of the picturesque, the new English aesthetic of the 1790s, identified with a taste for cottages and propounded most forcefully by Uvedale Price. 9 Price held that picturesqueness consisted in the intricacy and variety of form, and that an aspect of this was the irregularity of picturesque objects. By this Price means that a picturesque plantation or cottage forms no easy Gestalt, so that one view of it will be insufficient to imagine its totality, and for the moving observer it will create a number and variety of views. Price's picturesque is concerned with the classification of objects and finding a basis for public taste, rather than being, in the postKantian sense, an analytic of aesthetic judgement and the basis of critique. Thus the picturesque engages with art practises at the level of genre formation. If the beautiful is about formal qualities such as perfection, preciousness, and harmony, it is also the operative category of history painting. For Price, the formal qualities of the picturesque are a generalisation of the qualities of landscape and genre painting. Picturesque objects then tend to be close at hand, familiar and worn, in contrast to the elevated and distanced beautiful or sublime. The approbation 'picturesque cottage' is then quite tautological. The picturesque is the project of defining a lower genre of landscape and buildings which ornament it, and its formal categories are derived from the objects found there. 'Picturesqueness' thus answers a need for a concept of approbation for objects which had no intrinsic value, but also that more empirical problem of English land holders who could thus distinguish, for example, the free beauty of their horses from the familiar picturesqueness of their worker's houses. Price describes cottages and villages throughout the three volumes of his Essays on the Picturesque, and devotes a major essay to the question of a picturesque architecture. This essay is about what architects might learn from paintings and about generic categories, where Price reminds the reader of the few occasions for building in a grand manner and the many economical opportunities to exercise taste in rebuilding cottages. The picturesque is only half of the explanation of a taste in cottages, and it leaves many riddles. Price's intention is a prescription for landscape designers, but within the text his descriptions of picturesque things and experiences are always set while walking abroad in the prosaic countryside. AtthesametimeweknowthatPricedidnothimselffeelsafeoutsidethepale of his park at Foxely unless armed and on horseback. He was also the author of On the Defence ofProperty, a tract which proposed a mounted citizen militia who would make the countryside safe for strolling picturesque aesthetes who might otherwise be assaulted by the landless classes. 10 In regard to our immediate question of cottages, the particular issue which has been obscured is whether the picturesqueness of cottages is an ornament to a landscape design or to England as a whole, and whether when Price advises to improve them, he distinguishes a mimetic cottage from those lived in by workers. Price's split-mindedness prompts further investigation, and it is apparent that alongside picturesque discourse there is a contemporaneous discourse on agricultural reform, which also has a particular role for the cottage. Alongside the ornamental cottage there was a Reforming cottage, par
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exemplar the disciplinary regime, the thatched policing of families. 11 This reformist cottage also stands in a relation of succession with the fixing of the population by the massive forces of sovereign government, just as Foucault contrasts the French regulations for governing plague towns with the Panopticon. The reformers begin with a premise that agricultural unrest has primary cause in poor housing, in the fabric of cottages and in the behaviour of their inhabitants. The reformers saw the faults of the cottages around them not, in the first place, as a poverty of land, building materials and fuel, but as aspects of more extensive moral and intellectual failings of the cottagers: irreligion, readiness to revolt, adultery and incest, irrational attitudes to diet, resistance to modern agricultural practices, and a maddening ambition to set up as independent farmers. The reformed cottage was a complete regime which was designed as a domestic economy of women and children intersecting with the paid labour of the male 'cotter'. The cottage garden was sized so as to be incapable of completely supporting the family, there was to be no accommodation for taking apprentices so as to set up farming, and in the Communications to the Board of Agriculture there are long and fascinating debates about how the cottagers might have a cow for milk, but without profiting from breeding. Reformers promoted what was then a novel sexual division of labour with the idea that women's work in the cottage and garden and the raising of employable children would replace the dowry systems which had failed as rural poverty increased. The cottage came bundled with pamphlets which encouraged women to develop basic hygienic, dietary and child rearing expertise. The cottage provided tools for production, images of a subjectivity to attain, and finally in its upkeep and the productivity of its garden, a token improved or debased, which is visible to all. The reformers' cottage is then a clear example of Foucault's concept of a disciplinary regime. It is a device which is: 'positive', that is it draws out and rewards the cotters as well as their landlords; it constructs norms of behaviour through equipage as well as physical partition; and its economy is self-correcting, as well as being externallyinspectable. With the cottage we can see that much more directly (than in the case of the prison) Foucault's argument that the 'abstraction' of the body as labour power happens on the ground of its construction as a subjectivity.12 The picturesque and agricultural reforms are then two discursive formations where two sets of texts, sites and administrative constraints are overlaid historically, most obviously at the point where they address a single class of land holders who had an aesthetic and a managerial relation with the countryside. A mapping of both discourses would show that although they share few objects and concepts there are relations of complement and opposition which give us cause to think of them as a discursive constellation rather than being merely temporarily contingent. While reform and the picturesque have complementary views of the subjectivity of land holders, they each define an object, the cottage, completely differently, indeed obversely. The cottage is a significantly regular discursive shifter or hinge, and in recognising the two discursive objects at stake in it the land holder was constantly articulating the fortuitous pairing of landed wealth
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and taste. As Derrida would say: economimesis.13 Nowhere is the articulation of the double cottage object clearer than in the genre of architectural pattern books for cottage design, because the architects where unable to keep to this discursive rule. There were some 90 pattern books published between 1780 and 1830, largely by young architects advertising their talents and desperate to have their designs determined by both the picturesque and agricultural reform. 14 The books typically begin with an essay followed by a set of designs. It is rare to see much competence in the handling of politico-aesthetic referents, and this is not explained by the cross determinations of any formalised discourse on Architecture. If the pattern book text advertises a national imperative to improve the housing of agricultural labourers, the designs are likely to have too many or too few bedrooms; if Price is quoted it is quite possible that the designs will be the prim Georgian style he detested. But most significantly most of the pattern books set out their designs in a range of sizes, and as many start with labourers' cottages and work up through ornamental buildings to villas for the gentry in a cottage style, this creates all sorts of unwanted politicoaesthetic inferences. However, despite the failure and incoherence of pattern book discourse, the pattern books are very significant historically. They are the mosttangible documents of the emergence of architectural planning, which will become one of the fundamental techniques of modern societies. What the pattern book architects saw, but were unable to articulate, was that the picturesque form of complex roof shapes was the consequence of non-symmetrical plan forms, and further, the ability to begin planning a building from a functionalist analysis of room interrelations tended to produce non-symmetrical plans. The two discursive cottages are thus joined not only in that they have the same referents but in that they suppose the same technique in the strategy for their proliferation. The architects call this technique 'irregularity', which has a topicality because of Price's use of it to describe the qualities of picturesque objects. While for Price irregularity is very abstract, he also directed architects' attention to the ancient manor houses, with their centuries of accretions, and the naively built peasant's cottages which did have irregular, asymmetrical plan forms. Prior to this, the symmetry of the plan is the principle by which architecture could be distinguished from vernacular building, a rambling accretion of parts which is 'unclosed' by an idea or intention of an architect. John Nash and Humphry Repton probably designed the first irregularly plarmed architectural work since the Renaissance at Luscombe, Devon, in 1799.15 They wanted the primary rooms on the ground floor oriented to particular views at ninety degrees to one another. A symmetrical plan was therefore implausible because of the dissymmetry of the views, and impossible because the service rooms of the building, which would normally be on the ground or in a half-basement, had to be on the same level as the main apartments. Irregularity might have begun as an imitation of medieval styles, but it allowed very specific room relation, ease of servicing, and an ability to deal with additions and change. With the vantage point of history we can see a definite and fundamentally modern principle emerging whereby
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the 'planning' has two axes. The first is a concern with the dialogue and mutual definition of spaces inside and outside the building, and the second is the use of a functionalist analysis of room requirements, interrelation, and servicing. But there was no contemporary discussion of the planning principles which architects such as Nash, Soane, and the better pattern book architects, clearly must have 'understood' at some level. The only documented discussion of these matters before 1850 is in the cottage pattern books and there 'irregularity' is discussed in a fractured and confused way, not as a technical device, but as to how it might be semantically commensurate with the twin discourses on the picturesque and agricultural reform. The dislocation of discursive referents and architectural technique can be seen most clearly in the books of Malton and Elsam. In 1797 James Malton published British Cottage Architecture which argues for an irregular plan form from Price's concept of the visual complexity and directionality of picturesque objects, but without stating any of the other advantages of irregular planning. 16 He also argues that the associations of irregularity are entirely scenic and not social and that the same cottage style is applicable to labourers and gentlemen's houses. The designs also include a mixture of rustic materials and some faked decay. They are quite charming and not a world away from any overtly picturesque cottages builtin England up to the present day. Malton is then attacked in a rival pattern books. Richard Elsam accuses Malton of an affront to taste by housing the gentry in buildings which look like peasant's hovels. 17 For Elsam this implies a loss of signifying functions for architecture. Malton, taken aback by the criticism quickly produced another book of extreme symmetrical designs in non-rustic materials.18 Yet this second book, Designs, is typical of many of the pattern books in that the regular designs are not symmetrical in the full sense of the word. For classical architects symmetry is an overall sense of propriety, the immanence of ordo in every consideration, but in the pattern books uniformity, is seldom to do with balance and harmony of this sort, and as in Malton's triangular designs, the reduction of the concept of symmetry to plan geometry. The villa is the preferred vehicle of architects timid of the political connotations of cottage, as Malton is in his second book, and gentlemen's cottages and villas provide architects with a particular freedom to manipulate form. The villa is the complement to the cottage in that it is about the formation of bourgeois subjectivity, and is related to ideas of privacy and companionable marriage. While the cotter's wife will be given a new technical role in domestic economy, the gentlewoman, jaded and made artificial by the mechanics of entertaining and being received in the full light of society, will retire temporarily to a shady cottage where she will find herself in long walks, charitable acts and novel reading. Architects like Malton make much of these images to justify stretching the cottage type up the social range, but it also gives them a particular freedom in that such buildings will not require extensive service areas, which in country houses used for entertaining, typically equalled the public rooms in area. Buildings with peculiar symmetries such as the triangular or circular were extremely
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difficult to achieve with large service areas. So while the cottage opened on one hand to the irregular and free planning which could be learnt from accretionary buildings, it also opened symmetrical figures in a quite novel way. Now, rather than the manifestation of an ideal, they represented a demanding task over which the architect could demonstrate the bravura of producing furnishable rooms out of a triangular plan. We are now ready to say that the dislocated citation of discourses of the social and aesthetic by architects actually functions to open a space in which the technique of planning will emerge. This is perhaps clearest in the work of Joseph Gandy the architect who is the most laconic and negligent of discursive referents and the most skilled and focused on planning techniques.19 Gandy sets out to provide a systematic exploration of plan figures in apparent ignorance of the controversy as to their semantics. These range from bilateral symmetry, polarised single axis symmetry, broken symmetry, and free asymmetry. In one design he shows how four dwellings of the same floor area could be combined together to form a single asymmetrical building, and then presents another in which four dwellings of a progressive range of size and room number could be perversely planned as a building which would have the appearance of bilateral symmetry. This display of purposiveness can have no actual purpose except to advertise a skill in planning, newly differentiated from architecture as such. We know that subsequent to this period the ability of architects to 'plan' involves a whole range of specialised considerations; of plot ratio, ratio of gross to net floor area, the articulation of structure, solving complex requirements for the interrelation of spaces, and directing the sequence of attention of users of the building. Each of these is a teachable skill involving the use of particular types of drawing and calculation. Such particular tasks have been largely unintelligible to architects of the period, but they are already preparing the conceptual space of such activities, a space of meta-technics, in which architecture could understand itself in its 'applicability' and in relation to other emerging techniques of the social. After 1810 'irregularity' is gradually dragged away from its politicodiscursive referents through the invention of the asymmetrical 'rural Italian' style. The issues which Malton had raised return with the Old English cottage style in the 1830s by which time the political associations had changed. In 1850s Robert Kerr, an expert on the planning and management of country houses, addressed the RIBA and claimed that the poor preferred one room dwellings and that the differentiation of activities and access which planning could achieve was best associated with the more developed society of the middle and upper classes. 20 He was apparently shouted down because by then planning had a discursive regularity, it answered to a concept of technique, and one which was identified not with social classes but with the specific and definitive expertise of architects. Talking ofplanimetrics in relation to social class and generic height, which the pattern-book architects had begun in a spluttering way, was by 1850 not a possible form of statement in architectural discourse.
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Discourse and Technique Through my exposition I have opposed discourse and architectural technique and attempted to take seriously the failure of the pattern book architects to engage in these two discursive formations. In doing this I have followed Gilles Deleuze's exposition and development ofFoucault's historical method. 'What The Archaeology recognised but still only designated negatively, as non-discursive environments, is given its positive form in Discipline and Punish, a form that haunted the whole of Foucault's work: the form of the visible, as opposed to the form of whatever can be articulated' ,21 Foucault has shown us, according to Deleuze, that major shifts in the history of thought have relied on structuring a relation between what is visible and what is sayable. Indeed knowledge is defined by the combinations of visible and articulable that are unique to each stratum or historical formation',22 NowthisrunsdirectlyagainsttheadviceofPaulHirstwhichwouldhaveme consider 'irregularity' as some sort of discursive object or concept, and which I think would result in a description where the cottage pattern books could only be a sort of anomaly. If Deleuze is correct, then this would explain the great appetite which Cultural Studies seems to have for the built environment. These 'general historians' imagined by Foucault have interesting things to say about the buildings which they come across because they have begun with what can be 'said'; institutions and practices of governmentality which necessarily produce diagrams of relations between visibilities, normalised behaviour and discourse at the moment when they build. By contrast, analyses of architecture which begin with questions of 'visibilities' like irregular planning, will always describe an architecture which is either inadequately engaged in discourse and concrete historical formations, or, is completely determined by them, like the reformed housing of the 1850s where there is nothing 'architectural' to look at, only the determination of building by a reformist discourse. Whatever interconnections and dependencies there are will always be more or less like the cottage pattern books, the evidence not of a system of the dispersal of statements in which architecture is engaged, but the splatter of an impact as discourse shoots through the tissue of space. Hirst's advice is so firm on the discursive nature of architecture because he follows Brown and Cousins' criticism of The Archaeology which is; that by inadequately differentiating his concept of the statement from linguistic units, and discourse from language, Foucault inadvertently allows that there might be a 'real' which discursive formations document more or less adequately. 23 Thus the description of discursive formations in their own terms, as monuments, has collapsed into something like a relativist epistemology. Brown and Cousins therefore insist that there are no unified realms of discursivity and the 'non-discursive', merely things (whether they are words, buildings or administrative procedures) which either do or do not form statements in a particular discursive formation. The discursivity of certain buildings is then one proof of the pudding that discourse is the formation and organisation of statements rather than something wrought out of linguistic material.
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Deleuze's account of Foucault is useful because he has a much more commonsensical understanding of discourse as a linguistic organisation, but within a complex structure which accounts for most of the methodological problems which Brown and Cousins raise, if not their attempt to weaken Foucault's epistemological claims. Deleuze is claiming that the opposition of visible and articulable forms is general and more extensive than any discursive formation. It swings around the putative 'natures' of language and visibilities, but it is an historically concrete speculation on the capacities of these 'natures'. Thus we cannot simply divide historical objects into discourses and visibilities on the basis of their linguistic content or form. Some parts of buildings might be in the realm of what is articulable, others form mechanisms of visibility; and this relation is in flux, because although the articulable level has a primacy and acts to determine the visible, each side enacts a strategy of capture. Thus the picturesque suddenly determined that humble buildings could be seen as architecture, and the pattern book architects attempted, and failed, to interject a concept of 'irregularity' into aesthetic discourse. To name and mark something as non-discursive, in the sense of being positively a field of visibility, is not then an issue of how or from what statements and visibilities are formed, but an issue of what Foucault calls discursive strategies. For Deleuze what he calls 'historical formations' are 'concrete machines' which deploy the two parts of visible and articulable forms, but they are also the successors to more' abstract machines' which are their 'immanent cause'. Abstract machines are abstract in that they are a diagram of the entire social field, and in that they do not distinguish between discourse and nondiscourse. Disciplinarity is such an abstract machine, which, in a non-place, arranges the whole of the social. But concrete disciplinary regimes arrange particular populations and whether they do so by buildings, statistical data, legal codes or police, they can be described in the way in which they form and intersect fields of discursivity and visibility. Historically, the emergence of concrete machines and the production of social effects can be observed in their reaching a threshold of technicity at which point they enact this division. It follows that we cannot examine the adequacy of a technique to some idea of it, because these things stand either side of an historical threshold. It also follows that although techniques can become the object and concepts of discourse, they are, in the first place, non- or pre-discursive. Which is why I would want to say that the cottage pattern books are such a threshold which immediately precedes the nineteenth century organisation of what can be seen, said and planned for in urban form, domesticity as the formation of self, and the house as gender marked equipment. In the case of the cottages, it is clear that architectural things form discursive statements. Bread ovens are an object of discourse as much as incest, and the concept of what acts on incest is access arrangements between rooms as much as it is religious instruction. The drawing of plans is a regular form of'enunciation', alongside the calculation of the cottage economy, and eulogies to the usefulness, loyalty and virtue of independent cottagers. We could do a similar mapping of the picturesque which shows that an aspect of their pairing is a similar level of the engagement of architecture into
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discursive economies. But the corpus of cottage pattern books is not regular with either of these, nor does it constitute a discursive formation of its own, nor is it part of a delimited architectural discourse. Its relation is that it is making something with the inadequate name 'irregularity'; a word which barely makes sense as an architectural term, is meaningless in reformist discourse, and has a different meaning in picturesque discourse. According to Foucault, one of the principles of 'semio-technique' was that techniques of punishment required 'sufficient ideality' and it is something like this that marks the failure of an architectural discourse on the cottage to rise and intersect with those on agricultural reform and the picturesque. The irregularity of cottage architecture had insufficient ideality. Within the discourses it was quite simple to 'think' an admiration for complex roof forms, or the separation of children from parents in tiny buildings, but nowhere is there a place to see that these aesthetic and disciplinary projects are unknowingly dependent on a single technical innovation, a task, as it were, spat out of discourse, unnamed. What is, would it be, to generalise from my case study and Deleuze's rather Baroque theory? What would it mean to start with technique? Provenance, yes, objectification in discourse, certainly, place in a strata of visibilities, yes, although it is not entirely clear what this would be. 24 But these are historical questions and an archaeology of techniques would require the terms of a positive description. Reading Deleuze (and Adorno )25 alongside the analysis of 'irregularity' has led me to think of it this way; that technical assemblages construct sets of materials, and in a way which partners what Foucault calls regimes of truth. Discursive formations construct truth regimes, bounded areas of thought where the true I false distinctionrunsitswrit,andfromwhichthingsareexcludedorincludedasamatter of historical struggle. Deleuze describes these regimes in terms of a well determined primacy in the 'two-part machine' of discourse over visibilities. Truth is enacted in the project of 'speaking and seeing at the same time .. ', in the act of determining vision within a discursive framework, ' .. although we do not speak what we see, or see what we speak'. 26 This problematisation crosses an epistemological threshold when a kind of viewing is determined to be the concept of a science, when the thing viewed is 'objectified'. But perhaps it crosses a threshold of technicity when a device emerges in search of its appropriate material. The cottage problem does something like this: the actual rural cottages that were first 'seen' in the late eighteenth century and displayed in a variety of architectural dioramas, produce the concept that housing is the index and means of social integration in later urban hygienicism, and also the polarity by which the object of the rising middle classes will be detached and sub-urban housing. But there is a stage prior to this, as I have shown, the techniques of planning which all of this assumes had emerged decades earlier and where given a sub-conceptual exercise. Therefore I have supposed that planning was a technique which posited a materiality for itself, 'the stuff arranged by the plan', of which it had a kind of non-conceptual knowledge. The relation of technique and material is rational but non-conceptual; from the point of view of the architects it is logical that picturesque outline and domestic economy are equally formed
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by the plan, but at the time this could not be conceptualised. This is not to say that it could not be thought by individuals, but that it could not be taken up in discourse and given a regularised usage. To do so would have been unstrategic as it would have put into identity what was supposed to be opposed: the paired discursive economies of agricultural reform and the picturesque. The question of 'irregularity' is, then, such a short lived 'regime of materiality' which will later be offered up as a specific form of exteriority on which some concepts of class, the family and urban form will be erected. Thus in the case of the frivolous ornamental cottage, knowledge is prefigured in technique, and discourse forms around these architectural irregularities.
1
See Ian Hunter (1994). Rethinking the School: Subjectivity, bureaucracy, criticism, St Leonards: Allen and Unwin, and Tony Bennet (1995). The Birth of the Museum, London and New York: Routledge.
2
Michel Foucault (1972). The Archaeology ofKnowledge: and the discourse on language, New York: Pantheon, p.31.
3
Hanno-Walter Kruft (1994). A History ofArchitectural Theory: from Vitruvius to the present, Princeton University Press.
4
Jeffrey Minson (1985). Genealogies of Morals: Nietzsche, Foucault, Donzelot and the Eccentricity of Ethics, London: Macmillan, p.123, and chapter 6 'Genealogy and Archaeology' passim.
5
See Robin Evans (1982). The Fabrication of Virtue: English Prison Architecture 17501840, Cambridge University Press, especially chapter 10 'Architecture limited and unlimited' which raises issues concerning technique co-extensive with those I raise about the architecture of ornamental cottages.
6
Paul Hirst, 'Foucault and Architecture', first published in Local Consumption, Sydney, Occasional Paper 4; also as 'Power /Knowledge- Constructed Space and the Subject' in Power and Knowledge: anthropological and sociological approaches ... a conference held at the University of St. Andrews in Dec. 1982 R. Pardon (ed.) Scottish Academic Press, 1985; and most recently in AA Files, 26, 1993.
7
My account of agrarian history is based on J.L. and B. Hammond (1911). The Village Labourer, Longmans, London: Green and Co., G.E. Fussell (1949). The English Rural Labourer, London: Batchworth, E.P. Thompson (1963). The Making of the English Working Class, Harmondsworth: Penguin, K. Snell (1985). Annals of the Labouring Poor, Cambridge University Press.
8 John Barrell (1972). The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place; an approach to the poetry ofJohn Clare, Cambridge, and The Dark Side of the Landscape; the Rural Poor in English Painting, 1730-1840, Cambridge University Press, 1980, and more recently Ann Birmingham (1986). Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition 1740-1860, California University Press. 9
Uvedale Price, Essays on the Picturesque, London: Mawman, [Westmead: Gregg Int. facsimile], 1810, [1971]. On the theory of the Picturesque see Christopher Hussey, The Picturesque: Studies in a Point of View, Frank Cass and Co., London, 1967, and W. J. Hipple (1957). The Beautiful, The Sublime and the Picturesque in Eighteenth Century British Aesthetic Theory, Carbondale: Sth lllinois University Press.
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10 Uvedale Price (1797). Thoughts on the Defense ofProperty, addressed to the County of Hereford, London. 11 An influential text of the time is: Communications to the Board of Agriculture; on subjects relative to the husbandry and internal improvement ofthe country, Geo. Nicol, London, 1797. Also see Society for bettering the Condition and Increasing the Comforts of the Poor (1800) Information for Cottagers, London. 12 Michel Foucault (1979). Discipline and Punish, NY: Vintage, p.25. 'It is largely as a force of production that the body is invested with relations of power and domination; but, on the other hand, its constitution as labour power is possible only if it is caught up in a system of subjection (in which need is also a political instrument meticulously prepared, calculated and used); the body becomes a useful force only if it is both a productive body and a subjected body' 13 Jacques Derrida (1981). 'Economimesis', Diacritics, June, pp.2-25. 14 Michael McMordie (1975). 'Picturesque Pattern Books and pre-Victorian designers', Architectural History, 18:42-59. Also see John Archer (1989). The Literature of British Domestic Architecture 1715-1842, MIT. I am currently doing research on the architecture of these books, and have previously published (1989) 'The Picturesque Cottage: Genre and Technique', Southern Review, 22(3)301-314. 15 This is not to say that previously buildings were always symmetrical but that their asymmetries were to do with the contingencies of siting and the accretion of symmetrically considered parts. This is most obvious when looking through the folios of mid-eighteenth century architects. For example J. Paine was capable of skilful use of the irregularities of a city site through the recovery of divergent angles within the poche of the regular plan, yet he always develops a full symmetry when the site is less constrained, and country houses and ornamental buildings in particular become an exercise in axiality and unfolding. R. Adam drew irregular castles, but as views and in the mode of caprice, while his buildings on this theme are symmetrical. 16 James Malton (1797). An Essay on British Cottage Architecture: being an attempt to
perpetuate on principle, that peculiar mode of building which was originally the work of chance, London. 17 Richard Elsam (1803). An Essay on Rural Architecture... Being an Attempt, also, to refute, by analogy, ... Mr. J. Malton's Essay, ... London. Also attacking Malton is John Plaw (1800). Sketches for Country Houses, Villas, and Rural Dwellings ... Also some Designs for Cottages, London. 18 James Malton (1802). A Collection of Design for Rural Retreats, as Villas, Principally in the Gothic and Castle Styles of Architecture, J. and T. Carpenter, London. 19 Joseph Michael Gandy (1806). Designs for Cottages, Cottage Farms, and other Rural
Buildings, London, 1805, The Rural Architect; consisting ofvarious designs for Country Buildings, London. 20 Robert Kerr (1866-7). 'On the problem of providing dwellings for the poor in Towns',RIBA Transactions,1stSeries, vol. XVII,1866-7, pp.39-59. Sourced through Robin Evan's discussion of these issues in (1979) 'Rookeries and Model Dwellings: English Housing Reform and the Moralities of Private Space', AAQ, 10:1:2435. 21 Deleuze, Gilles (1986). Foucault, Minnesota University Press, p.32 22 Ibid, p.51 23 Beverley Brown and Mark Cousins (1980). 'The Linguistic Fault: the case of Foucault's Archaeology', Economy and Society, 9(3):251-78.
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24 There is now a minor literature on 'scopic regimes' which is a new historicist history of art which begins from a somewhat Foucauldian position but does not refer to Deleuze's methodological inventions. See the works of N. Bryson, J. Crary, M. Jay. 25 Deleuze's schematised Foucault is actually quite close to Adorno's aesthetics on the issue of technique and discursive- non-discursive relations, if not on the nature of history and its dialectical mechanisms. Adorno holds that the critical value of artworks lies in their being non-discursive forms of knowledge, and, through a complex set of arguments, the privileged agents to oppose reification, the distortion of discursive forms of knowledge. Technique is a constitutive part of art and of its non-discursivity because it is 'rational but not conceptual... in addition to providing the criterion for the 'logic' of art works, technique also determines when and where logic has to be suspended' (Aesthetic Theory, p.304). Adorno also holds that material (space, tonality,line) are not given a priori to an art form but are formed in society and over history. Good art, which is to say critical art, locates historically advanced artistic materials, and understands them as a constraint on technical development. For instance, modern composers properly avoid the diminished seventh (a question oftechnique) because tonality (a musical material) was out of date by the beginning of the twentieth century. Similarly Wagner's operas achieve a certain ambivalent critical resonance because although at a conceptual and mimetic level they are ideological and false, at a technical level they truly locate and exercise the advanced musical material of their period. (T. W. Adorno,Aesthetic Theory, RKP also see LambertZuidervaart (1991). Adorno's Aesthetic Theory: The Redemption of Illusion MIT.) Now it is relatively simple to remove the Marxist epistemology from under this by saying that the artistic materials and their histories are not singular and the knowledge of them which technique exercises is not a non-conceptual knowledge of historicity as such. We could thus capture Adorno's schema within Deleuze's historical formations. 26 Deleuze, 1986, p.67.
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j'oucau{t: 'IFte Legacy //)
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1. Cottage design typical of treatises on agricultural reform. Robert Beeston, "Small Cottages" from his "On Cottages" pp.103-117 of Communications to the Board of Agriculture; on subjects relative to the husbandry and internal improvement of the country, Geo. Nicol, London, Vol1, 1797. The author wishes to acknowledge Cambridge University Library who hold the books in which the following illustrations appear.
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2. James Malton's architectural version of an agricultural worker's cottage, Plate 6, An Essay on British Cottage Architecture: being an attempt to perpetuate on principle, that peculiar mode of building which was originally the work of chance, London, 1979.
3. James Malton's contentious idea of designing villas for 'retired' gentry in a manner which is not differentiated from vernacular farm houses, Plate 9, An Essay on British Cottage Architecture: being an attempt to perpetuate on principle, that peculiar mode of building which was originally the work of chance, London, 1979.
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4. Joseph Michael Gandy, four cottages of the same size grouped as an irregular building. The Rural Architect; consisting of various designs for Country Buildings, London, 1806.
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5. Joseph Michael Gandy, four cottages of different sizes grouped as a regular or symmertrical building. The Rural Architect; consisting of various designs for Country Buildings, London, 1806.
Part Four Philosophy
The Ethics of Singularity in an Era of Complete Nihilism
In his last works Michel Foucault began to examine ethics - humans as
ethical beings instead of products of knowledge and power. This shift, in my opinion, can be considered as an effort to search for such a human power or form which would be able to resist the modern form of subordination which he called biopower, and its dangers which he had so well described previously. His critical work took a positive turn in the end. The question was no longer, how power produces us as subjects, but, how can we 'create ourselves as a work of art' (Foucault 1983:237).
A history of morals For a long time Western ethics and politics were based on the transcendent law of God. This law was transcendent because it was not made by human beings; it had a divine origin. It got its authority outside of the community. ImmanuelKantwasamongthefirstphilosopherstounderstandthathuman beings cannot rely on laws made from without. According to Kant, the laws should be made from within, by the pure reason of human beings. Pure reason alone, says Kant, 'gives (to man) a universal law, which we call the moral law' (Kant 1976:143). But in so far as reason itself, in the case of Kant, remained the ultimate faculty of judging, it took the place of God. Reason itself became transcendent. That is why, according to Friedrich Nietzsche, Kant's critiques were only forms of justification: 'Kant's success', says Nietzsche, 'is merely a theologian's success' (Nietzsche 1972, aphorism 10). One cannot just put God to death, one must also destroy his place. The moral revolution had to be brought to its end. One also has to destroy, as Nietzsche claims, the divine essences like Reason, Truth and Goodness, Telos or Right which tried to occupy the place of a dead God. This is because, according to Nietzsche, morals should not be regarded from the point of view of transcendence, but from the perspective of immanence, from the perspective of life. This is exactly what the human sciences, these modern messengers of the apolitical from medicine to biology and sociology (from Bichat to Cuvier and from Galton to Spencer) have always wanted to say. However, while Nietzsche used life as a metaphor, or as a joke, referring to the deceptive nature of being ('life is based on semblance, art, deception, points of view, and the necessity of perspectives and error' (Nietzsche 1967a:23)) the human sciences have taken life seriously. For these sciences, life is not the multiplicity of the forms of life as they appear, but a united multiplicity created by immanent norms of life. The human sciences, from biology to sociology, have rejected transcendence and have offered a new kind of moral principle, which is not transcendent, but, as the modern scientific outlook of the world requires, purely immanent (or at least they claim so). According to these, life
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is the only legislator and the only laws are the immanent norms of social and biological life. Thus, it is evident that the order of norms of life is not the willed order of human beings (it is not political), but, as the human sciences assert, the necessary order of things. It is the order which rises from the regularities of the social life, from its probable variations and its forecasted processes. In this respect, the human sciences are very different from the political theories of the eighteenth century. The human sciences do not give rational right to nature (as natural right theories), on the contrary, they give the natural norm to the ratio, to the reason and will. (In the era of the human sciences, human intelligence or reason is not much more than the IQ test indicates.) Michel Foucault was a severe critic of the human sciences and the immanent norms of life. He described carefully how these norms operate in practice, how these norms are not simply harmless standards by which we comprehend man and his world, but means of power which are maintained and sustained by normalising technologies. But how does the power of the norm operate? First of all, the norm of the modern human sciences is not a boundary between two distinct areas. It is not a juridical law which separates good and bad making an abyss between allowed and forbidden, between inside and outside: 'The law always refers to the sword. But a power whose task is to take charge of life needs continuous regulatory and corrective mechanisms. It is no longer a matter of bringing death into play in the field of sovereignty, but of distributing the living in the domain of value and utility' (Foucault 1990a:144). This does not imply, however, that the law itself is always necessarily juridical, an expression of a sovereign's power, for it can also be normative. Thus, the opposition is not between the law and the norm but rather between the juridical and the normative. Unlike the juridicallaw, the norm knows no outside, as Fran~ois Ewald has pointed out. Nothing is strange to the norm, because the stranger (the dwarf or the giant), is not the Other, but a variation of the Same (Ewald 1992:171-4). The stranger is not the opposite of the norm, but an extreme case of it. Thus, the limit of norm is absolute. That is why Foucault saw the effort of liberation as useless and even inconvenient. The norm excludes liberation, because to liberate is to throw away the limits, but the limit of the norm is always supple - absolutely supple. It extends itself to the final point of its application. That is also why it is not open to discussion. The norm is beyond all ethics and politics- it is their a priori. The power of the norm, its capacity to swallow everything it touches, lies in the modern concept of life. Unlike us, who have only one concept to signify life, the Greeks had two: zoon signified life common to all living beings, and bios signified a form or manner of life which was characteristic to each individual being or group. The basic question about life was not what is life in general, but which one. Modern languages forgot this fundamental distinction and one, and only one, noun was substituted for them both. The result of this substitution was that life in its nakedness entered into the political field: the new foundation of politics, its new nomos, was the production of life. The most peculiar feature of modern politics is not, in other words, the sovereignty of the state nor any form of democracy but the fact that its main
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target is the naked life of human species. For millennia the pure fact of life was excluded from politics. In modern society, however, natural life is put at the heart of the polis. For the Greeks, man was primarily a political animal, zoon politikon, whose life had a specific form, bios politikos. Now man is primarily an animal whose politics, as Foucault writes, 'places his existence as a living being in question' (Foucault 1990a:143). This fusion of politics and life in the modern world gave birth to a new form of power which Foucault calls biopower (bio-pouvoir). This power does not have a form of law or prohibition nor does it deal the legal subjects. It is invested - with the help of an immanent norm - in the pure biological existence of men: it regulates individual bodies and whole populations. If 'the people' is still claimed to be the politically sovereign subject in the era of modernity, this is because this 'people' is always, at the same time, the ordinary people, les miserables whose life should be governed by the administrative apparatuses at the level of its 'life processes' as Hannah Arendt puts it (see Arendt 1958:33-6). The people becomes a population. Biopower does not operate through the citizens and the people, it is invested, instead, in their real material conditions of existence. It is power which faces naked life without the mediation of forms of life. This power which fosters life for the sake of the strength of the nation, race or mankind, is also, without exception, a good companion of the modern thanatopolitics, the politics of massacre: 'Wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire populations are mobilised for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity; massacres have become vital' (Foucault 1990a:137). Even if the name of Auschwitz brings to our minds the most absolute space of biopower ever come true, concentration camps are not the only proof of the vitality of massacres. Hiroshima and all modern wars (Vietnam, Afghanistan, Bosnia)- in which the winning of combats as a purpose of war is replaced by the calculated slaughter of civilians - point towards this political rule of modernity. Foucault's main point about the immanence of the norm of life is that its norm is not, in the last analysis, immanent at all. Georges Canguilhem has made this explicit too: 'to set a norm, to normalise, is to impose a requirement on an existence' (1991:239). Life, as such does not know norms, only human beings know them, and norms are known by human beings, because they are invented by them. That is why norms are transcendent. However, one has to consider that the immanent norm of life is not a transcendence understood as eternal or constant (even if it is 'a root of all existence', as Foucault writes) but a historical and changing root, in other words, a sort of quasi-transcendent element (Foucault 1989:278). The norm is quasi-transcendent, because it does not even try to occupy the transcendent place left by the overthrown God. The power of the norm lies precisely in thatithasnoplaceatall-rather,itis a pure non-place. The norm spreads all around. It is now-here and no-where. The norm is the invisible sovereign. But what could immanence or life be without the transcendent law or the immanent norm? What could life be as pure immanence? According to JeanLuc Nancy absolute immanence, life without transcendence, signifies fusional
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communion which has no other logic than that of suicide or death (Nancy 1991:11-12). (Though this does not mean that Nancy wants to erect a new object or expose a new sacrifice, because for him transcendence signifies nothing else than resistance to immanence (Nancy 1991:35).) According to Gilles Deleuze, however, it is a mistake to suppose that transcendence would save us from the night of immanence, from death and suicide. Rather it is this immanence and its infinite movements, its pure speeds and slownesses, where we should search for our power to exist. In this immanence, 'there are no longer any forms of developments of forms;nor are there subjects or the formations of subjects. There is no structure, any more than there is genesis. There are only relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness between unformed elements, molecules and particles of all kinds' (Deleuze and Guattari 1988:266). The absoluteness of immanence does not signify that everything would be united in the mysterious suicidal community; rather, according to Deleuze, thinking of immanence without transcendence means thinking pure multiplicity without unity. (However, the transcendence which, according to Nancy, saves us from the absolute immanence and which he calls singularity, is not far away from Deleuze's concept of individuation of which immanence in fact is' composed'. (On the relation between things and immanence see Deleuze and Guattari 1991:148)). Nietzsche gives this immanence another name. For him, pure immanence, life without law or the norm, is nihilism. But what kind of nihilism? Nietzsche distinguished at least two kinds of nihilism; transcendent and negative, and immanent and reactive. The common denominator for both these forms of nihilism is that they depreciate life: life is something unreal for them. Thus, on the one hand we have a form of nihilism which devaluates life in the name of higher values, such as God, Truth or the Good. On the other hand we have a form of nihilism which devaluates these higher values themselves. As the former denies life for the sake of a better life (for the sake of the universal love of the Christian, or for the sake of absolute freedom of the Revolutionary) the latter denies it because nothing is true, nothing is good, because God is dead. But they both share the same foundation. They both are, as Nietzsche puts it, unfaithful to every tradition, even to their own memories. They allow them to fall, 'lose their leaves'. And what they do not do for themselves, they also do 'not do for the whole past of mankind': they let it fall (Nietzsche 1967b, aphorism 21). Like the rider on a horse rushing forward, they 'let the reins fall before infinity' (Nietzsche 1896:Book VII, aphorism 224). They sacrifice all the old experience to the purifying flame of the new. They are like those cartoon characters who can walk on thin air as long as they do not notice it, and once they realise, they are bound to fall. The Greeks used the concept of hubris to describe this kind of thinking because of its destructive capacity. It is destructive because it contains a belief that everything is possible and nothing is real (for if everything is possible then nothing is real), or as Nietzsche says, because it rises up to the level where any kind of reality ceases to be, where it can despise every form, everything firm, 'all that is custom, institution, Church... ' (Nietzsche 1972: aphorism 29). Few are
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Christian or revolutionaries nowadays, but the appeal for nothingness lies not in love or freedom, but in language in which every word is only a mask of itself. It lies in endless semiosis, in communication without any content. Ironically, this is exactly what Nietzsche finds at the heart of Christianity. The task of Nietzsche's philosophy, as well as that of Foucault's, is, in one way or another, to complete this tradition, the tradition of nihilism which breaks all the illusions of stability and permanence. Even the body, as Foucault claims, cannot function as the basis of existence, for it is 'totally imprinted by history' (Foucault 1984:83). However, their nihilism is not transcendent and negative or immanent and reactive, but is based on the idea of complete immanence and is absolutely positive. For them, every singular form of life is an effect of immanent forces of being ('the will to power'). Their nihilism is no longer imperfect (in so far as they do not erect new moral obligations) but perfect. However, only this kind of nihilism, complete nihilism, which shows itself as formlessness and powerlessness, is, in the end, the point of departure for every true ethics from which it has to strive (withouttaking it as a foundation) towards a form and power. And this is precisely the point of view from which Foucault's last works have to be examined. For they are not critiques of power, but an effort to find a power which is capable of staying indifferent in relation to biopower.
Power of ethos The human sciences have made an immense effort to solve the riddle of the human being: they have wanted toknowwhomanis. Buttheproblemofthe human being (ifitis a problem) is nota problem of knowledge, but a problem of ethics, a problem of ethical practices. If it is true, as Foucault claims, that 'no morality is possible for modern thought' (Foucault 1989:328) in the era of modern man as an anthropological figure, then it is understandable why he celebrated the death of man. The death of man (complete nihilism) is the condition of all ethics, or as Foucault put it: 'It is no longer possible to think in our day other than in the void left by man's disappearance' (Foucault 1989:342). Foucault's formulation of the death of man as the condition of thinking and therefore of ethics is analogous to Giorgio A gamben's idea that the point of departure for any ethics, 'is that there is no essence, no historical or spiritual vocation, no biological destiny that humans must enact or realise' (Agamben 1993:43). If it is so that human beings had this or that substance, this or that destiny, no ethical experience would be possible because there would be only tasks to be done. This was precisely what Immanuel Kant was thinking when he, in the preface of Foundation of The Metaphysics ofMorals he demanded that we should construct 'a pure moral philosophy which is completely freed from everything which may be only empirical and thus belong to anthropology' (Kant 1976:51-52). If the human sciences have ceaselessly been seeking for an answer to the question of what is the real content of man regardless of any morals, Kant asked, on the contrary, what is the pure form of morals regardless of man. But it is equally wrong to claim that the human being is not, that he is simply consigned to nothingness and therefore can freely decide whether to be or
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not to be, to adopt or not to adopt this or that destiny. In reality, there is something that the human being is and has to be, but this something is not an essence nor properly a thing: 'It is the simple fact of one's own existence as possibility or power (potenza)' (Agamben 1993:43). Rather than as an essence or as an absolute I, the human being that is capable of ethics (and in so far as he is capable of ethics he is a human being), has to be seen as possibility or power. Spinoza, in turn, has expressed it as follows: an essence and the only essence of the mode of existence is power (potentia). This power or'endeavour' (conatus) 'wherewith a thing endeavours to persist (perseverare) in its being', in so far as it belongs to a human being, is the first and only basis of virtue (virtus) (Spinoza 1989: prop.7, part III, def. 8, IV, and corollary, prop.22, part IV). The more man has existence the more he has power, and the more he has power the more he has virtue. Thus, first of all Spinoza separates lack, debt and obligation from ethics and replaces them with power. Secondly, he exposes the whole question of ethics as a question of the manner (modus) of life. He separates ethics from life in general (immanent or transcendent) and replaces it with manners. Ethics does not concern life but a manner of life. It concerns the power of human being or the human being as power which is based on manners, habits, and forms of life, that is to say, on life which exists nowhere else than in its own manner, in its own form. The essence of man (if there is an' essence' in man) lies in a manner of life and his power is identical to that manner. Thus, it is evident that the power of a human being is not located in some identity or property (being black or white, being communist or liberal, being Finnish or Australian), neither in the absence of these identities, in negative identity (in nothingness). For identity (fragmented or not), is nothing but a hiding place for timid individuals, a place that diminishes the power of acting and cuts off human freedom. However, one has to consider that this manner does not erect a new foundation, it does not found us or befall us, rather, as Agamben says, it engenders us (Agamben 1993:27-9). Our manner of life refers not to life, but to the manner in its rising forth, to the singular form of life as it exists as such. When Spinoza writes that 'to act absolutely from virtue is nothing else than to act according to the laws of one's own nature' (Spinoza 1989, proof, prop.XXIV, part IV), this nature should be understood as a habit, ie. as our second nature. Only this nature, which is also our happier nature, can provide us with a place of living (where we can 'feel at home'). For every habit, as the concept implies, every ethos is, properly speaking, a dwelling. We inhabit our habit, as Heidegger writes. And if this habit is looted, we become mere living bodies at the level of naked life, pure and easy targets of biopower and thanatopolitics. If we want to resist this power, we should not do it on the grounds that we are living beings, but on the grounds that our life has a specific form.
Community However, it is essential to note that this form, this manner or form of being, insofar as it is singular, appears or takes place only in common. Singularity does not refer to an individual. Rather, singularity appears where individual disappears. Singularity appears where there is a community. There
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are no singularities without communities. We are born to a community, we are educated in a community, we live in a community. There is no such a thing as an individual, because individual, as the word indicates, is an atom without relation, an undivided. However, there is nothing without relation. Atoms are not enough, for we need the Lucretian clinamen which is the condition of possibility of the existence. According to Lucretius nothing could exist if atoms did not form bunches and bunches are not possible without a knot or glue, without clinamen. Individualism claims that it is the individual that must be taken as origin and as certainty. But in reality, the individual can be the origin and the certainty of nothing but his own death (see Nancy 1991:3). And death should not be understood here as a phenomenological event, but as a fact that man does not live forever, that he will die. (Even being alone I am not alone, for the Other appears in front of me despite the fact that there is nobody else present than me, for I is an other: 'Jeestunautre ... ' asRimbaud writes and Deleuzeaffirms. Forme, as a passive object of knowledge, I, an active thinker, am always the other as it thinks but cannot be known (see Deleuze 1993:42-45). Our community is always a community of others. Or as Heidegger puts it, 'Being with others belongs to the Being of Dasein, which is an issue for Dasein in its very Being' (Heidegger 1962:166). However, this community, which engenders us, is not tied up with something which is common to each of us. It is not, for example, a community of citizens or men. Being in common (etre-en-commun, as Nancy writes) is not added onto the dimension of being-self, rather it is coextensive with it. But that does not signify that it is a substance uniformly laid out under supposed individuals. Nor is it uniformly shared out among all individuals like some divisible ingredient. Rather, it signifies a mode of exposition of singular beings without an essence. It signifies shared existence that only appears in common, or 'com-pears', com-paraltre, as Nancy puts it referring, at the same time, to the fact of appearing in common and the acts of distribution and partition - acts of communication (see Nancy 1991:28). The community which engenders us is a web or a knot of the singularities appearing in common. But this knot is not a bond, neither social nor economic, for the 'compearance' is of a more original order than that of the bond: 'It does not set itself up (ne s'instaurepas), it does not establish itself, it does not emerge among already given subject (objects). It consists in the appearance (dans la parution) of the between as such: you and I (between us) - a formula in which the end does not imply juxtaposition, but exposition' (Nancy 1991:29). The nation-state tries to set a human being to a direct relation with itself, it tries to abstract him from his community and isolate him as a powerless island, as an in-dividual. Or it tries to fuse him with the greater spiritual totality saturated with tasks and duties, the totality called nation. Community without an essence, community which is nothing else than the exposition of the singular beings, their manner of exposition, signifies resistance to this kind of abstraction and fusing, resistance to the modern biopolitics: 'Community is given us with being and as being, well in advance of all our projects,desires,andundertakings'(Nancy1991:35).Theplace(orratherthe non-place) of this community is the place of the political, insofar as the
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political signifies nothing else than the taking place of a conflict as such. There is no other place for community. This place is not essential because it is the taking place of freedom, but because it gives rise to the existence of being-self. Only a being in common can make possible a being separated, being-self. But if this community has no positive terms, is it nihilistic? Yes and no. Nihilism is certainly a factor, but it does not form part of its foundations. Nihilismisjusttheweakestandnotthemostevilelementofthiscommunity. Nihilism is not evil: rather evil is our inadequate reaction to this impotence, this power not to be. Evil is, says Agamben, our fearful retreat from this 'demonic element' in order to exercise some power of being. Fleeing from our own impotence or trying to adopt it as a weapon, we construct the malevolent power that oppresses those who show their weakness. The ethical task, on the contrary, is, as Agamben writes, to take care of this demon (Agamben 1993:32). This impotence which every power essentially possesses as its proper element, in so far as it is ethical and not 'blind', is what most needs our help and our prayers, because only a power that is 'capable of both power and impotence' (Agamber 1993:36) is the supreme power, in other words, power which is capable of being at ease with itself. Only this kind of power, which is able to act and not to act and which feels at home in this conflictual situation or can 'stand' or 'endure' in this irresoluteness is free. Ethics (and politics) is the use of this freedom. The only reason why the biopower that constitutes the basis of modem politics is capable of grasping a human being (and making him only an individual without a community) is that it is based on the pure fact of life, on life without a form. When Michel Foucault made a return to the ancient Greeks and Romans, when he started to explore practices of the self, he did not make a return to the subject. On the contrary, and especially when he talked about the Romans, he arrived at the edge of the power and power relations which were not in direct relationship to pure sovereign or normalising power. For, in the Roman 'complex network of power', as Foucault writes, 'one is never alone facing one's enemies' (Foucault 1990b:92). With the help of practices of the self, the Greeks and Romans did not search for their deepest self, the most original experience, but searched instead for their proper manners or form which they could freely use 'to shape themselves as ethical subjects' and to establish their own ethos (Foucault 1987:13). For Foucault, practices of the self are an effort to gather up the pieces of forms of life (community) engendered by manners and experience (understood as practical and definitely not as 'lived' experience: Erfahrung rather than Erlebnis), which modem political power has been trying to destroy for centuries. However, the question is not of the blind acceptance of manners and experiences, but of remembering them and of living with this memory (which we have to cherish - not because it is worthy of being cherished but because it is our second nature, the true form of ourselves). It does not make any difference how we take this memory, for the most essential thing is that we take it, that we do not 'lose our leaves' and step with dropped reins to the bottomless abyss of stupidity.
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References Agamben, Giorgio (1993a). Infancy and History, Essays on the Destruction ofExperience, Verso. __ _, (1993b ). The Coming Community, University of Minnesota Press. Arendt, Hannah (1958). The Human Condition, University of Chicago Press. Canguilhem, Georges (1991). The Normal and The Pathological, Zone. Deleuze, Gilles (1993). Critique et clinique, Minuit. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari (1991). Qu'est ce que la philosophie? Minuit. __ _, (1988). A Thousand Plateaus, Athlone. Ewald, Fran<;ois (1992). 'A power without an exterior', in Timothy J. Armstrong (ed. ), Michel Foucault Philosopher, Harvester. __ _, (1990). 'Norms, Discipline, and The Law', Representations, 30, Spring. Foucault Michel (1990a). The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, Vintage. __ _, (1990b ). The Care of The Self, Penguin. __ _, (1989). The Order of Things, Routledge. __ _, (1987). The Use of Pleasure, Penguin. __ _, (1984). 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, History', in Paul Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader, Penguin. __ _, (1983). 'On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Interview with Michel Foucault', in Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow,Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd edn, University of Chicago Press. Heidegger, Martin (1962). Being and Time, Basil Blackwell. Kant, Immanuel (1976). 'Critique of Practical Reason', Critique of Practical Reason and Other Writings in Moral Philosophy, Glencoe. __ _, (1976). 'Foundation of The Metaphysics of Morals', Critique of Practical Reason and Other Writings in Moral Philosophy, Glencoe. Nancy, Jean-Luc (1991). The Inoperative Community, University of Minnesota Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1972). Twilight of The Idols and The Anti-Christ, Penguin. __ _, (1967a). 'Attempt at a self-criticism', preface to the second edition of The Birth of The Tragedy, Vintage. __ _, (1967b ). The Will to Power, Vintage. __ _, (1896). Jentseits von Gut und Bose, Neuman. Spinoza (1989). Ethics, Everyman.
An Exegesis of the Text Was ist Aufkliirung? Foucault's Intellectual Testament
Introduction The main purpose of the present paper is to suggest that one of Foucault's last texts, 'What is Enlightenment?' (WIE), can be interpreted as his intellectual testament: a sort of synoptic expression of the foundational points of view of his thinking in a retrospective and prospective manner. I will be looking at Foucault's text as a palimpsest on Kant's Was ist Aufkliirung? In order to expound this idea, I will present an itinerary of Foucault's encounters with Kant's work. I believe that Foucault subtly changes the fundamental question asked by Kant. In effect, after reminding us that Was ist Aufkliirung? was a question posed by a German periodical, Foucault asks us to imagine that 'the Berliner Monatschrift still exists and that it is asking its readers the question: What is modern philosophy?' (WIE:32). With this change, Foucault is proposing that the very beginning of modern philosophy is rooted in the Enlightenment. Foucault's response to the question about modern philosophy is conceived as the attempt 'to answer the question raised so imprudently two centuries ago: 'Was ist Aufkliirung?' What is the imprudence of the question asked of Kant? Are there relationships between Kant's answer and Foucault's response? These two questions will guide our exegesis on Foucault's 'What is Enlightenment?' There is another reason for interpreting Foucault's WIE as a Kantian palimpsest. The text is divided into two parts. The first and shorter one, considers Kant's text. At the end of that first part, Foucault states thatitisnot possible 'to give an exaggerated place' (WIE:37) to the Kantian text in the global context of Kant's work. Nevertheless, Foucault stresses the connection of that brief Kantian text with the Kantian Critiques, and the other Kantian texts devoted to history. In this connection, Foucault suggests the hypothesis that Kant's WIE is 'a reflection by Kant on the contemporary status of his own enterprise' (WIE:38). Exactly the same reflection that he is engaging in in his own piece and there is more: the Kantian reflection 'on 'today' as difference in history and as a motive for a particular philosophical task is viewed by Foucault as the primordial novelty of Kant's WIE, and this novelty allows this text to be interpreted as 'a point of departure: the outline of what one might call the attitude of modernity'. Exactly the attitude which Foucault identifies as the authentic ethos of the modern philosopher. The second part of Foucault's WIE is completely devoted to explaining this 'attitude of modernity'. It seems to me that this attitude, this ethos, is the fundamental key to understanding the foucaultian praxis of intellectual life in a retrospective and prospective manner.
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The retrospective view in 'What is Enlightenment? Foucault's 'What is Enlightenment?' draws a context in which one can understand the move from the archaeological stance to the genealogical one or, in another well known characterisation of Foucault's work, the move from the interest in diagnosing the formation of human sciences to the critique of power relations in our modern society, to finally reach the search for an ethics of our existence. In this sense, it is not difficult to show that the 'history of the present'- or the historical'ontology of ourselves', based on the interplay among our constitution as subjects of our own knowledge (savoir), as subjects of the exercise of power relations, and as moral subjects of our own actions (WIE:48-9) - exists as a permanent construction in the whole work of Foucault. From Madness and Civilization to The History of Sexuality, all the historico-critical works of Foucault are steps in advancing the diagnosis of the present. This present is conceived as 'a privileged region', a region that 'is the border of time that surrounds our presence, which overhangs it, and which indicates it in its otherness; it is that which, outside ourselves, delimits us' (AK:130). The purpose of the diagnosis of the present is not to 'establish the fact of our identity by the play of distinctions'. The diagnosis' establishes that we are difference, that our reason is the difference of our discourses, our history the difference of times, our selves the difference of masks' (AK:131). When Foucault interprets Kant's WIEhe finds in Kant's definition of Aufkliirung an Ausgang (a way out, an exit), a sort of conception of history based on diagnosing the present: Kant is not looking for teleology: 'he is not seeking to understand the present on the basis of a totality or a future achievement; he is looking for a difference: What difference does today introduce with respect to yesterday?' (WIE:34). The foucaultian diagnosis of the present conceived in this sense can be retraced as a permanent task aiming to answer the question which Foucault found in his first explicit encounter with a Kantian work. This first encounter occurred in his These Complementaire (an early work which consists in an interpretation of Kant's Anthropology as a complement to a French translation by Foucault). In this text, he identifies his own work under the name' archaeology of the text', and he delineates the future treatment of another of Kant's works by putting the question: 'If it were possible, would not the archaeology of the text allow us to see the birth of a "homo criticus", whose structure would be essentially different to the man who preceded him?' (TC:4). Kant's Anthropology was his last work published in 1798, thirteen years after his first book on morals. Kant, more interested in his metaphysical work, conceives anthropology as the empirical field of moral philosophy, 'a pure moral philosophy that is wholly cleared of everything which can only be empirical and can only belong to anthropology' (GMM:2). He defines anthropology as 'a systematic doctrine of knowledge of man' which, from a pragmatic point of view, explores 'what man as a being of free activity makes, or can and should make of himself' (A:ll). Foucault's reading of Kant's concept of man in the Anthropology ('man as world citizen' in Kant's words) contrasts the moral empirical field related to moral metaphysics with another empirical (experienced, concrete, effective) field of human praxis: precisely the network of knowledge on madness in the Classical Age.
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Probably, this contrast is responsible for Foucault's rejection of transcendental philosophy. In Madness and Civilization, this rejection is based on the interpretive analytic of the field of madness. The rejection should be seen as a double announcement of the second encounter with Kant's work. On the one hand, atthe end of the brief introductory note to the Anthropology translation there is a footnote which states 'the relations between critical thinking and anthropological reflection will be studied in a future work' (A:lO). On the other hand, Foucault evokes Nietzsche's'death of God' as his inspiration for the questions about man: Is not the death of God, in effect, manifest in a doubly murderous gesture which, by putting an end to the absolute, is at the same time the murder of man himself? For man, in his finitude, is not separable from the infinity of which he is both the negation and the herald. Is it not possible to conceive of a critique of finitude which would be liberating with respect to both man and infinitude, and which would show that finitude is not an end, but the curve and knot of time in which the end is the beginning? (TC:l26).
In The Order of Things, Foucault cannot elude the encounter with Kant. In fact, the modern episteme, as conceived in the foucaultian archaeology of human sciences, also has its verification in the philosophical field. Kantianism can be understood as the constitutive historical a priori of the modern episteme (Le Blanc:57). The substitution of the Kantian transcendental analytic for an analytic of man, as the modern constitution of the' analytic of finitude' (OT:IX-3), is the beginning of the confusion of empirical and transcendental fields. This analytic of finitude marks the birth of the man: 'Man appears in his ambiguous position as an object of knowledge and as a subject that knows: enslaved sovereign, observed spectator, he appears in the place belonging to the king, which was assigned to him in advance by Las Meninas, but from which his real presence has for so long been excluded' (OT:312). Foucault also sees in this analytic of man, in this analytic of finitude, the birth of modernity. Dreyfus and Rabinow summarise this point clearly: Modernity begins with the incredible and ultimately unworkable idea of a being who is sovereign precisely by virtue of being enslaved, a being whose very finitude allows him to take the place of God. This startling idea, which breaks forth full blown in Kant, that 'the limits of knowledge provide a positive foundation for the possibility of knowing' (OT:317), Foucault calls the analytic of finitude. It is 'an analytic ... in which man's being will be able to provide a foundation in their own positivity for all those forms that indicate to him that he is not infinite' (OT:315). Foucault recognizes this desperate move as definitive both of man and of the modem age (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983:30).
The analytic of finitude as an anthropological view of man is a permanent temptation to edify the 'metaphysics of life, work and language' as a culture which thinks the finite from itself. 'Our culture crossed the threshold beyond which we recognise our modernity when finitude was conceived in an interminable cross-reference with itself' (OT:318). In sum, the modern view of man is the anthropological answer to the (Kantian) question Was ist der Mensch? But it was not the Kantian answer.
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Foucault clearly states that the Kantian characterisation of knowledge as a empirico-transcendental doublet, only constitutes the point of discontinuity between dogmatic and anthropological configuration of philosophy: from a dogmatic slumber to an anthropological one. In Foucault's view, the question Was ist der Mensch?, has marked thought from the beginning of nineteenth century with the 'constitution of an empirico-transcendental doublet' (OT:319). Nevertheless, he implicitly recognises that Kant maintains a clear distinction between transcendental philosophy and anthropological research, although in the Logik, the three critical questions- What can I know?, What ought I do? and What may I hope?- are subordinated to the question Was ist der Mensch? (OT:341). For Foucault, the possible waking from anthropological slumber consists in transposing the work of thinking onto the vacuum of man. All of Foucault's historico-critical works- concentrated in concrete human experience and concrete knowledge about man (les sciences humaines)are a permanent construction of roads to another way of thinking. Foucault, looking on his own work, conceives a historical investigation that focuses on 'the events that have led us to constitute ourselves and to recognise ourselves as subjects of what we are doing, thinking, saying' (WIE:46). Beyond the three Kantian critiques, is it possible to see in Kantian philosophy another way of thinking as a 'critique of the anthropological dream'? It seems to me that this is an implicit question in The Order of Things. Twelve years later, Foucault began to answer this question.
The second direction: the prospective view in WIE. Foucault's 'What is Enlightenment?' should be read as an invitation to continue a historico-philosophical work which brings 'some measure of clarity to the consciousness that we have of ourselves and of our past' (WIE:45). Indeed it is a commonplace amongst commentators on 'What is Enlightenment?' to see this as a text in which Foucault explains the sense of his last work and its possible pursuit (Bernstein 1991; Hiley 1988; McCarthy 1991). Here, the cornerstone is that the question of ethics and the work of thought are related in a way so that one is a realisation of the other: bridging both gives rise to a 'limit-attitude'. In 1978 at a Conference held by the French Society of Philosophy, Foucault offered his first analysis of The Aufkliirung as the problem of the modern philosophy. Here, he finds good reasons in the Kantian text to distinguish critique from the Aufkliirung. In exploring the notion of critique, historically, Foucault prefers to contrast 'the art of governing' from the' art of not being governed in a certain way' (QQC:37-8). He proposes to identify the latterwith a' critical attitude'. The realisation of the art of governing dates far back in Western civilisation and its development always run parallel to 'a sort of general cultural form, at the same time a moral and political attitude, way of thinking, etc., which can be named the art of not being governed'. In this sense, critique, as a particular companion of 'governmentalization', of the process of developing technologies of government, of the social practices of individual subjection can be understood as playing the role of 'un-subjection' in the game of 'the politics of truth' (QQC:39).
189 In 1978, Foucault thought that one could interpret Kant's answer of 1784 as a clear distinction between critique and Aufkliirung. He also proposes to understand Kant's answer as an identification of the Aufkliirung with what he names 'critical attitude'. This critical attitude is the modem prolongation of the art of not being governed in a certain way. Obviously, Foucault does not forget the critical - and transcendental - project of Kant. If there is a difference in Kantian philosophy between critique and Aufkliirung it will be only the Kantian stubbornness in 'fixing knowledge as the main task of the critique ... as prolegomena of all present and future Aufkliirung' (QQC:41). The Kantian answer to the question Was ist Aufkliirung?, is not only concerned with a critical attitude in relation to political field but it also concerns the philosophical field. The Kantian response implies both the explanation of a philosophical position with respect to a political regime (the'contract of rational despotism' (WIE:37) proposed to Frederick II), and the clarification of a philosophical position in relation to the philosopher's role in his own time and within philosophy itself. In this respect, it is possible to find a meaning to the imprudence of the question posed to Kant in 1874. In effect, the Kantian answer initiates two paths in the philosophical tradition. The more developed of these is the continuation of the Kantian critical enterprise, or as Foucault puts it, 'a critical attitude in retreat with respect to Aufkliirung'. The other one, less developed, is the continuation of the this same'critical attitude' as 'un-subjection'. The unbalanced beginning of these two paths of philosophical reflection is a consequence of the sudden and accidental introduction of a very new theme into the philosophical field of eighteenth century: 'rational thinking was interrogated ... about its history, its geography, its immediate past, its place and its actuality;... Was ist Aufkliirung? is a symbolic question of that theme' (VES:S). In another text 'La vie, 1'experience et la science' which appeared in the same year as Foucault's address to the French Society of Philosophy he concludes his early reflection on the problem of Aufkliirung: 'Two centuries after its appearance, the Aufkliirung returns both as the way which permits the West to gain consciousness about its present possibilities and liberties accessible, and as the way of questioning the limits and power used by it (VES:7). In 1983 and 1984 (the bicentenary of Kant's text) Foucault completes his palimpsest in answering the question about another way of thinRing in Kantian philosophy. In the same way as in The Order of Things, in which Kant's work is considered as the foundation of the epistemic modernity, now Foucault sees in Kant's works the foundation of historical modernity. It is historical modernity rooted in Kantian considerations on the Revolution and the Aufkliirung. In fact, this philosophical direction constitutes another critical tradition different from that which 'poses the question of the conditions in which true knowledge is possible', a critical tradition developed 'as the analytics of truth' (ATT:95). The prolongation of the 'critical attitude', akin to the question of Aufkliirung, tries to answer another type of question, another type of interrogation: 'What is our present? What is the present field of possible experiences? That is not an analytics of truth; it will concern what might be called an ontology of the present, an ontology of ourselves'.
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Intellectual work, the work of thought, the way of thinking required by these questions is the permanent realisation of the attitude, the ethos of modernity. Foucault also turns his attention to the Baudelairean notion of modernity underlining clearly what he understands by attitude: 'a mode of relating to contemporary reality; a voluntary choice made by certain people; in the end, a way of thinking and feeling; a way, too, of acting and behaving that at one and the same time marks a relation of belonging and presents itself as a task' (WIE:39). This implies a sort of stylistic of life which is essentially practised as an intellectual task. This attitude is'an exercise in which extreme attention to what is realis confronted with the practice of a liberty that simultaneously respects this reality and violates it' (WIE:41). It seems to me that there are two levels to this intellectual task. Between these two levels, one more concerned with intellectual life and the other, more general, is placed the 'limit attitude'. The first level of the foucaultian modern ethos consists in 'the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us' (WIE:SO). An analysis which takes the form of enquiries with their theoretical coherence (ie. 'the definition of the historically unique forms in which the generalities of our relations to things, to others, to ourselves, have been problematised') and with their methodological coherence (ie. the 'genealogical and archaeological study of practices envisaged simultaneously as a technological type of rationality and as strategic games of liberty'). The second level of that 'attitude of modernity' is concerned with the risky experiments necessary 'to give new impetus, as far and wide as possible, to the undefined work of liberty', these experiments are responsible for 'a practical critique that takes the form of a possible transgression' of limits, for going beyond them. It is intellectually conceived as an ethical research. ('Liberty is the ontological condition of ethics. But ethics is the deliberate form assumed by liberty'.) (ECS:4). The limit-attitude of the foucaultian intellectual task is the frail, patient and obstinate construction of a 'philosophical life' in which those two levels are in permanent symbiosis. It is a philosophical life which summarises- in perfect continuity with the historical courage invoked by Kant in his definition of Aufkliirung - both 'the critical reflexion against the abusive techniques of government' and 'the ethical research which allows individual liberty to be founded' (ECS:19). Finally, the foucaultian 'attitude of modernity', that is, the limit-attitude or the modern ethos, proposes the search of 'an aesthetics of existence' in the face of the disappearing, 'idea of a morality as obedience to a code of rules' (AE:49). In our present, this search is only possible in the philosophical life and by means of the concrete work of intellectuals. But as Foucault says: the work of an intellectual is not to shape others' political will; it is, through the analyses that he carries out in his own field, to question over and over again what is postulated as self-evident, to disturb people's mental habits, the way they do and think things, to dissipate what is familiar and accepted, to re-examine rules and institutions and on the basis of this reproblematisation (in which he carries out his specific task as an intellectual) to participate in the formation of a political will (in which he has his role as citizen to play) (CT:265).
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References Foucault's works: (A)
I. Kant. Anthropologie du point de une pragmatique, trans. M. Foucault Vrin,
Paris, 1991 (AE)
'An Aesthetics of Existence', in L.D. Kritzman (ed.) Michel Foucault. Politics, Philosophy, Culture. Interviews and other writings 1977-1984, Routledge, Lon-
don, 1988, pp.47-53. (AK)
The Archaeology of Knowledge, Tavistock, London, 1972.
(ATT) 'The Art of Telling the Truth' in L.D. Kritzman (ed.). Michel Foucault. Politics, Philosophy, Culture. Interviews and other writings 1977-1984, Routledge, London, 1988, pp.86-95 (CT)
'The Concern for Truth', in L.D. Kritzman (ed.) (1988), pp.255-67.
(ECS) 'The Ethic of Care of Self as a Practice of Freedom', in Bernauer, Rasmussen, D. (eds), The Final Foucault, MIT Press, 1991, pp.1-20. (OT)
J.
and
The Order of Things. An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, Vintage- Random House, New York, 1973.
(QCC) 'Qu'est-ce que la Critique? (Critique et Aufkliirung)', Bulletin de la Societe Franr;aise de Philosophie, 84 ieme annee, no. 2, avril-juin 1990, pp.33-63. (TC) ' These Complementaire' for the Doctorates Lettres, University of Paris, 1961. (Fragments quoted and translated by D. Macey. The Lives of Michel Foucault, London: Hutchinson, 1993). (VES) 'La Vie, !'Experience et la Science', Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale, 90 ieme annee, no. 1, janvier-mars 1985, pp.3-14. (WIE) 'What is Enlightenment?' in P. Rabinow (ed.). The Foucault Reader, Pantheon Books, New York, 1984, pp.32-50). (The original version 'Qu'est-ce que les Lumieres' was published in April1993 in Magazine Litteraire, no. 309, pp.6174)
Other cited works Bernstein,R. (1991). 'Foucault. Critique as a Philosophic Ethos'. The New Constellation, Polity Press, pp.142-71. Dreyfus, H. and Rabinow, P. (1983). Michel Foucault. Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, The University of Chicago Press. Hiley, D. (1988). Knowledge and Power in Philosophy in Question. Essays on a Pyrronian Theme, The University of Chicago Press, pp.86-114. Kant, I. (1991). (A) Anthropologie du point de vuepragmatique (trans. by Foucault), Vrin, Paris. __ _, (1981). (GMM) Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, Hackett, Indianapolis. LeBlanc, G. (1993). 'Le conflit des modernites selon Foucault', Magazine Litteraire, no. 309, pp.56-60. McCarthy, T. (1991). 'The Critique of Impure Reason: Foucault and the Frankfurt School'. Ideals and Illusions on Reconstruction and Deconstruction in Contemporary Critical Theory, MIT Press, pp.43-75.
Clutter and Glitter: Foucault and the Writing of History
'History', writes Foucault in The Order of Things, 'is certainly the most erudite, the most aware, the most conscious, and possibly the most cluttered area of our memory; but it is equally the depths from which all beings emerge into their precarious, glittering existence'.l In this paper I want to consider Foucault's writing of history. By this I mean both the way in which he theorises the writing of historical texts, and the manner in which he conducts his own historical work. The former is a matter of methodology and can be best observed in his various comments upon genealogy as an historical approach to the study of the clutter of the past. The manner in which he conducts historical research relates to the concerns of his late essay, 'What is Enlightenment?' with its conception of philosophy as a certain attitude to modernity and the self. Foucault's historical attitude is that he described as being an historian of the present, interested in the glittering existences that subjects might possess today. I want to approach these two interrelated issues by analysing three key texts of Foucault's: The Archaeology of Knowledge, the 1971 essay 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, History', and the essay on Kant and the Enlightenment. The overall intention is to try to assess the function of history for Foucault's philosophical work by indicating a number of difficulties with his approach to history.2 It is sometimes difficult to disentangle archaeology from genealogy in Foucault's work, other perhaps than by noting the influential weight of Nietzsche in the latter methodology. Certain commentators argue that archaeology as a method of historical investigation is replaced at the start of the 1970s by the Nietzschean-derived genealogy. However, in the Enlightenment essay, Foucault states that his historical work combines archaeology as a method, and genealogy as a 'design'. 3 To elucidate this distinction it is necessary to look briefly at The Archaeology ofKnowledge. Here we repeatedly learn what archaeology is not; only rarely can we discern the contours of what archaeological history writing actually is. Two important features of archaeology do clearly stand out: firstly, it is an attempt to write history in terms of a notion of discontinuity; secondly, it is a form of writing which is rooted in the analysis of history as purely discursive. In his subsequent work Foucault appears, to an extent, to reject the second principle, whilst strengthening the role of the notion of discontinuity. Discontinuity represents a stigma to conventional history since it is that part of memory that historians normally regard it as their task to eradicate. History presents itself to us in the form of 'dispersed events- decisions, accidents, initiatives, discoveries4 that must be rearranged and reordered so as to reveal the essential continuity of events. In this way written history overcomes 'temporal' dislocation'- chance meetings of significant historical
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actors, avenues of action not taken, instructions misheard - so as to be able to explain and interpret the past. Historians were always aware of the contingent nature of historical events but, argues Foucault, regarded this 'given' of history as practically 'unthinkable' (AK:8), since it challenges the essential methodology of most historical work. For Foucault discontinuity, is both a tool of the historian, and a description of the object that one is investigating (AK:S-9). One examines the past through the lens of discontinuity, while also being aware that what one is regarding is itself constitutionally broken and dispersed. Foucault's dislike of continuous, or what he also terms 'total history' (AK:9), is related to his earlier critique of the transcendental subject in The Order of Things. It is not quite clear if he dislikes continuous history because it supports this sovereign subject, or because continuous history is itself sustained by this form of subjectivity. Indeed Foucault avoids this issue by claiming that they are two sides of the same theoretical approach: 'Continuous history is the indispensable correlative of the founding function of the subject' (AK:12). Continuous history acts as a reassurance to subjectivity, promising to restore, as historical consciousness, all that is different and other to subjectivity. Foucault clearly has in mind here the link of subjective consciousness and historical development found initially in Hegel and then Marx, and which he feels is revived, in a slightly different form, in the twentieth century by phenomenology. Foucault espouses discontinuity so as to assist his aim of defining' a method of historical analysis freed from the anthropological theme' (AK:l6). Two initial queries we might raise here would be: firstly, whether history can completely escape the question of subjectivity, as Foucault seems to suggest; and secondly, whether traditional history does always rely upon a linkage of continuous history and a foundational subject, or whether you can have one of these terms without the other. Foucault keeps the notion of discontinuity as a key principle of his historical writing even when he shifts from a solely archaeological perspective. But the other prong of archaeological analysis- its essentially discursive focus - is considerably modified. Archaeology is the study of discourses rather than the objects or events to which discourses or signs refer or represent. Foucault states that he does not analyse discourses in order to write a 'history of the referent' (AK:47). His study of madness, for example, was not an attempt to reconstitute what madness was, before it was represented and organised in a whole variety of discourses. Just as the principle of discontinuity was upheld because it was more faithful to the reality of historical events, so Foucault wishes to value discourses for what they are rather than for what they represent: What we are concerned with is not to neutralise discourse, to make it the sign of something else, and to pierce through its density in order to reach what remains silently anterior to it, but on the contrary to maintain it in its consistency, to make it emerge in its own complexity. What, in short, we wish to do is to dispense with 'things' ...To substitute for the enigmatic treasure of 'things' anterior to discourse, the regular formation of objects that emerge only in discourse (AK:47).
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There are a number of important issues that this statement raises and which I will only sketch out here. Prima facie, Foucault might be saying one of two things. Firstly, his comments could imply that history is only to be regarded as possessing a linguistic existence. If objects and events only emerge in discourse does that entail they have only a discursive existence? It is, therefore, the fact of historical interpretation that produces what we believe to be the events and objects of 'the past'? The second interpretation is that our only access to the events and objects of history is through specific discourses that, in various ways, describe them. This would imply that 'the past' does exist, but that our only grasp upon it is through our own discursive interventions which necessarily contain our own perspectives and interests embedded into them. The first position is, to an extent, a form of quite radical scepticism, while the second, which is closer I think to Foucault's own view, is perspectival or relativist, but not quite so sceptical. Remaining at the level of discourse when one analyses history does not, however, imply treating discourses as subject only to linguistic rules. Discourses are not- as in structuralism- to be treated solely as 'groups of signs (... )but as practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak' (AK:49). Archaeology studies 'discourses as practices obeying certainrules' (AK:138). SoFoucaultisnotcommitted to the position that history is merely a set of discourses since history is about practices that occur under the constraints of rules. But there are still ambiguities here. If we are to understand discourses as practices does that mean that we should also consider the reverse, and treat practices as discourses? Foucault's adoption of the term' discursive practice' only complicates matters here. And how are we to regard the systematic 'rules' that constrain discursive practices? Are the rules themselves discursively constructed? The epistemological status of history as discourse is, it appears, a little obscure. Foucault's attempt to resolve these difficulties is seen in the essay 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, History', published two years after The Archaeology of Knowledge in 1971. In effect, it is practices which win out over discourses, whilstthenotionofdiscontinuityisre-emphasisedandfinally helps Foucault break with the structuralist vocabulary of rules of formation. History now is not primarily about discourses but about power. This is a point summarised in a slightly later interview, 'Truth and Power', when Foucault explains his distance from the structuralist perspective upon history: 'I believe one's point of reference should not be to the great model of language (langue) and signs, butto that of war and battle. The history which bears and determines us has the form of a war rather than that of a language: relations of power, not relations of meaning'.s One impetus for this shift from signs to power is Nietzsche's argument that signs are themselves nothing but interpretations of earlier interpretations that have been forgotten or suppressed. Rather than the anodyne theory that discourses are practices governed by innocent rules of formation, Foucault now adopts Nietzsche's view that 'everything that exists, no matter what its origin, is periodically reinterpreted by those in power in terms of fresh intentions' and that this reinterpretation is a forceful' outstripping and overcoming' during which earlier meanings are necessarily destroyed or hidden. 6
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Foucault's 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, History' essay is an attempt to revise his historical inquiry in the light of this shift from signs and meaning to power and struggle. It is also a vituperative attack upon the methods of conventional historical writing, a much more aggressive critique than is evident in The Archaeology of Knowledge, even though certain themes - such as the importance of discontinuity - remain. Although it is not always evident precisely which historians Foucault would label as 'conventional', the tenor of Foucault's criticism is very clear. Foucault accuses historians of not actually paying sufficient attention to history. Historians are just not meticulous enough, as they hide their gaze from the immense clutter of the past because they desire to write history in the form of a reassuring narrative of origins, explanations and continuities. In The Archaeology Foucault argued that the philosophical itch for foundations manifested itself in conventional history in several ways: one was the linkage of continuous history and the transcendental subject, another was the desire to interpret signs as representations of things. These are still the failings of the historian, but now Foucault is not content to view them as errors of method that can be corrected by detailing sets of procedures for analysing discursive formations. The historian's quest for origins has to be seen as a motivated desire to ignore the actual torn and twisted fabric of history, part of a 'will to power' that writes history from an omniscient perspective where the past makes sense only because the chance and contingent reality of that past is actually violently suppressed: 'The historian's history finds its support outside of time? Conventional history is more properly named a metahistory or a 'suprahistorical history' (NGH:93). Historians try to uncover a 'primordial truth' behind or before 'the external world of accident and succession' (NGH:78). The genealogist, in contrast, refuses these metaphysical comforts and actually 'listens to history', where he or she finds no secret essence behind historical events but rather an essence 'fabricated in a piecemeal fashion from alien forms' or that 'reasonable' actions by historical actors have their origin in chance (NGH:78). Foucault, therefore, respects history too much, listens to the singular events, chance occurrences and random beginnings too closely to reduce these 'myriad events' (NGH:81) to some preexistent or imposed narrative. Archaeology sought to split history writing from its comfortable relationship to the idea of the transcendental subject. But now Foucault realises that this separation is not sufficient to free history from the influence of this model of subjectivity. The writing of history must, instead, be actively turned against the transcendental subject in order that it can be properly analysed without the fear that a transcendental conception of subjectivity might return to bridle and contain the contingent and discontinuous events of the past. Thus Foucault writes that the 'purpose of history, guided by genealogy, is not to discover the roots of our identity, but to commit itself to its dissipation (NGH:95). Foucault's concern to study the history of the body, seen most clearly in the 'docile bodies' of Discipline and Punish, can be understood as another part of this critique of the transcendental, and thus dematerialised and non-corporeal, subject.
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Genealogy is concerned with the descent rather than the evolution of events in history, a movement backwards rather than forwards in time. One such series of events is the way the self 'fabricates a coherent identity' from 'numberless beginnings' (NGH:81); to trace the forward evolution of such a self would too readily produce an image of progressive unity. If we reverse the focus of historical study, and work backwards, then this fiction of a unified subjectivity is less likely, argues Foucault, to take hold of us. Analysing descent, he suggests, 'permits the dissociation of the self, its recognition and displacement as an empty synthesis, in liberating a profusion of lost events' (NGH:81). But unlike evolution, which assumes a point of origin, genealogical descent must never reach some point of origination, and instead only seeks 'the moment of arising' or the 'emergence of something as a result of a struggle of forces against one another' (NGH:83). Here I want to pose four problems for Foucault's notion of genealogy as a prelude to considering his later history writing: 1. Is it possible that history as descent might arrive at a point of origin? There might be seen to be a danger that the point at which one concludes one's descent might be regarded as a point of origin. 2. What is it about descent that compels us to see subjectivity as dispersal and not unity? And why is it that evolutionary history is doomed to only ever produce a unified subjectivity? Surely there is nothing inherent in thetemporaldirectionofhistorywritingthatcompletelystructureswhat one will say of the object under investigation. The answer might be that evolutionary history is not just about temporal directions, but about an evaluative notion of progress being embedded in the subject one studies. 3. It is clear that descent helps Foucault introduce the idea of writing a history of the present, a notion most clearly articulated in a 1984 interview: 'I set out from a problem expressed in the terms current today and I trytoworkoutits genealogy. Genealogy means thatibeginmy analysis from a question posed in the present'. 8 This starting point in the present is not designed to confirm a relationship of necessity or inevitability that might hold between the past and the present, such that we understand the past in order to see what has shaped us. Rather, Foucault's history of the present is a development of Nietzsche's point in The Genealogy of Morals that knowledge is always a matter of perspective. 9 Historians must acknowledge their own perspective on the past, their 'grounding in a particular time and place, their preferences in a controversy'. History is thus a 'curative science' whose perception is slanted, 'being a deliberate appraisal, affirmation, or negation' that examines issues in the post in order to intervene and 'prescribe the best antidote' (NGH:90). Therefore the historian who starts to examine some topic in a previous era should start by asking what it is in the present that makes this topic of contemporaryinterest.Foucaultextendsthispointinalaterdefinitionof genealogy as concerned with the 'insurrection of subjugatedknowledges', those local, illegitimate or disqualified knowledges that are opposed to what Foucault calls 'the tyranny of globalising discourses' such as the disciplinary networks of power analysed in Discipline and Punish. 10 Genealogy in this more political definition attempts to utilise the
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perspectival interests of the historian in the present. Foucault's wish here is to' establish a historical knowledge of struggles and to make use of this knowledge tactically today' .11 Archaeology now reappears as the method for studying and recuperating these local knowledges; genealogy refers to the tactics by which these subjugated knowledges can be freed and 'brought into play' in the present. 12 The question here, however, is the following: how easy is it to utilise historically subjugated knowledges in the present? It might be the case that one might wish to recover a subjugated set of practices, but be unhappy at the historical ideas that may be attached to them. Can one easily be selective about which parts of subjugated knowledges one wishes to employ? 4. The dissipation of identity celebrated by Foucault as an essential part of genealogy arises from a renewed value granted to the idea of discontinuity: 'History becomes "effective" to the degree that it introduces discontinuity into our very being as it divides our emotions, dramatises our instincts, multiplies our body and sets it against itself' (NGH:88). Previously Foucault believed that the recognition of discontinuity resided in the methods one used to study history. As I argued earlier, Foucault then sawtheneedtoturndiscontinuityarounduponthesubjectthatconducts historical investigation. Now I think that the later Foucault realises that this violent annihilation of identity raises more problems that it resolves. It does not necessarily entail that one writes a form of history more attentive to the singular events of the past. This is because the question arises of from where does the historian write if her or his identity is dissolved? Writing from the perspective of the present with a dissolved identity does not really address the question of who it is that is doing the writing, what form of self is interested in these historical events. Maybe Foucault's rhetoric here is necessary in order to erase the transcendental subject, but it is instructive that the final, oblique, sections of 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, History' seem to reach a kind of impasse. We must not, argues Foucault, judge the past in terms of a truth we can only possess in the present, but must risk 'the destruction of the subject who seeks knowledge' (NGH:97). This is because of a recognition that 'all knowledge rests on injustice( ... ) and that the instinct for knowledge is malicious' (NGH:95), and therefore the perspective of the present is also caught up in this obnoxious epistemology. The call, then, for the dissolution of the subject is for the 'destruction of the man who maintains knowledge by the injustice proper to the will to knowledge' (NGH:97). The price, it appears, of the destruction of this injustice is the dissolution of the subject of knowledge. But then who is it that is able to gaze upon the past or present and assert that these events and knowledges are unjust? It appears that Foucault realises the need to reinstate some historical consideration of the subject that writes history in order to know. In the 'Truth and Power' interview, Foucault's definition of genealogy is still that of 'a form of history which can account for the constitution of knowledge ... without having to make reference to a subject which is transcendental'.13 But Foucault also sees the need to produce an account of
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subjectivity that amounts to more than its demolition: 'One had to dispense with the constituent subject, to get rid of the subject itself... to arrive at an analysis which can account for the constitution of the subject within a historical framework'.1 4 It is only by dissolving the constituting subject of history that Foucault can reach a position where he can begin to study the historical constitution of the subject. In 1981, Foucault commented that his intention was not to analyse power but 'to create a history of the different modes by which, in our cultures, the human being is made "subject"'.l5 This project is theorised quite explicitly in the essay, 'What is Enlightenment?' The subject that reappears is, however, a thoroughly historical subject, bound by chance, difference, contingency rather than possessing a transcendental unity. This is why philosophical critique must engage in what Foucault terms an 'historical ontology of the self', rather than conduct ontology or history by assuming a transcendental subject position as a starting point. A proper attention to history starts by making no assumptions about the nature of the self that appears in the past- it starts by respecting the ungivenness of human subjectivity. If Foucault's interest in Kant's essay on the Enlightenment has its genealogy in the problem of trying to consider subjectivity historically, its point of origin lies in The Order of Things, where Foucault analyses the emergence of the modern episteme between 1775 and 1825. One characteristic of the new episteme is the idea of a history ruled by the concepts of chronology and origin, and which represses the idea of history as 'the radical mode of being of events'.16 This latter view is clearly the one criticised in The Archaeology of Knowledge. But Foucault also notes that this theory of history is a symptom of the' question of knowing what it means for thought to have a history', or, less cryptically, an 'investigation concerned with nothing more nor less than the very being of our modernity' of which we are, he notes, still coming to terms. 17 When Foucault discusses Kant on the Enlightenment it is precisely this awareness of modernity and the historicity of thought around which the text is constructed. In 'What is Enlightenment?' Kant's text is interpreted as 'a point of departure' for what Foucault terms 'the attitude of modernity'. Modernity is an attitude, not an epoch, a 'mode of relating to contemporary reality' (WE:39). It is thus a way of relating to the present that includes thinking, feeling, acting and behaving but, most importantly, has the flavour of a 'task' or 'ethos' with two parts. Foucault now conducts one of his own leaps of historical and intellectual imagination that exemplify his own discontinuous method of writing history. To help characterise the attitude to modernity he has outlined in Kant he produces a very un-Kantian example, Charles Baudelaire. For Baudelaire, writes Foucault, modernity is an experience of the 'is continuity of time' requiring the elaboration of an attitude that can grasp the eternal dwelling within the temporal. The true modern mode of subjectivity follows Baudelaire's command: 'You have no right to despise the present' (WE:39-40). Instead you must form an intimate relationship to the present, just as Kant did in trying to answer the question, what is Enlightenment? This is one part of the 'task' of relating to modernity: the formation of 'a relationship to the present' (WE:41). Clearly, then, Foucault
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is pulling together various elements from his previous work upon historiography: a notion of the discontinuity of history and of subjectivity; the importance of practices; and the idea of an historical understanding of the present. The second part of the 'task' displayed by Baudelaire consists in elaborating 'a mode of relationship that has to be established with oneself' (WE:41). This marks the reappearance of considerations of the construction of subjectivity that Foucault had earlier wanted to dissolve in the interests of a proper writing of history. Now historical work must be intimately tied into a consideration of selves and subjects. In Baudelaire, Foucault has found an instance of an Enlightenment attitude worthy of preservation; it is that of a critique of our words, ideas and actions through a 'historical ontology of ourselves' (WE:45). This yokes together the two parts of the task of modernity: forming a relation to the present, and forming a relation to oneself. Foucault's is a rather odd 'ontology', concerned not with universal features of that which exists, but with the differing and not necessarily related forms of existence people have historically produced. This is an ontology of the subject that bears the mark of historical discontinuity through and through. Unlike the earlier uses of discontinuity derived from Nietzsche, the effect now is not to blast apart subjectivity butto see how, historically, the self is put together after an initial dissolution of its transcendental conception. Another innovation is the way inwhichtheconstitutionoftheselfisallowedacertainamountofautonomy. Not subjected by discourses or disciplined by technologies, the constitution of subjectivity is now a series of practices (the 'care of the self or the 'aesthetics of existence') that can be self-employed. This self-formation of subjectivity can be seen in Foucault's notion of how we are to understand the present in terms of 'the contemporary limits of the necessary' (WE:43). Foucault once more eschews a transcendental approach to the self, conceiving his study as an historical one into 'the events that have led us to constitute ourselves' (WE:46). These events are those we now view as the limits of our ontological states. If Kant asked the negative question of what limits knowledge must remain within, Foucault want to pose a more positive question: in what poses as universal in our knowledge is there anything which is the result of contingent constraints and how can these constraints be transgressed? This form of historical inquiry is still genealogical in being brought face to face with the present; it must 'put itself to the test of reality, of contemporary reality, both to grasp the points where change is possible and desirable, and to determine the precise form this change should take' (WE:46). Foucault'sfinalworkuponthesexualityoftheGreeksandGreco-Romans thus comes to play a key part in his final vision of how one writes history. By considering the past events which have formed us as human subjects we gain a sense of the contingency of those norms and values we tend to regard as universal. History shows us diversity rather than universality, discontinuous modes of acting as 'human subjects'. By writing history we can bring to prominence those constraints upon our present subjectivities that perhaps should be transgressed, the points where change in values and action is possible. The past, then, does not help us understand the present; but it
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might help us have the courage to imagine that the present could be different from the form it manifests at the moment. Perhaps historical writing requires a certain aestheticisation, not to erode the 'truth' of our past, but to enable it to imagine the telling of radically different stories of who we are. Critics have sometimes accused the late Foucault of wanting to recreate the Greek world in the present. I think this misses the point of what he understands to be the work of genealogical history writing. Foucault says of the Enlightenment that what should be preserved is not faithfulness to any specific set of ideas, but rather the 'permanent reactivation of an attitude' which is that of a 'permanent critique of our historical era' (WE:42). Reactivation is the term used by Foucault when he had discussed how genealogy seeks to redeploy historically 'subjugated knowledges' in the present. Now it is not knowledges but an attitude, practices not discourses that Foucault wishes to rescue from the past. It is an attitude that, by examining the vast 'networkofcontingencies'thatishistory,mighthelpus'graspwhyandhow that-which-is might no longer be that-which-is'.18 Discontinuity, then, no longer resides just in the approach to events of the past, or even in the very being of the subject, but now takes up its place in the present as an awareness of how the self can discontinue being a certain kind of subject and work towards some new self. I have tried to argue that Foucault's late work bears the traces of a working through of an approach to the writing of history scattered throughout his major texts. For the final Foucault a sense of the past involves a self-critique from the position of the present, and the new practices sought by subjects can perhaps only be glimpsed in a 'reactivation' of practices from the past. As I have suggested, however, it is the project of 'reactivation' which is perhaps most problematic for Foucault's practice of the writing of history. 1 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things:An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, London: Tavistock, 1970, p.219. My thanks to Moyal Uoyd for her helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper. 2 The best account of the role of history in Foucault's work is that of Clare O'Farrell, Foucault: Historian or Philosopher?, London: Macmillan, 1989. 3 Michel Foucault, 'What is Enlightenment?', in Paul Rabinow, (ed.). The Foucault Reader, London: Penguin, 1984, p.46. Further references to this essay will be given in the main text as WE with page number. Foucault also discusses his combined use of archaeology and genealogy in Volume 2 of The History of Sexuality, The Use of Pleasure, London: Penguin, 1984, trans. R. Hurley, pp.ll-12. 4 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan, London: Tavistock, 1972, p.8. Further reference will be given in the main text as AK with page number. 5 Foucault, 'Truth and Power', The Foucault Reader, p.56. 6 Friedrich Nietzsche,'The Genealogy of Morals', in Nietzsche, The Birth ofTragedy and The Genealogy of Morals, New York/London: Anchor Books, 1956, p.209. 7 Foucault, 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, History', The Foucault Reader, p.87. All further references will be given in the main text as NGH with page number.
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Foucault, 'The Concern for Truth', in L. Kritzman, (ed.) Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977-1984, London: Routledge, 1988, p.262.
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Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, p.255.
10 Foucault, 'Two Lectures', in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-7, C. Gordon, (ed.) Brighton: Harvester, 1980, pp.81, 83. 11 Ibid, p.83. 12 Ibid, p.85. 13 'Truth and Power', p.59. 14 Ibid. 15 Cited O'Farrell, Foucault, p.l13. 16 Foucault, The Order of Things, p.219. 17 Ibid. pp.219-20, 221. 18 Foucault, 'Critical Theory /Intellectual History', in Politics, Philosophy, Culture, pp.37,36.
Foucault, Politics and the Performative Patricia Moynihan Since 1989 there has been a marked increase in the number of dilemmas facing any attempt to frame political possibilities. The uncertainties are a product of a number of factors but amongst those generally regarded as most significant have been the events in Eastern Europe. The collapse of socialism combined with a consistent move towards the adoption of the principles of the capitalist market and democratic political system has provoked a serious challenge for many of these academics on the Left who are accustomed to formulating their analyses in terms of Marxism. Those recent pressures on Marxism as a paradigm for economic and political alternativescomesometimeafterthecritiqueofitassocialtheory.Foucault's work has been particularly influential as a source of self-criticism for a decade. As with other post-structuralists, he has directly confronted the taken-for-granted assumptions underpinning the analytic categories of Marxism: the limitations of structural theories of the state, the explanatory weight given to the economy, the implications of vesting liberation in reason and the pursuit of truth. The approach of this paper is to reconsider Foucault's thinking about the political from the perspective of his Nietzschean themes. Particular attention is given to the performative as a framing of an alternative politics. The paper argues that Nietzsche and Foucault's account of the performative involves rejection not only of subjectivity but of any framing of politics that involves a self, including a project regarding an authoritative, independent self. The performative, in contrast, implicitly involves processes of selfovercoming. The paper then explores some of the locations where we might find signs of the performative. Foucault describes his position on what to do about the problem of politics in an interview with Raulet (1983). In response to a question about his intentions he replied that he hoped that his work would make possible the recognition that 'things could be different'. The description could be regarded as providing support for those who would see and decry a normative neutrality in Foucault's position. In its implied refusal to adhere to the norms of modern political practice, to take a position, set an agenda and write meta-narrative, it appears to confirm interpretations of his work asradicallyrelativistorperhaps,nihilistic. Consistentwith that,italsolends confirmation to strategies that would confine Foucault's influence to the problematisation and critique of the current operation of the social. Martin Jay's recent text Downcast Eyes (1993) is not atypical in identifying Foucault with a theoretical genre which is suffering from a loss of hope; a deep pessimism that can no longer believe in and therefore promote, a project. However, Foucault's reply to Raulet was located in a wider context, one in which Nietzsche's influence on Foucault was being discussed. Under
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those circumstances 'recognition that things could be different' links into and levers open a number of issues in regard to Foucault's work generally and his politics in particular. Further, it suggests that Foucault expected that his readers could take away from their engagement with his fictions their own sense of what the political would consist of. Yet, as Ansell-Pearson has commented in relation to Nietzsche, there are considerable difficulties to surmount in an attempt to frame the political in terms outside those recognisable to the modern. Foucault found in Nietzsche the way round the dilemma of framing a politics that did not promote the very problems he was identifying in his critique of the modern. Like Nietzsche, his work explored the way in which things can originate out of their opposite, in particular, the relation between the will to truth and deception, or in Nietzsche's terms, 'slavery'. Much of Nietzsche's account of the dynamics involved is embedded in his description of the operation of Christian morality. As he saw it, the JudeaChristian tradition has turned weakness into a virtue, has promoted a slave morality by privileging fear. As 'the mother of all morality' (BGE:201), fear entrenches and legitimates prohibitions; in Christianity, the body and its passions. Their replacement with pity and compassion consolidates a slave morality insofar as they are values which strip the will to power of its independence, its command and its creativity. Nietzsche's critique is however less concerned with Christian morality per se than its influence on post-Enlightenment philosophy. God is dead but the principles of slave morality have been transferred across into a search for Truth. Thus for instance, Kant in his 'homesickness' has taken the metaphysics of Judeo-Christian morality and embedded it within his philosophical project. For the purposes of this paper there are three components of Nietzsche's critique of Kant which are of particular importance: the will to truth, causal analyses, and the subject/ object dualism. Together, they provide the basic framework of Nietzsche's critique of the modern and the point of departure for his proposal of an alternative. Nietzsche's alternative to the bourgeois pattern of collapsing the will to power into the will to truth involves making a move 'beyond good and evil', that is beyond a system of reasoning that establishes new and more pervasive techniques for judgement. However, Nietzsche's art is such that it is not always readily apparent what his alternative consists of. His riddles, spiders (Derrida), or double coding, can have the effect of attributing to Nietzsche a voice which is not only just one among the chorus of positions he puts forward but also one which is distinctly not his. Thus for instance, there is a widely held view that the alternative involves mastery (see for instance Ansell-Pearson). On that reading, Nietzsche is proposing as the site for independence and authority that which is occupied by the aristocracy. Rank and hierarchy are consequently a feature, along with the rightful subordination of 'the herd', 'the common man'. It seems clear on closer reading, however, that mastery is the source of the problem, not its solution. Slaves 'play the master', incorporating principles of mastery into their slave revolt. Those components that we have discussed in terms of 'resentment', ie. the seeking after someone I something responsible, is a trait of masters adopted
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and adapted by slaves to make sense of their suffering. The death of God only heightens the need for the comfort that meaning, now secularised, provides. Above all, it is mastery in its construction of slavery which provides the situation for which consolation is sought. Without masters, with their domination and exploitation there would be neither danger nor fear: 'If one could at all do away with danger, the cause of fear, one would have done away with this morality at the same time, it would no longer be necessary,itwouldnolongerconsideritself any longer necessary' (BGE:113). Nietzsche's alternative has to therefore avoid not only'good and evil' but also mastery. Mastery is sourced in the compliance with the expectation that the honourable are required to 'keep their promises' (GM:40). That association of ethics with social status and social esteem introduces both instrumentalism and asceticism. Together they provide the basis for duty, the externally imposed but accepted expectation of obligation, responsibility and predicability. Nietzsche finds his alternative to that framing in nobility: 'at present it belongs to the conception of 'greatness' that a man would be noble ... to be capable of being different, to stand alone, to have to live by personal initiative' (BGE:212). Nobility eschews making judgements of others as 'intellectually shallow' and refuses to allow others to exercise that authority over him/her. Instead the 'noble' is the expression of the 'mind strong and original enough to initiate opposite estimates of value' (BGE:203). His alternative thus acts to dismantle the processes of both slavery and mastery. A prime target amongst them is the self. As the self is a central vehicle for delivering technologies of domination/ subordination it takes a crucial place in Nietzsche's alternative. It is a project of self-overcoming in which fear, proscription and virtue, with their concomitant weak will is replaced by a strong will. It is at this point that we can start to see the shape of Nietzsche's politics. Democracy centres a subject which is subordinate to a form of regulation that 'inscribes itself with equal demands on soul and body' (BGE:240). Selfovercoming dismantles the subject through which regulation operates. In addition the replacement of mastery I slavery by nobility allows the reentering of traits which Nietzsche associates with the Dionysian. JudeaChristian processes of judgement are represented in terms of a culture of asceticism as Apollonian: rigorous, rational, controlled and punitive. The Dionysian in contrast is perhaps most readily recognised in Bakhtin's carnivalesque; it is playful, artful, ironic and sceptical. Underlying the Dionysian is Nietzsche's commitment to spiritualising all aspects of life, both its strengths and weaknesses, and including the body and its passions. The Dionysian is art without boundaries or structures. It also brings the artist back in from her /his exclusion by Kantian categories. And as Nietzschean 'immoralist', the artist re-introduces within art not just creativity, action and movement but also transgression. Amongst the effects then, is that Dionysian art challenges the limits placed on art by aesthetics, that is, by the processes put in place by pursuing the question 'whatis beauty?' This liminal Dionysian thereby carries the capacity to return the body and the mask to art where together they can cheat aesthetics, the Apollonian, of its
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capacity to reduce creativity down to a problem of knowledge. Consequently, not only does creativity resurface in the Dionysian, but in the absence of mechanisms of distinction and dominance, it takes the form of an inseparable combination of doer and deed. Art and the artist are one. More generally then, rather than having a self emerging out of the construction of knowledge of an object, that is, in division and subordination, creativity asserts the possibility of the performative. Nietzsche's politics involves an exploration of that performative, 'the deed and its creativity' (GS:451). In this context of doer/deed, the will to power recovers the capacity to will freely which had been lost as the effects of epistemological framing turned it into a will to truth. The pursuit of 'free will' had generated its opposite- regulation. The performative, by operating beyond epistemological framing allows the will to life, to repossess its Dionysian dimensions excluded by the will to truth. This form of the political then, resists turning things into problems of knowledge, refuses resentment, allows the resurfacing of difference, and rejects formulations of subjectivity. The Dionysian positions movement against Apollonian form and will to power against will to truth. Without form or truth the basis of modernist processes of judgement dissolve and are replaced by the dynamic of creativity in which judgement emerges out of criteria specific to the performative. Nietzsche's final position recombines the Apollonian and the Dionysian so that judgement and creativity operate together. But judgement still rests on criteria constructed out of creativity rather than truth. Rather than being incompatible with playfulness, the ironic, and the physical, judgement emerges out of these formerly transgressive opposites, the other side of the dualisms. Nietzsche could never be accused of 'normative neutrality'. Despite his efforts to critique the metaphysical, to develop a 'psychology' rather than a social theory and to explore the potential of aphorisms, double coding, poetry and fiction to dismantle philosophical form and structure, his success in avoiding the metaphysical has been open to question. The teleological aspects of his project suggest that there are grounds for Heidegger's description of him as the 'last metaphysician'. Nietzsche's attempt to illustrate the movement of the performative in his own work has, on this reading, been defeated by its position in an end-directed project. In my view, Foucault's work is in part an attempt to address and resolve the problem of teleology raised in the analysis of Nietzsche's formulation of the performative. Further, that it is in the character of the solution Foucault found that we also find his politics. Broadly speaking, to draw out the Nietzschean themes in Foucault's work provides the conditions for the unmasking of his politics. However, the purpose of this paper is to focus on those issues most central for recognising signs of the performative in our contemporary social formation, so I will take out of Foucault's work only the most pivotal observations. My starting point is the concluding section of Madness and Civilisation where he sets out the processes involved in the attempts to impose subjectivity on those defined as transgressive, in this case 'the mad'.
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As he argues neither the entry of the discipline of medicine into the asylum nor the effects of its presence are related to the content of its knowledge: 'If the medical personage could isolate madness it was not because he knew it, but because he mastered it' (MC:272). In Madness and Civilization, then, Foucault is already giving emphasis to processes, not content. The relations activated by mastery are the location of the capacity to construct a context of judgement in which the mad are to develop a consciousness of themselves as objectively mad. The processes involved allow the entry ofbourgeois cultural values into the shaping of practices that were being associated with the authority of science. The mad would be trained to take responsibility for their madness through the mediations of 'that delicate structure which would become the essential nucleus of madness- a structure that formed a kind of microcosm in which were symbolised the massive structures of bourgeois society and its values' (MC:274). That construction of the mad as the Other and the concomitant silencing of madness was also facilitated by the deployment of the discourse of the social. The eighteenth century saw associations being made between madness and 'social failure', that is, the failure to comply with the social. The social was thus brought to bear not only as the formalisation of divisions constructed on the basis of danger and fear, but also in the formulation of social universals which suggested a generalised capacity of the mad to undermine coherence and order. Foucault's description of the operation of the human sciences thus follows Nietzsche in seeing elements of mastery and 'resentment' underlying the constitution of a self. The organisation of action into a subject involves silencing people's own knowledges and replacing them with a sense of the gap between themselves and the bourgeois ideal. It is in that distance ('the pathos of distance') that judgement resides and with it the source of the transgressive identity which provides the conditions for becoming an object to oneself. That theme of judgement acting through displacement receives further development in Discipline and Punish. Here, the imposition of subjectivity is the catalyst for establishing divisions within the culture of a class. The respectable, responsible, approved working class becomes divided from that part of the class seen as delinquent, criminal, transgressive. As with Nietzsche, fear is a catalyst for mobilising processes which generate hostility and suspicion. It is important to notice that the division depends on there being a group which does not accept the imposition of identity, the mechanics of which were described in Madness and Civilisation. Discipline and Punish also explores the impact of this transgressive group on the policy initiatives of liberal humanism. First, it is the response to their ongoing transgression which provides the impulse behind the spread the carcerel. Without their continued non-compliance there would be no incentive to elaborate increasingly more interventionist strategies. Second, and associated with that, is the pivotal role Foucault gives to failure in his account of the operation of discipline. The literature quite frequently interprets failure in systemic terms, that is, as a feature of the system. Yet disciplinary systems can only fail if there is opposition to them. That professionals should account for failure in terms of an incapacity to get the degree of proximity required to
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change people, can only emerge out of a sense that they have not changed. They can thus be seen as having resisted taking on the identity of a bourgeois, responsible, but transgressive, subject. Clearly then, the 'criminal' suggests success in resisting the external imposition of judgement that would have their own knowledges silenced, displaced and replaced. The History of Sexuality suggests that in contrast, Foucault has serious misgivings about the political strategies of the gay community. As he sees it, engaging in the struggle to dismantle the structures that constitute the Other by using modern political strategies has serious drawbacks. The objective of taking apart the foundations of the Other by becoming part of the mainstream involves taking on the norms and thereby the judgements of the human sciences. In Foucault's critique, the human sciences, by deploying the categories, assigning identity and extrapolating norms, are a major vehicle for imposing judgement in contemporary society. The norms carry the same components of morality that Nietzsche identified: fearprohibition-suffering-blame. As a version of slave morality, the human sciences cultivate a stance that generates the same resentment that makes 'homosexuals' victims. By seeking liberation, and further, to frame that liberation in terms of 'homosexuality' involves accepting the coding of transgression and the resentment it involves. It also accepts subjectivity with its norms and judgements, that striving for improvement which Foucault, like Nietzsche, sees as the antithesis of 'freedom'. Their liberatory project has therefore caught them up in a process which confirms the values and strategies of the straight community and which are a major factor in the oppression of the gay community. Foucault is making a point similar to that which Nietzsche makes in regard to women, that they are abandoning that which is a source of self-overcoming in favour of 'fear and mastery'. Foucault also sees the gay community losing the grounds upon which they do operate as a force of opposition. For to take on the subject position of 'homosexual' involves the displacement of people's own framings. And for Foucault that which is beyond the 'homosexual' has avoided epistemological framing. Thus in The History ofSexuality val 1 he provided two examples of formulations operating outside the boundaries of 'sexuality'. 'Ars erotica' and 'the body and its pleasures' are illustrations of the performative. That is, each positions an inseparable doer and deed. For Foucault then, there lies beyond homosexuality with its transgressive identities, a form of life that is consistent with a Nietzschean will to power. The body and its pleasures refuses problematisation and prohibition in favour of Dionysian creativity in which pleasure and pain, strengths and weaknesses produce the heterogeneity of a self that is in the process of becoming. It also can generate the criteria for exercising judgement, thereby allowing autonomy without subjectivity and avoiding the trap of the normative. The body and its pleasures and ars erotica stand as two sites of resistance to subjectivity, the framing of the Other and the norm. And as with the transgressive criminal, there is no agenda for change. Yet volume one of The History of Sexuality shows us that insofar as the gay community does have an agenda for change it is caught up in mechanisms of compliance
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at a number of levels. To employ modern political framing is thus inconsistent with the Nietzschean critique of Kant that Foucault carries into his work on the human sciences. The influence of Nietzschean issues does not abate in Foucault's later work. In The Use of Pleasure the second volume of History of Sexuality Nietzschean themes are at the forefront in the framing of his analysis and discussion. As with his other texts, he is pursuing themes relating to regulation. In a departure from earlier texts however, the location of his study is neither the modern nor the pre-modern. This time his genealogical interests have taken him to antiquity, to classical Greece. Theoretically this is an important move because it entails an exploration disconnected from the processes that Foucault has been associating with regulation. Not only are there none of the Christian practices of self-reflection and self-review such as the confessional but also there are none of the processes identified as operating out of and in conjunction with epistemology. The absence of the dividing practices, classification, definitional and disciplinary techniques, suggests that Foucault, as far as his own interests are concerned is making a theoretical move outside subjectivity. Using Nietzsche's framework, he is leaving behind that historical period associated with slave morality- that is, the Judeo - Christian tradition, its transfer into modern philosophy, and thereafter, into the human sciences. The move to take his observations outside epistemology could suggest that The Use of Pleasure involves a project not dissimilar to Nietzsche's search for 'beyond good and evil', that is, for the stance which would allow nobility. Such a reading gains initial credibility from the fact that Foucault sites his text amongst the Greek aristocracy, where nobility is actively sought and where considerable emphasis is placed on developing strength of character, on being wise in one's judgement and living with the harmony that belongs to beauty. We have here a number of the traits that Nietzsche associates with self-overcoming. Furthermore, and fairly persuasively, the ancient Greeks did not regard men having same sex relationships, including with boys, as transgressive. Theoretically then we are located in a period which does not use mechanisms of regulation associated with the onset of Christianity, rather, interpretation is generated within a context of the aesthetic, not the coding of transgression. The question arises then of whether or not for Foucault the aristocratic systems of the ancient Greeks stand as an example of a situation where people retain control over the conditions of judgement on terms which promote order but not regulation. Certainly many would draw that conclusion. I would argue, however, that such is not Foucault's intention. Rather, if The Use of Pleasure is read against Nietzsche we find an illustration not of nobility, or self-overcoming, but of mastery. In the second essay of the Genealogy of Morals one of the voices which Nietzsche is employing makes the association between 'the problem of man' and responsibility: 'The breeding of an animal that can promise- is not this just that very paradox of a task which nature has set itself in regard to man? Is not this the very problem of man?' (GM:40) Nietzsche sees mastery as this point, where expectations consolidated that a man's nature be such that he would enter into and keep a promise. The processes involved generate two
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sets of effects: first, it activates ego, a sense of superiority amongst those who regard themselves as fitting the criteria; and second, corresponding representations of inferiority attributed to those who do not. The requirement that people shape themselves, do work on themselves, as a means of achieving some goal is identified by Nietzsche as a starting point for the self. It is of considerable theoretical importance, as we have seen, that the emergence of self is also the location for the production of division and hierarchy. For Nietzsche, the training in mastery is the context for creating 'resentment'. The regulatory processes adopted subsequently in the slave revolt, are those shaped originally in mastery, ie. in division, domination and resentment. The Use of Pleasure uncovers the way in which concerns about the management of sexuality operated similarly as a terrain of power that linked to both truth and to the self. Despite 'homosexuality' not being judged transgressive, by the ancient Greeks, it was not free of judgement. So while codification of the act typically belongs to the Christian, there was a considerable literature regarding the dangers of excess. Fears were regularly elaborated about the destructive consequences of uncontrolled passions on the capacity of men to rule with wisdom and diligence. Sex was seen to be natural but a trait shared with animals and therefore requiring subordination to the authority of reason and judgement: 'but the natural inferiority would not of itself be a reason for having to combat them, if there was not the danger that, winning out over all else, they would extend their rule over the whole individual, eventually reducing him to slavery' (UP:66). Thus 'homosexuality' itself was not problematised but the lack of control that might be produced by any liaison, including the homosexual was regarded as having the potential to undermine what did matter- the conduct appropriate to leadership. Thus Foucault sees 'care of the self' as 'a precondition that had to be met before one was qualified to attend to the affairs of others or lead them'. An ethical system regarding sex was elaborated which mirrored the aesthetic. In the absence of epistemological framing, an aesthetics of order, harmony and discipline prevailed. This 'aesthetics of existence' was' a way life whose moral value did not depend either on one's being in conformity with a code of behaviour, or on an effort of purification, but on certain formal principles in the use of pleasures, in the way one distributed them, in the limits one observed, in hierarchy one respected' (UP:89). Furthermore, the aesthetics of judgement did not preclude the development of a self. On the contrary, the aesthetic, insofar as it generated universalised, generalised criteria for the free, sovereign, male citizen, promoted the establishment of the self. AB with Nietzsche, it is in the expectation that one would be master to the slaves and women that proscription emerged: 'self-mastery and mastery of others were regarded as having the same form'. In both cases that domination was expressed in civil, legal and sexual terms. Again also, expectations required that relations complied with ethical calculations. And it was compliance with ethics that legitimised and heightened mastery. Under the ancients then, there was no Other of sexual transgression. Foucault points out however, that the later construction of the homosexual
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which followed upon the codification of the behaviours themselves, evolved out of the mechanisms put in place in antiquity. They operated as if in 'anticipation of future ethics ... the sign heralding a new sensibility' (UP: 150). By providing the criteria for judging some few as, first, selves to be trained and cultivated, and second, as thereby superior, sex provided the processes for making judgement which would evolve into resentment, and thereafter, Christianity and the human sciences. The knowledges associated with an ethics of asceticism thus used pleasure as a means of coding a self. The dominance I subordination that belonged to Greek aristocracy was an effect of and also operated through the power /knowledge of their ethical system. So the framing of the practice of living in aesthetic terms acted as a catalyst for the production of truths of living: 'One could not form oneself as an ethical subject in the use of pleasures without forming oneself at the same time as a subject of knowledge' (UP:86). Those truths in turn become the grounds of division. The Use ofPleasure thus attempts from another direction to identify the most basic components which make up the architecture of regulation. By examining those components as they began to emerge in antiquity, Foucault has removed some of the sources of confusion that have surrounded his work and been a pronounced feature of his legacy. What remains is an argument about the effects of pursuing the truth of the self (later to be framed epistemologically), of subjectivity as mastery, and its influence as a force for domination and subordination that can mobilise judgement in terms that divide and then construct an Other of exclusion. Foucault'scritiqueisthusdirectedtowardanyprocesseswhichhaveastheir effect the separating out of a self. Like Nietzsche, he observes that the conditions which generate a separate self include social expectations of authority and control, linked to status and esteem, and deployed through some exercise of power /knowledge. The text, therefore, is a significant contribution toward the realisation of Foucault's goal of making it possible for people to see that things can be different. It seems relatively clear that liberal democracy, rather than offering an alternative, promises more of the same. Its tendency to differentiation, which is being given theoretical emphasis in Foucauldian readings, maintains and even heightens the importance of self-responsibility with its mechanisms for displacing people's own knowledges, replacing them with externally derived criteria of judgement and shaping a self on those terms. The fact of pluralism does not eliminate the regulatory processes out of which liberal democracy produces the self. The rational, calculating, disciplined and defined self is an effect of the early bourgeois coupling of freedom and order. Power /knowledge inscribes itself on body and soul but insofar as liberal politics is concerned, its most privileged terrain appears to be where both are combined, that is, the self. Further, epistemological framing of the subject as an object of knowledge increases as differentiation proliferates the divisions between people. Thus as identity becomes more closely bounded by contrasts, such as that between gay and straight, black and white, male and female, the unitary categories that are generated defeat the objective of identity politics which is to promote difference. To use a Nietzschean/Foucauldian observation: they continue the pattern of pro-
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ducing their opposite. Despite the very best intentions then, insofar as they take on the techniques of mastery, the political strategies which are deployed suggest an up-dated version of the 'slave revolt'. At the same time, the literature suggests that there are areas where an alternative dynamic is operating. For instance in the sphere of sexual politics there has been a relatively recent critique surfacing of the gay /lesbian position which has insisted on the importance of linking issues of sexuality to epistemology. This has been a catalyst for an opening up of a series of new moves around political strategy. The gay movement and the more recently declared 'queer nation', share political objectives around resistance to the marginalisation of homosexuality as excluded and demonic Other. After that however, their projects diverge. The gay movement is largely associated with the assertion of difference on the basis of rights assumptions: that people have the right to be accepted regardless of sexual preference. The queer nation reads that implicit desire to become part of the mainstream as a form of cooptation. In contrast, they identify as 'queer' ie. with the transgressive, and as 'nation', as separate and autonomous. Both gays and the queer nation make identity a crucial part of their politics. However as Cindy Patton argues with regard to gays: 'the engagement required to gain minute rights simultaneously bestows identity and constrains marginal difference'. It is those constraints which she argues, the queer nation rejects in its formulation of itself in terms of 'performances of oppositional identity which state their difference' (Patton 1993). That location of identity in performance is an important move, both politically and theoretically for it entails a refusal to be the individuals or subjects of liberal, Western, homosexuality. Instead identity belongs to 'nation' as a collective, formulated through collective alliance. It also moves the political away from acting subjects to the performative ... to what people do rather than who they are. In contrast with Nietzsche's self-overcoming, therefore, a new resolution is being sought in which identity, now decentred and fragmented, is constructed out of action rather than an object. Yet as we have seen, Foucault in The Use of Pleasure is pointing out that a difficulty remains with any framing which is used as the basis to construct knowledge of the self. The self which is produced may well be defined as unfixed and changing, but as identity it remains constituted as a discrete self, and therefore bound up in distinction, opposition and mastery. Nevertheless, the argument in the literature is that unstable representations like Madonna as 'gay icon' are introducing into popular culture a new uncertainty in regard to the bounded categories of the modern. Certainly that seems an accurate reading insofar as the unitary definitions of sex and gender delivered in mainstream popular culture are concerned. However there is an increasingly influential view, informed by the work of Barthes, that what is delivered is not necessarily that which is received. Studies by John Fiske, E. Ann Kaplan and Meagan Morris amongst others, have made central contributions to marking out some of the distinctions between the two.
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For the purposes of this paper it is important to note that embedded within that distinction is the emergence of animplicitrecognition of both the complexity of the audience, and the context in which its responses are located. I would argue further that if, using the work of de Certeau, we shift our focus across to the whole of everyday life, we find a location where techniques have long been operating that have placed limits on modernist framing, that have resisted displacement, and have been a location for the preservation of people's own cultural responses. Seen from this perspective, everyday life can be regarded as having an oppositional capacity, for it provides a site where at least some of Nietzsche's 'immoralist' values can be seen tohavea place, thatis,movementratherthanform, the deedratherthan the doer, the verb rather than the noun, the Dionysian rather than the Apollonian. It thus also suggests a sphere where the performative operates without the constraints imposed by attempts to use it as a source for establishing identity. Michel de Certeau sees his project as an attempt to bring to light the 'models of action' characteristic of the users of culture. His argument is that the processes of consumption generate ways of reworking the culture so that it more nearly fits people's own interests, values and traditions. He examines the way in which those processes have shaped both imposed colonial cultures and also the culture of the contemporary West, documenting the extent to which the dominant, delivered, culture is 'subject to innumerable small transformations' which adapt it to people's own ways of thinking and living. The tactics which de Certeau uncovers can be regarded as political for two reasons: first, they are the means by which the weak resist the strong; and second, they provide an alternative logic, that is, 'a way of thinking is invested in a way of acting'. de Certeau is describing 'an art of practice' in which the dominant culture of form is reshaped through use into practice. Formal, imposed culture is repositioned as a resource for use in everyday life. Further, the processes involved in the usurping of hegemonic culture put in place an alternative to epistemological framing. Thus the art of practice is a counter-discourse to power /knowledge. Rather than the Will to Truth stipulating both an actor and thereafter, an action, everyday life appears to reverse the process. When thought is located within practice, not only are the doer and the deed inseparable but the framing and position of knowledge as an object is dismantled. Thought belongs to and takes its character from specific, conditional, contested, even contradictory locations. It is not then that there are simply no pretensions regarding universals or truth, but that the requirements involved in requisitioning and reworking dominant culture entails processes which replace the noun with the verb that is opposition is located within use. Thus creative cultural practices, as an expression of the performative, act independently of attempts to frame them as problems of knowledge. And as we have seen, with no Truth to strive for, the expectations of a sovereign self are seriously limited. Conditional, heterogeneous, conflictual knowledges emerging out of practice are more likely to produce a self that mirrors it- a Nietzschean self in which one is in a process of becoming.
j'oucau{t, PoCitics and tlie Peiformative
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Support for de Certeau's interpretation can be found in recent developments in the deployment of popular culture. Popular culture has consistently placed emphasis on the experience, the event, the new and the transgressive, that is, the' carnival' rather than on the discovery of meaning. Contemporary cultural formations appear to be linking into, and strengthening that tradition. Technology, design and marketing have generated an explosion in the number of forms available for experiencing the event. The interest in expanding the range of experience can now be pursued thorough music, video games, recreational drugs,life style, fashion, sport, film, virtual reality, etc. The heightening of experience also takes place through the spectacle offered by department stores, discos, shopping centers, clubs, fun parks, or amusement centers, where the modernist distinction between real and imaginary is broken down. In addition, the transgressive dimensions of the popular get more space in horror films, X-rated videos, cable television and home made videos. It is possible to observe in that overall strengthening, a return of public culture to the centred position from which it was marginalised by the modern. The taming of excitement and excess, of the carnivalesque or Dionysian, by modern processes appears to be being undermined by a renewed interest in an unmediated experience of doing. Everyday life thus itself features a shift away from knowing to the performative. These changes can consequently be seen to be reconstituting ordinary life as a field of creativity for experimentation, for challenging limits. Running alongside that has been a further and parallel exposure of the illusions of knowledge. Thus the certainties offered by epistemology are becoming increasingly fragmented and unstable. Intransigent issues around the economy, the environment, health and poverty are themselves deconstructing modernity by exposing its myths. This strengthening of public culture suggests not only a victory of doing over knowledge but also of the popular over the elite and the bourgeois. The fragmentation of authorised codes and their replacement with a diverse mix of expressions reverses the homogenising impulse of the modern which was bourgeois in character. Heterogeneity opens up the space of non-authorised readings of cultural preferences which become the thing in itself, no longer carrying the burden of extraneous meaning or purpose. However, the sharpening profile of the performative aspects of everyday life does not speak of the emergence of a new politics. Rather it is important to affirm Baudrillard's observation that the sphere of images and experiences is proliferating. The terms of the strengthening of popular culture are thereby displacing epistemology. The surfeit of activity itself pushes the limits of modernist knowledges as it stretches the classificatory capacity of reason. From this direction then, diversity, variance and multi-dimensionality can be seen to resist the encoding process and undermine the operation of power /knowledge. And when this new instability in delivered images intersects with the local and specific practices of the everyday, the dismantling the coherent and unitary can be seen to accelerate. In conclusion, the formulation of a political project around liberal democracy is based on the same principles as those valued by the ancient Greeks:
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citizenship, self-regulation, the public sphere and ... mastery. Foucault's work both critiques such a move and explores the conditions of possibility for an alternative. Consideration of the performative suggests that independence and autonomy already exists in people's lives: not in sovereignty but in resistance. Paradoxically, it is in that aspect of life formerly categorised as 'low culture' where the crucial combination of creativity and judgement are being located. Thus not only does everyday life appear to supplant epistemology, subjectivity and the disciplinary knowledges, but more importantly, provides the sphere where it becomes possible to recognise the 'political' as an art of practice, as self-overcoming.
Bibliography Ansell-Pearson, K. (1991 ). Nietzsche contra Rousseau, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge. de Certeau, M. (1986). Heterologies: Discourses on the Other, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Derrida, J. (1978). Spurs, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Foucault, M. (1967). Madness and Civilization, London: Tavistock. (Referred to as MC in the text). __ _, (1975). Discipline and Punish, London: Allen Lane. __ _, (1976). The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, New York: Random House. __ _, (1983). 'Structuralism and Poststructuralism: An Interview' with Gerard Raulet, Telos 55, Spring, pp.195-211. __ _, (1984). The Use of Pleasure, London: Viking (Referred to as UP in the text). Jay, M. (1993). Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought, Berkley: University of California Press. Held, D. (1993). 'Liberalism, Marxism and democracy', Theory and Society, April, 22, p.2. Kaufman, W. (1971). The Portable Nietzsche, London: Chatto and Windus. Koelb, C. (ed.) (1990). Nietzsche as Postmodernist, New York: The State University of New York Press. Patton, C. (1993). 'Embodying Subaltern Memory: Kinesthesia and the Problematics of Gender and Race' in Schwichtenberg, C. (ed.) The Madonna Connection, Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Patton, P. (1993). Nietzsche, Feminism, and Politics, Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Nietzsche, F. Beyond Good and Evil, New York: Modern Books.
__ _,The Genealogy of Morals, New York: Modern Books (Referred to as BGE in the text).
__ _, Twilight of the Idols (Referred to as TI in the text). __ _, The Gay Science (Referred to as GS in the text). Schwichtenberg, C. (ed.) (1993). The Madonna Connection, Sydney: Allen and Unwin.
The Subject of Foucault !Micliae{Janover Foucault's fundamental idea is that of a dimension of subjectivity derived from power and knowledge without being dependent on them.! A centred self once again became a possibility, only now the self was understood in historical-social terms, not in ontological ones. Position 1 of the 1960s (which Foucault was later to call'archaeology') was a critique of the self as rationalist by a strategy of reversal: madness vs. reason. Position 2 of the 1970s (which Foucault was to call 'genealogy') was a critique of the self as centred consciousness by a strategy of displacement: the locus of intelligibility shifted from subject to structure. Position 3 of the 1980s (which Foucault was to call 'ethics') was a hermeneutics of the self using a strategy of historicism: the emphasis fell on the activity of self-constitution in discursive practices.2
We begin with two statements concerning the significance of the late researches and writings of Michel Foucault. The first statement by Deleuze is succinct and carefully phrased: subjectivity is 'derived from' but is not 'dependent on' power and knowledge. The second passage from Mark Poster is far more general in its historical sweep and in its imprecision. We could criticise elements of the description of every one of the 'positions' he graphs for us. The work of the 1960s is reduced to Madness and Civilisation the work of the 1970s is summed up without mention of the relations of power and knowledge which are its key contents. The work of the 1980s is misconceived as a 'hermeneutics of the self', this being for Foucault but one local and late variation (in Christian practices of self-decipherment and confession) of the longer 'history of morals' in early and late antiquity.3 Yet Poster's summary of Foucault's theoretical itinerary does sum up a drift of concerns, to which Deleuze also more concisely alludes, that Foucault too recognised in his writings and suggested to readers that they treat as a map of his work: Three domains of genealogy are possible. First, an historical ontology of ourselves in relation to truth through which we constitute ourselves as subjects of knowledge; second, an historical ontology of ourselves in relation to a field of power through which we constitute ourselves as subjects acting on others; third, an historical ontology in relation to ethics through which we constitute ourselves as moral agents. So, three axes are possible for genealogy. All three were present, albeit in a somewhat confused fashion, in Madness and Civilisation. The truth axis was studied in The Birth of the Clinic and The Order of Things. The power axis was studied in Discipline and Punish, and the ethical axis in The History of Sexuality. 4
I would like to suggest that a rigorous critique of notions of founding subjectivity is a feature of Foucault's writing from Madness and Civilisation (1961) to The Care of the Self (1984). This much is, I think, uncontentious and my remarks on the critique of subjectivity in Foucault are aimed more at
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emphasising the extent to which the last writings reassert a critique of any notion of foundational or unified subjectivity than establishing the roots of, what Deleuze calls, Foucault's 'cold and concerted destruction of the subject'5 in his earlier texts. Against Poster's claim that the Foucault of Position 3 launches a 'hermeneutics of the self' as opposed to the 'critique of self' common to Positions 1 and 2, and that '[i]n this last phase of Foucault's theory of the subject one senses a return of sorts to the problematic of Sartre and the existentialists',6 I argue that a critique of the self is common to all of Foucault'sworkandthatareturntotheSartreanauthenticsubjectandethics of commitment is not on the agenda for Foucault. Yet in another, perhaps a stronger sense, I am in agreement with Poster and others, such as Habermasl who have seen in Foucault's research of the 1980s an open-ended yet clearly-present renegotiation of the heritage of the Enlightenment. This reconsideration of the positive critical tradition of modernity involves Foucault in a wider rendering of the autonomy of the subject as actor and thinker despite the limitations of discursive and nondiscursive practices which still surround and in some measure permeate and constitute the subject. I am not arguing for the existence of a deep zone of impermeable subjectivity. Rather, I want to suggest that subjectivity is best regarded as being no zone or space at all but an exercise or a practice of sorts. Moreover, subjectivity is an ineliminable and ultimately irreducible exercise which bears analysis on its own terrain. Paraphrasing what Foucault holds to be true of freedom, the guarantee of subjectivity is, and can only be, subjectivity itself. s The conditions of emergence of a dynamic notion of subjectivity, as an exercise of the self, are modern and Western. The idea that we can act, think, live differently, eccentrically with regard to the patterns of life of others is a post-Enlightenmentheritageofours. 9 Itcanbe,andfrequentlyis,anillusion. We might firmly believe that we are being different, eccentric, uniquely ourselves, original, when our individuality is most evidently (to all but ourselves) branded as a mime or a reflex of discourses, institutions, forces. But the possibility of being mistaken about this and with it the possibility of launching a wholesale critique of the idea that we ever really are anything other than complex interplays of mime and reflex - the possibility of a decentring critique of all subjectivity- these are possibilities which crucially depend upon the historical emergence of the notion of subjectivity as the exercise of ourselves upon ourselves. Gilles Deleuze has suggested, with reference to Foucault's late writings, that subjectivity- the relation to oneself -can be defined most generally as 'the affect of self by self, folded force'.1° This, I think, is insightful, yet it is also true that this general formula itself is conceivable only since the end of the eighteenth century. It may be, as Deleuze speculates, that the appearance of such 'folded force'- subjectivity -'can seem unique to Western development'.11 Whether this is true or not, it is highly likely that the articulation of, and reflection on, subjectivity is a recent development in European thought substantially present only since the Enlightenment. More particularly, could it be that the modern search for the sources of the self, of which Foucault's 'historical ontology of ourselves' is but one in-
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stance, depends upon a certain withdrawal from the self and upon a postulation of some Other which so distances the European Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment self-images of Reason, Morality, Man, or History, as to open to question the very identity and constitution of the self invested by these images? An early postulation of Otherness which corrodes the verities of its time, and makes space for the theories and histories of subjectivity, might be located in the Romantic critique of Enlightenment. The endless irony of the German Romantics at the turn of the nineteenth centuryisacaseinpoint. 'World-irony',asHeinrichHeinecharacterisedit,12 sets up a kind of perpetuum mobile of the subject in which the self is set at odds to itself in such a way as to prevent the simple recuperation of the self at a higher note upon a pre-given scale of self-identity. Instead, the unremitting alterity of endless possibility throws all the scales into doubt: memory, sobriety, sanity, love, knowledge, all the familiar registers of identity are destabilised in the play of irony, and they can even crumble altogether. Against Hegel's consonance of subject as universal spirit, now stands Holderlin's dissonance of both spirit and subject in the 'withdrawal of the gods' and the poet's collapse into madness. My contention is that Foucault's critique of the self, is aimed always at the magisterial illusions of subjectivity- Man, Reason, History, Duty- not at the exercise of subjectivity, the folded force of self affecting self, which we can see exemplified in the counterpoint of self against self in German Romantic irony. Foucault's 'critical ontology of ourselves' 13 sets us at odds with ourselves, but this is not to discomfit subjectivity since subjectivity is exercised most actively through alterity for Foucault too. Paradoxically, it is only by standing to the side of ourselves that we can become ourselves. There may well be a Faustian echo here: the moment we rest contented with ourselves we are lost, only in motion do we find ourselves. Or, in Foucault's terms: 'To be modern is not to accept oneself as one is in the flux of the passing moments; it is to take oneself as object of a complex and difficult elaboration'. 14 It is because Foucault was himself a self-conscious modern setting his investigation, and his posture toward the present in that space between Kant and Baudelaire that his 'historical ontology of ourselves' in antiquity and modernity can be accomplished with such vigour and such passion. The tensile force-field which he constructs between the' aesthetics of existence'15 of late antiquity and the 'work carried out by ourselves upon ourselves' 16 in the present is not the resultant of research from which the subject has been exorcised or reduced to the status of a mere target of historical dissection. Rather, it is the fact that subjectivity is exercised and affirmed through alterity which explains Foucault's fascination with classical antiquity and early Christianity as alternative currents to, and archaeological ruins beneath, our modern understandings of ethics, sexuality, and ourselves. And it is because, for him, subjectivity is exercised through alterity that he can think that our task as modern subjects is 'not to discover what we are, but to refuse what we are' .17 It is in such a refusal that subjectivity is exercised; we do not say or stay what we are, but we become what we might be. For Foucault, subjectivity is very much like the 'negative capability' or 'poetical
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character' of John Keats. As Keats says: 'a thing per se and stands alone; it is not itself; it has no self- it is everything and nothing. It has no character; it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated... the poet has no identity'.18 Reading Foucault is to encounter a sustained assault upon the imperiousness of philosophy and of all those 'human sciences' which implore us to seek, or tell us where to find, a constitutive source of our universal subjectivity. In his earliesttexts Foucault seems to be proffering a kind of surrealist critique of rationalism in which it is precisely the experience of Unreason that offers us a glimpse of a constitutive source. Here in texts like Mental Illness and Psychology he urged that we 'be ready for the great tragic confrontation with madness' 19 and saw in it 'access to the natural truth of man'. 20 EveninMadnessandCivilisation,theworkhewouldlaterclasswithin the first axis of the genealogy of ourselves, the rhetoric of inversion and the privileging of raw experience as the innocence of Reason suggests that we attain to a kind of truth about ourselves through the 'sovereign enterprise of unreason'. 21 In invocations of the liminal tragic figures of madness and art fused - Holderlin, Goya, Sade, Nietzsche, Nerval, Roussel, Artaud - that stretch from the early text on mental illness, through Madness and Civilisation to The Order ofThings and into the essays of the 1960s and early 1970s, we find not so much a critique of constitutive subjectivity as a counter-constitution: a deconstitutive subjectivity composed of Dionysian fragments of excess, transfiguration, disorder, unreason and death. Such a deconstitutive subjectivity of necessity teeters on the brink of dissolution in Foucault's elegiac essays on Blanchot's 'thinking from outside',22 on Bataille's transgressions23 which explode thought and being into a kaleidoscope of multiple experiences; and on Deleuze's 'Theatrum Philosophicum' which promises, like LSD, a release into acategorical thinking- 'a mobile, asymmetrical, decentred, spiraloid ... swarming of phantasm-events'.24 Foucault's attack upon the rational, centred, and steady conception of subjectivity begins in these writings and might best be emblematised in Foucault's celebration of the 'death of Man' as the 'unfolding of a space in which it is once more possible to think'. 25 However, we might note that Foucault opposed the republication of Mental Illness and Psychology26 and that he distanced himself more and more from the attempts in Madness and Civilisation and The Order of Things to recapture for thought and life a zone 'below the level of representation',27 John Rajchman has aptly written of the pursuit of a 'modernist sublime'28 in Foucault's early hopes for a 'thought that stands outside subjectivity29 and for transgressions of language and experience which would herald 'the shattering of the philosophical subject'. 30 It is this modernist sublime, the lyrical challenge to represent the unrepresentable or think the unthought, which drops out of Foucault's writing from The Archaeology of Knowledge on. 31 But the ambition of provoking a thinking to the side of the wellordered, rational subject of knowledge and of moral action, remains alive in Foucault. It is this passionate antagonism to the conventional subject(s) of philosophy - universal, rational, synthetic and recollective - which drives Foucault's later less lyrical but equally forceful critique of subjectivity.
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In Discipline and Punish32 the poetics of deconstituted subjectivity are displaced by the genealogy of the 'fabrication of the disciplinary individual'.33 Through a careful charting of knowledges, technologies, discourses and strategies of numerous kinds of social organisational reformfrom penology to psychology and from the standards of military drill to the teaching of handwriting- Foucault gives us a book that truly does 'serve as a historical background to various studies of the power of normalisation and the formation of knowledge in modern society'. 34 Of course, this modest statement of aims sells the book far short. It is a tour de force of sustained analysis and implicit, but raging, critique of the historical substitution wherein judicial torture and public scaffolds are replaced by the routinisation of disciplines (pun intended: these are simultaneously grids of knowledge and of power), surveillance and normalised behaviour. The bitter irony in Foucault'sbookstemsfromhisperceptionthatallofthisinnovationinforms of control is usually treated as humanisation, and progress. In one of his diaries, Elias Canetti writes: 'Cruel punishments back then, mass murder today'. 35 Some of the same gloomy but honest consideration of our present informs Foucault's Discipline and Punish. It is this same honesty that presses Foucault to question whether the constitution of subjectivity itself might be not a haven in a heartless world but a construction of 'processes of individualisation ... that are one of the effects of the new tactics of power'. 36 Discipline and Punish takes as one of its generat methodological rules the notion that penal law and human science are not separate, if overlapping, domains but are rather joined in a' common matrix'. Technology of power thus becomes 'the very principle both of humanisation of the penal system and of the knowledge of man'. 37 Moreover, this questioning of the bases and functions of knowledge reaches beyond a critical analysis of the self-reflection of the human sciences toward a doubt whether the very ideas of our interiority and individuality might be contrivances effected by the modern dispositifs of power and knowledge: 'Knowable man (soul, individuality, consciousness, conduct, whatever it is called) is the object-effect of this analytical investment, of this dominationobservation'.38 The criticat ironic thread which rejects or, at the least, severely doubts the assurances, hopes and ideals of humanism and interior subjectivity continued toinformFoucault's thoughtrightto the end. WithitsrootsinHeidegger and Nietzsche, as well as in the genealogical histories of modern power and knowledge, the assault on the myth of man is as vigorous in 'What is Enlightenment?' in 1984 as it was in Discipline and Punish in 1975, or in The Order of Things in 1966. And along with the collective subject man, the individual subject as rational knower and deliberative actor is subtly undermined. In its place, Foucault puts only a deliberately cool scepticism about all our deeds, decisions and thoughts a scepticism which amounts to what he calls a 'permanent critique of ourselves'. 39 In The Use of Pleasure Foucault fleshed in the historical background to the questionofwhatitmeans,whatmustbealreadyinplace,foruseventothink of an enterprise like a' critique of ourselves'. He suggests that in studying the genealogy of subjectivity we should distinguish moral codes - systems of
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rules, norms, taboos and mechanisms or personnel who might inculcate, oversee and enforce them - from the province of ethics which is concerned not with the code of norms but with 'the way in which individuals are urged to constitute themselves as subjects of moral conduct... the models proposed for setting up and developing relationships with the self'. 40 Self-reflection, self-knowledge, self-examination, self-decipherment, self-transformationall of these are matters of ethics in the sense of ethoi or forms of life. These are all contingent historical modalities of relation to the self that need not always exist, that can be organised differently from society to society, time to time. In this work Foucault was no longer involved in a critique, of the subject, but in a tentative elaboration of the conditions of possibility for the existence of subjectivity, or its non-existence and for its differentiated forms. These are not transcendental conditions of possibility but take the form of what we might call the historical a priori41 of the techniques of 'subjectivisation'. 42 Such techniques of subjectivisation (modalities by which individuals constitute themselves as moral subjects) are not positivistic applications of tools and tactics, or operations of apparatuses of power-knowledge upon bodies. There is in Foucault's last writings and remarks a strong sense of the reflexivity of the field of subjectivity which precludes any such positivistic, or quasi-mechanistic, understandings of the historical processes involved here. Instead, Foucault speaks of various problematisations of the self as subject, various ways in which the subject might be constituted as an object for thought (for itsel£):43 What I wanted to know was how the subject constituted himself in such and such a determined form, as a mad subject or as a normal subject, though a certain number of practices which were games of truth, applications of power, etc. I had to reject a certain a priori theory of the subject in order to make this analysis ...44
The historical interest in the forms of the subject might well be seen to grow out of the earlier genealogical interest of Foucault in individuation through normalisation. It was, after all, through his research into the character and genesis of modern sexuality that Foucault was faced with the question of how the sexual subject of desire is constituted historically. 45 However, in the later two volumes of The History of Sexuality project, published some eight years after the first, the historical interest in dispositifs of individuation is joined to a sharper philosophical focus on' self-formation as an" ethical subject'". 46 It is here, in the arena of' self-formation' (is it going too far to see parallels here to the idea of Bildung in German Idealist and Romantic thought of the early nineteenth century?) that Foucault expresses an intellectual and a personal interest in the 'aesthetics of existence'. 47 The arts of living can be studied with reference to the ancient Greek 'moral problematisation of pleasures48, or through a thinking upon the modern tasks of an 'ascetic elaboration of the self'. 49 In one of his most thoughtprovoking essays, 'What Is Enlightenment?', Foucault suggests that the Baudelairean 'asceticism of the dandy who makes of his own body, his behaviour, his feelings and passions, his very existence, a work of art' 50 is to be adopted as the quintessential'attitude of modernity'. 51 We cannot but be struck by the parallel of this conception of modernity and the work that
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Foucault produced at precisely this time on pre-Christian, Greek and Roman forms of 'cultivation of the sel£'.52 That the ethical attitudes of antiquity and modernity should converge at the point where an aesthetics of existence is articulated upon a practice of freedom is no coincidence. This is precisely the motivated convergence of the interest in the present of Michel Foucault near the end of his life. From antiquity to Christianity, we pass from a morality that was essentially the search for a personal ethics to a morality as obedience to a system of rules. And if I was interested in antiquity it was because ... the idea of a morality as obedience is now disappearing, has already disappeared. And to this absence of morality corresponds, must correspond, the search for an aesthetics of existence.53
Foucault suffered no illusions about the glorious beauties or human heights of antiquity. Asked if he found the Greeks'admirable', his response was a flat 'No'. Explaining his distaste for their moral and social world he remarks that the ancient Greeks were torn, 'between the relentless search for a certain style of existence on the one hand and the effort to make it available to all on the other'.54 One wonders, here, whether this is a contradiction perceived by the Greeks of antiquity or by the modern social and political activist, Foucault. Mocking his own fascination for that ancient style of existence Foucault avows that '[a]ll of antiquity seems to me to have been a 'profound error". Yet, despite these doubts, antiquity and modernity are ultimately affirmed as belonging together because neither can believe that ethics is founded in religion nor in any normative code of laws at all.55 Some classicists have argued that Foucault does not accurately chart the terrain of the ancient Greek or Roman moral worlds.56 It is certainly the case that Foucault's double recognition of the always contingent practices of freedom in both antiquity and modernity provides a perfect reflection of his own ethico-political thinking in the present. His is a thought that values 'practices of the self' above'systems of morality',57 and which sets the 'undefined work of freedom'58 against the normativity of, and normalisations to, any particular code of rules and prohibitions. Do we find, finally, in the coincidence of the research into the heautou epimeleisthai (care for onesel£)59 in antiquity with the pondering of the question of askesis (exercise on onesel£)60 as the life of philosophy today, a return of Foucault's earlier 'modernist sublime'?61 I think the answer to this question must be 'no', but a qualified no. The fundamental impulse of the early essays on Bataille, Blanchot and Klossowski, to break thought free from the 'dynasty of representation'62 remained central to Foucault's later genealogical work. But Foucault came to see that the power of the regime of ordered forms, conventional topoi and logics of the same, cannot be shattered through language experiments, nor even through experiments in transgression as urged by Sade or Bataille. Such experiments frequently feed back into the loops of power which they set out to sever, and their liminal voyages into transcendent madness or self-dissolution often merely throw into relief the continued dominance of codes of Reason, Man, and Identity. The line between critical consciousness and tragic experience which seems
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to inform Madness and Civilisation in its approach to the 'sovereign experience' of Unreason, and to recur in the liminal figures of art/madness invoked in The Order of Things, is not a line that can be crossed simply by crossing out critical reason. Appeals to the saving power of excess, transgression, madness, or to the 'nakedexperienceoflanguage'63 arenotfoundinFoucault'sworkafter1972. Yet these experiments in crossing over from philosophy to experience, from familiar order to strange disorder, remained central as models in Foucault's own thinking. It was, he said, through reading Blanchot and Bataille that he had first discovered Nietzsche in the context of pursuing 'a way out of phenomenology'. 64 They provided more than a way out of this particular philosophy of subjectivity as interior self-consciousness. 'For me Nietzsche, Bataille, Blanchot, Klossowski were ways of escaping from philosophy' 65 ways of crossing 'the frontier between the philosophical and the nonphilosophical'.66 This escape from the confines of pure philosophy, this frontier crossing, remained a prime motive of Foucault's thought. Moreover it was a characteristic of his sense of the project of an intellectual as being one who constantly questions the boundaries of his /her own work and thought. 67 If Foucault draws back from the explicitness, the high decibel output, of the modernist sublime in its heralding of transgression and dissolution of self; might it be apt to find in his later work a modernist minimalism, modernism sotto voce as it were? This does seem to make good sense of his intellectual 'ethic of constant disengagement'. 68 The 'straying afield of himself', 69 which he counsels the thinker, is a kind of canny hybrid of the obliteration of the limits of the self, and the scepticism that questions these attempts to break the self utterly away from the self. We can take Foucault's relation to Baudelaire as an example of this hybrid between the absolute transgression of the limits of subjectivity and the equivocal scepticism as to subjectivity and transgression of its limits. Baudelaire is presented to us, by Foucault, as an 'indispensable example' 70 of the 'attitude of modernity'; 71 'attitude' is defined as 'a mode of relating to contemporary reality ... a way of thinking and feeling ... [a] bit, no doubt, like what the Greeks called an ethos'. 72 The man (for Baudelaire always a man and always an artist) who exhibits the attitude of modernity both sees to the core of modernity and wishes and imagines it otherwise, according to Foucault. And the modern, or modernist, establishes a relation to himself which is 'tied to an indispensable asceticism'. 73 'Modern man, for Baudelaire, is not the man who goes off to discover himself, his secrets and his hidden truth; he is the man who tries to invent himself. This modernity does not "liberate man in his own being"; it compels him to face the task of producing himself'.74 Now, this depiction of the necessary asceticism of moderns in their work of self-elaboration is, of course, the root and nerve of Foucault's own philosophical ethos of permanent critique of our era and of ourselves. If this critical reflection on our present is linked in turn, as Foucault links it, to an historicised rendering of Kant's idea of critique it might even lead to areinvigorated 'faith in Enlightenment'. 75 Taken together with Foucault's statements that 'philosophy is precisely the challenging of all phenomena of domination?6 and that a philosophical ethos joins together critique of
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ourselves, historical analysis of limits imposed on us and experiments with surpassing these limits,77 we arrive at the following conclusion. The intellectual work of self-transformation, which is 'something rather close to the aesthetic experience' 78 and carries a resonance of the pre-Christian arts of existence, is to be simultaneously a form of historico-political critique and experiment in practical political as well as individual, change. 79 This might provide the outline of a modernism in which aestheticist concern with bending one's subjectivity into new shapes is fused with contingent political critique of shapes of domination. But it must leave Foucault a voyage away from Baudelaire. This we might think a good thing but it is a problem for Foucault who has taken Baudelaire as the model for his own attitude of modernity. In fact, the 'dandy'- the epitome of modern life- that Foucault takes from Baudelaire is not wholly Baudelaire's, or ratherisnotallofBaudelaire'sdandy.Forthepoethimself,thedandyisonly partially the stoic workman upon his own self, dandies are also characterised by a degree of self-absorption that seems foreign to Foucault's modernistethos. According to Baudelaire, 'these beingshaveno other status but that of cultivating the idea of beauty in their own persons, of satisfying their passions, of feeling and thinking'.so Self-transformation, is the common element in the transgressive modernist sublime, in Baudelaire's modernist aestheticism, and in Foucault's own modernist asceticism. Foucault's modernism finally declines the apocalyptic visions of transfiguration of the subject which characterise Sade's, Bataille's, and, in part, Nietzsche's thought. The combination of self-reflection, self-criticism, and self-detachment in Foucault's later thought might even be compared to the martial and melancholic turning upon the self that can be found in the paradigmatic modernist-minimalist Franz Kafka: 'but every day at least one line should be trained on me, as they now train telescopes on comets'. 81 Like Kafka, Foucault shrinks the subject down by taking distance, in Foucault's case historical distance, from it. This is the key to the subject of Foucault, it is seen true when seen from afar, through comparisons to other types of the folding of self back upon itself, and by contrast to types of existence in which such folding might be altogether absent. Of course, setting Foucault beside Kafka like this is only a pointer to the character of Foucault's modernism. Any strong comparison between them would founder (even though there is perhaps one other point of comparison in their Nietzschean figurations of punishment as an apparatus of memory and knowledge). Only a philosopher, like Foucault, could suggest that 'ethics is the deliberate form assumed by freedom'. 82 There is in the very expression and terms of this statement, a degree of abstraction and of hope that Kafka would eschew. Where they meet is in the elaboration of the subject as a continuing exercise of self-scrutiny and self-detachment. For Foucault, at least, this means that subjectivity is an exercise and not a space or a being. It is engaged most fully through alterity, through thinking otherwise than one's habits, surrounding practices and even one's own ideals, might indicate. Might we say, paraphrasing Foucault's own pithy formulation of ethics, that the subject, of Foucault, is the deliberate form assumed by transformation (or otherness)? And, hence, that transformation
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(otherness) is the ontological condition of the subject. The subject of Foucault then exists in so far as it is a creature of metamorphosis. 1 2 3
4 5 6 7 8
G. Deleuze (1988). Foucault, trans. S. Hand; London: Athlone Press, p.101. M. Poster (1993). 'Foucault and the Problem of Self-Constitution', in J. Caputo and M. Yount (eds), Foucault and the Critique of Institutions, Pennsylvania State University Press, p.64. Foucault refers to his 'general framework of the book about sex', as a 'history of morals' in H. Dreyfus andP. Rabinow (eds) (1983). 'On the Genealogy of Ethics'. Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd edn. University of Chicago Press, p.237. [Hereafter, this book will be referred to as BSH.] BSH, p.237. G. Deleuze, 1988, p.55. M. Poster, 1993, p.65. J. Habermas, 'Taking Aim at the Heart of the Present', in D.C. Hoy (ed.) (1986). Foucault: A Critical Reader, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, pp.103-4. ' ... "liberty" is what must be exercised ... The guarantee of freedom is freedom'. M. Foucault, 'Space, Knowledge, Power' (1983) in P. Rabinow (ed.) (1986). The Foucault Reader, London: Penguin, p.245. [Hereafter this book is referred to as
TFR.] 9 10 11 12 13 14 15
16 17 18 19
20 21 22
I am endebted here to C. Taylor (1991). The Ethics of Authenticity, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. G. Deleuze, 1988, p.104. Ibid, p.106. See E. Behler, 'The Theory of Irony in German Romanticism', in F. Garber (ed.) (1988). Romantic Irony, Budapest, p.46. M. Foucault, 'What Is Enlightenment?', in TFR, p.47. Ibid, p.41. M. Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, trans. R. Hurley, London: Penguin, 1987, p.89. [Hereafter this book will be referred to as UP.] Cf. M. Foucault, 'An Aesthetics of Existence' (1984) in Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977-1984, L. Kritzman (ed.) (1888) London: Routledge, 1988, pp.47-54. [Hereafter this book will be referred to as PPC. ] TFR, p.47. BSH, p.216. M. Forman (ed.) (1947). The Letters of John Keats, 3rd edn, London: OUP, p.227. M. Foucault (1987). Mental Illness and Psychology, trans. A. Sheridan; Berkeley, University of California Press, p.75. This text translates Maladie mentale et psychologie (Paris, 1962) which itself is a revised edition of Foucault's first book Maladie mentale et personalite (Paris, 1954). Ibid, p.74. Foucault(1965).Madnessand Civilization, trans. R. Howard; New York: Pantheon Books, p.278. In his 1966 essay on Blanchot, 'Thought from the Outside', in Foucault/ Blanchot, New York: Zone Books, 1987 Foucault suggests that this thinking, born of traditions of mysticism and negative theology, takes us to 'the void that serves as [thought's] site' (p.16). In his 1963 homage to Bataille, Foucault had taken up Blanchot's 'principle of contestation' whereby the subject is probed enabling thought to reach an 'empty core where being achieves its limit and where the limit defines being'. ('A Preface to Transgression', in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, D. F. Bouchard, (ed.) (1977) and trans., Ithaca: Cornell University Press, p.36. See on both Foucault and Blanchot, A. Stoekl (1992). Agonies of the Intellectual: Commitment, Subjectivity and the Performance in Twentieth Century French Tradition, University of Nebraska Press, chs. 6 and7.
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23 'Perhaps one day [the experience of transgression] will seem as decisive for our culture, as much part of its soil, as the experience of contradiction was of an earlier time for dialectical thought'. M. Foucault,'A Preface to Transgression', in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, 1977 p.33. 24 M. Foucault, 'Theatrum Philosophicum', in ibid, p.190. 25 M. Foucault (1970). The Order of Things, New York: Vintage Books, p.342. [Hereafter this book will be referred to as OT. ] 26 The history of the changes from Maladie mentale et personalite (1954) to Maladie mentale et psychologic (1962), and of Foucault's opposition to further reissuing of either text is told by Hubert Dreyfus in his Foreword to Mental Illness and Psychology, 1987. Cf. J. Bernauer (1990). Michel Foucault's Force ofFlight: Towards an Ethics for Thought, Atlantic Highlands, Humanities Press, 1990, pp.24-36. 27 'After [Sade], violence, life and death, desire and sexuality will extend below the level of representation, an immense expanse of shade which we are now attempting to recover ... in our discourse, in our freedom, in our thought'. OT, p.211. 28 J. Rajchman (1985). Michel Foucault: The Freedom of Philosophy, New York: Columbia University Press, p.17. 29 Foucault/Blanchot, 1987, p.15. 30 'Preface to Transgression', in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, 1977, p.43. 31 M. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. Sheridan-Smith; London: Tavistock Publications, 1972; original Paris, 1969. The Introduction raises several criticisms of the earlier archaeological writings. See also p.47where Foucault explicitly criticises the theme of an 'experience of madness' underpinning
Madness and Civilization. 32 M. Foucault (1977). Discipline and Punish, trans. A. Sheridan; New York: Pantheon Books; original, Paris, 1975. [Hereafter cited as DP.] 33 DP, p.308. 34 Ibid. 35 E. Canetti (1989). The Secret Heart of the Clock, Notes, Aphorisms, Fragments 1973-1985, New York; Farrar, Straus, Groux, p.104. 36 DP, p.23. 37 Ibid. 38 DP, p.305. 39 TFR, p.43. 40 UP, p.29. 41 Using a term of Foucault's from The Order of Things, p.xxii. 42 This term is used by Foucault to describe 'the procedure by which one obtains the constitution of a subject', PPC, p.253. 43 I am paraphrasing a passage from a 1984 interview of Foucault by Fran~ois Ewald, 'TheConcemforTruth',inPPC, p.257. Cf. UP, pp.14-25; andnotethatthe entirety of Part One takes 'The Moral Problematization of Pleasures' as its heading. Foucault's remarks in a 1983 interview also point to the importance this notion was corning to bear in his last phase of research. 'Polemics, Politics, and Problematizations', in TFR, pp.388-90. 44 Foucault, 'The Ethic of the Core of the Self as a Practice of Freedom', (1984), in J. Bernauer and D. Rasmussen (eds) (1988). The Final Foucault, Cambridge,Mass.: MIT Press, p.10. [Hereafter this book is cited as TFF.] 45 Foucault (1978). The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, trans. R. Hurley;New York: Pantheon Books;original, La Volontedesavoir,Paris, 1976. See especially the passages on the role of confession in the procedures of earlymodem individuation, The History of Sexuality I, pp.58-65. Note also the links between Foucault's concern here and in the incomplete and unpublished The
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46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56
57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81
Confessions of the Flesh in which the pre-modem Christian constitution of subjectivity as a particular relation to 'the flesh' is Foucault's topic. On the unpublished volume seeM. Foucault,'About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics oftheSelf: Two Lectures of Dartmouth College',inPolitical Theory,2l (1993),and J. Bernauer, Michel Foucault's Force of Flight, 1990, pp.158-165. UP,p.28. Ibid, p.89; cf. BSH, p.236. UP, subtitle of Part One. 'What Is Enlightenment?', TFR, p.42. Ibid, p.41. Ibid, p.39. M. Foucault (1986). The Care of the Self, trans. R. Hurley; London, Penguin, p.43. [Hereafter, this book is referred to as COS.] PPC, p.49. Ibid,p.244. (The next two quotes draw on this same page.) See BSH, p.231. See for example, M. Daraki (1986). 'Michel Foucault's Journey to Greece', Telos 67; P. Hadot, 'Reflections on the notion of "the cultivation of the self"', in Michel Foucault Philosopher, trans. T.J. Armstrong; London: Harvester, 1992, pp.225-233. UP,p.l3. TFR, p.46. cos, p.43. UP,p.9. J. Rajchman, 1985, pp.17-18. Foucault/Blanchot, 1987, p.l2. Ibid, p.l3. PPC, p.24. PPC, p.312. Ibid. PPC, p.263. J. Rajchman, 1985, p.37. UP,p.8. TFR, p.39. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid, p.41. Ibid, p.42. Ibid, p.50. TFF, p.20. TFR, p.50. PPC, p.14. TFR, p.50. Baudelaire (1972). Baudelaire: Selected Writings in Art and Artists, trans. P. Charvet; Cambridge: CUP, p.419. M. Brod (ed.) (1972). The Diaries of Franz Kajkil1910-1923, Harmondsworth: Penguin, p.14. It is of interest that Foucault's own journal entries during 1984 include many excerpted passages from Kafka writings. See J. Miller (1993). The Passion of Michel Foucault, London: Harper Collins, n. 68, p.458.
82 TFF,p.4.
Foucault, Dialogue and the Other Chris !Falzon With the 'death of man', scepticism concerning the transcendental subject and the project of articulating ultimate, universal grounds to underpin and unify thought and action, the notion of difference or otherness - sexual, cultural and so on- has come increasingly to the fore. But how exactly are we to understand this development? Does the 'death of man' mean the fragmentation of thought and action into so many incommensurable worldviews, forms of life or cultural practices? Supposing this to be the case invokes at least two familiar kinds of response. On the one hand, such fragmentation may seem a positive development. For too long, different voices have been subordinated to a standpoint that claims to be universal and absolute, but is in fact historically specific, being white, Western and so on. By freeing ourselves from the illusion of an absolute standpoint, we open up the possibility of a new age of tolerance for diversity, for different forms of life. On the other hand, this may seem to leave us with a kind of intellectual and moral chaos in which 'anything goes', a radical relativism in which we are deprived of any basis for evaluating or giving coherence to our cultural practices. Such considerations may motivate one to seek to restore some notion of transcendental ground or foundation. Rather than entering into this debate, it seems tome thatitwould be more useful to ask whether the 'death of man' necessarily implies the fragmentation of thought and action in the first place. I want to suggest that what the death of man engenders is not fragmentation but a conception of ourselves as existing inescapably in the midst of dialogue, dialogue with the Other. Such dialogue does not preclude forms of social unity or organisation, but rather allows them to be understood as emerging out of the play of dialogue. At the same time, it also provides the basis for their questioning and transformation, through ongoing dialogue. I also want to suggest that one of the things Michel Foucault provides for us in his work is just such a vision of dialogue. I will come to this dialogical reading of Foucault in a moment, but let me first expand on the claim that the 'death of man' does not lead to fragmentation. Habermas provides a useful point of entry into this discussion, because he is a key figure amongst those who want to say that without some kind of transcendental foundation for thought and action, we are left with a destructive fragmentation. Certainly, as Thomas McCarthy points out, Habermas has seen that 'Philosophy [has] had to surrender its claim to grasp the totality of being from an extramundane position and on the basis of principles discovered in the very structure of reason'.l For the purposes of this discussion, let us call this the metaphysical view. It is still present in the metaphysical subjectivism of Descartes and Kant. But the Cartesian and Kantian picture has been transformed in the course of the nineteenth century into a view of the subject as inherently social and historical. And in
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this century, post-Wittgensteinian thinking and poststructuralism have reaffirmed the point. However, as McCarthy notes, this transformation has 'left in its wake a variety of forms of relativism, images of irreducible pluralities of incommensurable language games, forms of life, conceptual frameworks, life-worlds, cultures etc'. 2 If there are positions which accept and even celebrate this fragmentation, Habermas's project can be seen as a strategy to avoid it. His response has been to argue that fragmentation is not inevitable, that without simply returning to the ahistorical transcendental subject, we can still preserve something of the universal claims of transcendental philosophy through an analysis of communicative intersubjectivity. This is not an easy feat to bring off, as the well-documented tensions between the historicist and Kantian sides of his thinking show. 3 But do we need to follow Habermas in his problematic path? Does a decisive rejection of the transcendental subject, of a metaphysically grounded conception of unity, necessarily lead to fragmentation? I want to suggest that it does not, that it seems to do so only to the extent that we have not sufficiently let go of metaphysics. My point is that there remains in Habermas, along with the vision of fragmentation he wants to question, a continuing reliance on a metaphysical conception of unity. The idea they share is that if we do not have a unifying metaphysical basis, in the sense of universal standards or ultimate principles, we will be left with a plurality of incommensurable standpoints or formsoflife.Andthisistosupposethattheonlypossiblekindofunityisthat which is grounded metaphysically. In other words, the vision of fragmentation reflects a nostalgia for lost metaphysical unity. 4 Moreover, it seems to embody its own version of metaphysical unity. We are presented with the vision of a multiplicity of forms of life. Each is self-contained, totally governed by its organising principles, and so unable to communicate with other forms of life. And what this suggests is that in the vision of fragmentation, a single, all-embracing metaphysical unity has been replaced by a multiplicity of local unities, each governed by its own deep rules. It is a kind of metaphysical monadism, though without Leibniz's prearranged harmony. In short, I want to suggest, the vision of fragmentation continues to depend on a metaphysical notion of unity, unity based on all-embracing, fundamental principles. Which means that to decisively reject this metaphysics, we need to abandon not only the idea that there is a unifying metaphysical ground for thought and action, but also the idea that the alternative is a breakdown of thought and action into incommensurable fragments. Now, such a decisive break from metaphysics requires that we abandon its ruling principle: ie. the idea that we can capture the totality of being in a single, global account, that there is an ultimate standpoint or set of categories in terms of which all thought and action can be comprehended and organised. Here, to understand something is simply to assimilate it, to absorbitintoone'sframeworkofthought, toreduceittoamereinstantiation of one's categories. The familiar criticism of such totalising thought is that in its hunger to bring everything under its sway, it suppresses difference and otherness. Derrida, discussing Levinas' critique of egocentric thinking in
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'Violence and Metaphysics', speaks of Western reason as characteristically neutralising the Other, transforming the Other to the Same. In this, he adds, thought makes common cause with oppression. 5 I will come to the political aspect later. For now, I want to consider another aspect of this criticism. The other side of the claim that there is a standpoint or set of categories in terms of which all thought and action can be comprehended and organised is that we are unable to speak of anything that goes beyond these categories. We can only reduce everything we encounter to a function of these categories. As such, totalising thought falls into a kind of solipsism. Because it can only comprehend the world in terms of its own categories, it can only ever comprehend itself. It seems to grasp the totality, and to be autonomous, only because it is moving in a circle. Encountering itself at every turn, thought is thus condemned to a sterile repetition or affirmation of its basic categories, categories which themselves remain unquestionable within this system of thinking. In short, by seeking to bring everything under the sway of its controlling categories, totalising thought falls into self-enclosure. And in so doing, its account of the world becomes untenable. Because its standpoint, its ruling categories, are supposed to provide the ultimate basis for explanation and understanding, these categories themselves cannot be explained. It is impossible to account for how they came to be. To speak of them as 'a priori' is only to conceal the embarrassment of being unable to say how one acquired them. To suppose that our starting point somehow brings itself into existence is to invite the mockery Nietzsche directed at the idea of the subject as First Cause, the desire as he puts it 'to bear the whole and sole responsibility for one's actions and to absolve God, world, ancestors, chance, society from responsibility for them', insofar as it implies that it could be possible 'with more than Munchhausen temerity, to pull oneself out of the swamp of nothingness by one's own hair'. 6 In the absence of such an unlikely provenance, the totalising metaphysical position, unable to account for its ruling categories, shows itself to be untenable as it stands. It is more useful to see it as a pathology of thought, in which thought has come to be trapped and imprisoned by its organising categories. If we are to escape from this kind of entrapment, we have to accept in principle that there is no fundamental standpoint which can capture the world in its entirety. The world is not in the first instance a function of our categories, reflecting our starting point back to us. Rather, what is fundamental, primary, is our encounter with the Other, our encounter with that which does not simply yield to us, but which we encounter as different. Such difference is not relative, as for example in the Hegelian notion of an Other which is merely the self alienated from itself. It is an absolute difference, a truly Other, in the sense of something which is new, unexpected, which comes from 'outside'. It is that which resists or eludes our efforts to impose ourselves upon it, and which can in turn influence us, affect and transform us. So the suggestion is that a decisive rejection of metaphysical foundationalism does not mean the dissolution of thought and action into incommensurable fragments. Rather, it opens up the possibility of concep-
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tualising our situation in terms of a fundamental encounter with the Other. And I also want to suggest that it is in the course of such encounters that our forms of thought and life emerge, and are also transformed. To flesh out this further claim, let us consider what might be involved in encountering the Other. To encounter the Other does not mean that we are simply passive, at the mercy of the Other. This self-negating way of thinking is just as problematic as the attempt to reduce the Other to our standpoint. Now, insofar as we apprehend the Other, it is through a sheer revelation of the Other to us. And once again, thought comes to a halt. We are reduced to reiterating our initial revelation, which is itself taken to be absolute and unquestionable. But this too is an untenable position. We cannot account for how the Other comes to be an object of knowledge for us. In fact, knowing something is impossible without some activity on our part, some process of ordering or imposing categories on it. So we are not simply passive in our encounters with the Other. In encountering the Other, we actively seek to comprehend it, to assimilate and transform it in accordance with our categories. But, and this is the crucial point, the Other we encounter is not passive either. It is not simply whatever we interpret it to be. As Other, it also resists, affects us in turn, requires us to conform to its demands. As such, our encounter with the Other involves in the first instance a reciprocal movement, a to-and-fro interchange, an interplay.Inotherwords,whatisfundamentalisdialoguebetweenourselves and the Other, the term dialogue being used to stress the reciprocal character of the encounter. The primacy of dialogue so understood means that instead of all-powerful transcendental subjects, we are first of all finite beings, involved in the world, and able to be affected and transformed by external influences. At the same time, as active beings, we are able to transform these external influences in turn. Even in the process of our acculturation, we are shaped as active beings. This is why acculturation is not causal determination, but a process of training and also why those who undergo it do not simply perpetuate or reproduce the existing cultural forms. We continue to be active beings insofar as we transgress imposed limits, redeploying forms of thought and action we have acquired in new, innovative ways, and transforming those who imposed them on us in the first place, changing the culture into which we were born. We are thus involved right from the start in a social dialogue. Of course, it is always possible for one to try to impose oneself completely on the Other, ie., to try to silence the Other and to bring this dialogue to an end. But it remains the case that such silencing is a derivative, secondary state, which presupposes the dialogue it has arrested. To take this state as fundamental, to take oneself to be the solitary, sovereign master of the world, is to forget the dialogue relations out of which one has emerged; and there remains the permanent possibility of being confronted by the resurgent voices of others, the reopening of dialogue. Now the kind of picture being presented here, I want to suggest, can be found in the work of Foucault. Foucault, of course, is amongst those who question the pretensions of totalising thought. And it is possible to see his
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own position as embodying in a central way a notion of dialogue. Here it is necessary to reject readings which see his notion of force-relations in terms of a mechanistic physics, and which see him as presenting a dehumanised picture of impersonal forces engaged in mechanical interactions. Foucault does not deny the human being in this way. Rather, he provides a concrete conceptualisation of human agency in terms of forces, where, to borrow Paul Patton's formulation, force can be understood minimally as a power or capacity, inhering in an individual or body of some kind, to do certain things or make some kind of difference in the world. 7 More specifically, forces seek to order, to give form to, to interpret other forces. Here, interpretation is not just a matter of knowledge, of discursively categorising forces, but of concretely ordering, directing or harnessing those forces, a process in which forms of discursive categorisation also play a part. At the same time, because forces are always imposed on other forces, this imposition requires an overcoming of those forces, and there is always resistance to it, struggle against it, and the ever present possibility of reversal. In Foucault's notion of resistance, what I have referred to as the Other makes itself felt, as that which does not just conform to the categories one imposes on it, but also eludes them and is able to affect one in turn. We are presented, then, with a dialogical picture, in the concrete sense of an open-ended, reciprocal interplay or combat of corporeal forces. In The History of Sexuality Volume 1, Foucault speaks of force relations as mobile, shifting and unstable. In 'The Subject and Power', he speaks of the interplay between forces as an agonism, a relationship of reciprocal incitation and struggle. 8 The notion of agonism stresses the strategic aspect of these encounters, their character as combat, offensive and counter-offensive, in which moves are not predetermined but continuously being made. History in general is made up of these encounters, this open-ended dialogue of forces. For Foucault, dialogue, so understood, is fundamental. It is out of this dialogue that normative principles and stable forms of life emerge. With this, Foucault rejects the idea that there is some ultimate metaphysical ground, some central organising transcendental subject or class, that imparts order and unity to social practices. Our practices have unity, but it is not a metaphysically prescribed, grounded or necessitated unity. We do not need transcendental rules to explain the unity, order or coherence in our practices. It is from the practices themselves, the interplay of forces, from 'below', as Foucault puts it, that specific forms of social arrangement and unity emerge. Relatively stable systems of social order emerge to the extent that some forces or sets of forces come to be able to orient, direct and utilise others in a relatively constant way. Thus Foucault does not abandon the notion of unity, but understands it non-metaphysically, as arising derivatively and contingently out of the dialogue of forces. 9 The advantage of such unitary organisations is that when forces are able to direct and utilise the capabilities of others, this significantly extends what it is possible to do. For example, as Foucault notes in Discipline and Punish, new techniques of disciplinary regulation and the harnessing of labour power made possible an enormous increase in productivity at the beginning
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of the modern period.1° At the same time however, this multiplication of capacities can only be achieved to the extent that those forces which are directed and utilised fall into conformity, their otherness is suppressed and dialogue is limited. And to the extent that this happens, an organisation of forces is in danger of becoming ossified, limited by its own organising principles, closed to innovation. However, to the extent that these other forces continue to manifest their otherness by resisting, transgressing imposed limits, going in new and innovative directions, and exercising influence in turn, interplay or dialogue between the forces in the organisation can continue The organisation thereby becomes susceptible to instability and transformation. But it is only through such dialogue that organisations of forces can be reorganised and revitalised. In this context it is possible to locate domination. Organisations of forces may be more or less open to otherness and innovation, to dialogue and hence to transformation. States of domination emerge when otherness is entirely overcome, when dialogue is wholly arrested and transformation precluded. 11 A closed institution like the prison comes close to this ideal of domination. But the price of such domination is the complete suppression of innovation, utter stagnation in thought and action. And it is here that the totalising metaphysical thinking I spoke of earlier ultimately finds its place, as bound up with states of domination. Totalising thinking, such as humanist metaphysics, is concretely embodied in forms of social regulation which seek to impose complete conformity, and in which the principles to which human beings are to conform are presented as universal, absolute, metaphysically necessary. At the same time, the sterile self-enclosure of totalising thought is concretely manifested in the closed institutions of domination which preclude all innovation. However, although history is littered with examples of oppression, it is not clear that total domination, absolute power over the Other, could ever be achieved. All forms of social unity remain essentially derivative, emerging as they do out of dialogue. And while all organisations constrain dialogue to some degree, it is not clear that even the most oppressive organisation could completely suppress it. To do so would amount to bringing history to an end. But that degree of sovereignty would only be possible for an inhuman transcendental subject. Finite human beings always remain in the end subject to history, to the ongoing play of dialogue. And so, no matter how oppressive an institution, otherness will inevitably reassert itself through various forms of resistance, dialogue will continue, and forms of life will be subjected to re-examination. History, which continually generates forms of order, also embodies the permanent possibility of their transformation. On this reading, then, Foucault replaces humanist metaphysics not with a vision of fragmentation but of historical dialogue. The sovereign, allpowerful humanist subject is replaced with a conception of human beings as essentially finite, as existing inescapably in the midst of history, in the midst of a dialogue with others. At this point, however, it might be argued that this account really does no more than define dialogue in a special sense, as equivalent to Foucault's agonism, the struggle and interplay of forces. If
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so, then why employ the term' dialogue', which it might be thought implies some notion of reciprocity, if not equality? One reason, which I mentioned earlier, is precisely to stress that a reciprocal movement is involved. To abandon in principle the idea that there is a fundamental standpoint which can capture the world in its entirety is not to reduce us to mere servants of an all-powerful Other. It is to put us in a situation where we are both affected and transformed by the Other and able to affect and transform the Other in turn. There is a combat, a struggle, but it is a mutual, reciprocal struggle. It might then be argued that this picture of combat or struggle is still remote from dialogue. To participate in dialogue is surely to be willing to listen to the Other, to be open to the Other, and equally to reject the dogmatic absolutisation of one's own standpoint which blinds one to the possibility of other points of view. Perhaps one response to this is to suggest that such attitudesareatleastconsistentwithdialogueasihavecharacterisedit.Inthe dialogue of forces, forces strive to transgress imposed limits and to transform other forces. However, if the Other is entirely overcome and silenced, if states of closure and domination are established, the organisation of forces becomes imprisoned in its own organising principles, closed to innovation. Here, continuing transgression and transformation depend on the resurgenceoftheOther.Butitseemstomethatitisalsopossibletoadoptattitudes towards the Other which, although ostensibly opposed to transformative activity, work against the states of totalising closure which such activity can produce, and in this way promote continuing transgression and transformation. And by this I mean precisely an attitude of openness, a willingness to listen to the Other and to take its claims seriously, which is at the same time a refusal to view one's own standpoint as absolute and all-embracing. Arguably, too, such attitudes can be found in Foucault's work. His openness to the Other lies in his concern, in the face of totalising forms of social organisation, to open up a space for others, for those who resist, to speak and have transformative effects. It is a concern that extends to a refusal on his own part to speak for others, to subordinate resistance to a new kind of totalisation. 12 Rather than laying down the law for others, he adopts a critical, anti-dogmatic attitude towards himself and his present, an attitude which suspends assumptions that current forms of social organisation are metaphysically prescribed, universal and necessary. 13 To do so is to make visible not just the Other but the long series of encounters with the Other, the interplay of offensives and counter-offensives, in short the historical dialogue of forces, that has given rise to present forms of social organisation. And to reveal these forms as historically emergent and specific is also to open them up to the possibility of transformation through continuing resistance and revolt, through ongoing dialogue. The dialogue that such critique invites and promotes is, to borrow Nietzsche's phrase, a 'dangerous perhaps', a risky endeavour. It challenges existing forms of social stability insofar as the Other, the unpredictably new and innovative, has a disruptive and destabilising effect on existing forms of life. But the effects of this destabilisation are also positive. Stability in life comes at the cost of the suppression of the Other, of innovation, and hence engenders closure, stagnation and sterility in thought and action. The other
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side of destabilisation is that new forms of thought and action can emerge, and culture can remain vital. And it is the possibility of such life-giving dialogue that the 'death of man', properly speaking, opens up. 1
T. McCarthy (1982). 'Rationality and Relativism', in J. Thompson and D. Held (eds), Habermas: Critical Debates, Macmillan, p.59.
2
Ibid.
3
On this tension in Habermas's thought, see for example D. Hoy (1979). 'Taking History Seriously: Foucault, Gadamer, Habermas', Union Seminary Quarterly Review 34:93-4; and R. Roderick (1986). Habermas and the Foundations of Critical Theory, Macmillan, pp.164-6.
4
For a similar assessment of the 'anything goes' position, see E. Steuerman, 'Habermas vs Lyotard: Modernity vs Postmodernity?', in A. Benjamin (ed.) (1992). Judging Lyotard, Routledge, p.l12.
5
J. Derrida (1976). 'Violence and Metaphysics'. Writing and Difference, Chicago University Press, pp.91-2, 96.
6
F. Nietzsche (1973). Beyond Good and Evil, Penguin, p.32.
7
P. Patton (1989). 'Taylor and Foucault on Power and Freedom'. Political Studies, 37:286. See also my 'Foucault's Human Being', Thesis 11, 34,1993.
8
SeeM. Foucault (1978). The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Penguin, pp.924; and 'The Subject and Power', in H. Dreyfus and R. Rabinow (1983). Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd edn, University of Chicago Press, p.225.
9
See History of Sexuality, p.94.
10 M. Foucault (1977). Discipline and Punish, Penguin, pp.218-21. 11 On domination, seeM. Foucault, 'The Ethic of Care fortheSelf',inJ. Bernauer and D. Rasmussen (eds) (1987). The Final Foucault, MIT Press, pp.3, 12. See also 'The Subject and Power', p.225. 12 On the role of the intellectual seeM. Foucault, 'The Concern for Truth', inS. Lotringer (ed.) (1989). Foucault Live, Semiotext(e), p.305. 13 See M. Foucault, 'What is Enlightenment?', in P. Rabinow (ed.) (1984). The Foucault Reader, Pantheon Books, especially 39, pp.45-6.
Atrocity Mechanics: Is there a Logic to Modem Inhumanity?
Paul.9lf6erts To discuss issues of violence, of cruelty, of human destructiveness in general, it is necessary to begin with a tone of self-reflexivity. The academic curiosity about human violence- the dimensions of self-incurred misery, cast as the search for 'the explanation' (or some would say the expiation) has become a modern preoccupation of enormous proportions. Philosophically, this signifies a type of recognition in modern thought - of human secular death as a fundamental limit - ontological, epistemological, and ethical, which bounds the possible values (and devaluation) of human life. It is in a time which has, as Nietzsche put it, usurped the position and functions of divinities with its own self-images, its own self-importance, that we find ourselves pondering the root causes behind human violence and the capacity for self-destructiveness. Let us recall the positive features around which this limiting condition, human secular death, assumes its importance: the academic discourses of the humanities are historically shaped around the contradictory figuration of 'humanity', occupying, as Kant argued, and Foucault reminded us, the dual positions of the subject and object, the transcendental and the empirical, the finite and the infinite. The epistemic space opened up in the tension of these dualisms is self-reflexive in its very constitution: how can we understand the conditions of an empirical life, what means are to be used; 'What are we, we who study ourselves?' is the credo of the humanities scholar. But the practice of that reflexion is never transparent: it is always mediated- by the historically sedimented assumptions, values, projects and figures of the field itself. Sometimes that mediation is refracted through a particular authority- such as this present collection- where the place of speaking, and the acts herein, are traced through with the writings of Michel Foucault. His spirit- or rather we talk less colourfully of 'a legacy' - an inheritance, the marks left behind by an individual, ironically celebrated here as an author and authority - opens up the life of our conversations, carries us here today in our relations together - our ethos of academic community temporarily consecrated by our analysis of the legacy: what have we been left, or more crucially, what has become the bequest of the Foucauldian oeuvre? It is clear that from the range of uses in evidence, Foucault's central contributions are in methodology and sceptical enquiry that are amenable to very different domains, and have therefore instigated a proliferation of texts. To mention this here is to recognise the tradition in the modern humanities of clustering our debates around inherited texts their finitude after the death of the author in its metaphoric and literal senses), is of course often the condition of an infinite dissemination and reinterpretation.
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In this case, an enquiry into human violence finds itself paying due homage; the reader of Foucault knows that the entwinement of pouvoir/ savoir is an economy invested in finite life, calculable populations, fertility and mortality rates, but then indebted to machineries of wholesale slaughter, weaponaries of mass destruction, cults of blood and blood-lines, purges and flagrant sneers in the face of 'common humanity'. At another levelinstitutional knowledges and practices produce the normal, the sane, the rational, marking off, but requiring nonetheless, the pathological, the mad, the dangerous and deviate as the internal limit, the demarcation guaranteeing 'normal life' through marshalling those deemed marginal- securing them to prevent the potential threat to normality - and inoculating them with whatever techniques or discursive explanations make them safe to the population; ensuring the life of the social order, through the judicious pruning, of those morbid elements. A tradition of thought including Nietzsche, Weber, the Frankfurt School and Foucault examines how these administrative grids, the fine products of Enlightenment culture, were in themselves forms of violence, measured acts of revenge by the social body- even if in the West we see more sedation, counselling, and amelioration than taking of flesh and naked retribution. The analysts of the darker side of modernity point to not only the historically shifting and sometimes arbitrary lines of those divisions and judgments as a violence, but also the ease with which modern societies can accelerate the devaluation of human life: fascisms, lynch mobs, apartheids and on it goes. Now, the liberal criticisms of these thinkers inevitably suggest that social diversity and a capacity for tolerance are the pre-eminent ethical gains of a culture of universalisation, and we ignore those features at our peril. But of course, it is minds rather than bodies that, in modernity, are asked to 'understand' differences. The category of modern tolerance is ultimately psychological: to tolerate, is to perceive differences and submit them to the empty, formal viewpoint of the universal, and discipline one's specific, pathological biases. The ethics of modern humanisms and their institutional grounds asks individual psyches to bear the responsibility for their pathology- to tolerate and suspend the constituted desire to repulse others; absorb those gay, criminal, ethnic or mad threats to our ethos, through the comforting mediations of institutions and knowledge, but suspend your specificity, and acknowledge the other, so that then your difference might be recognised. The subject of modernity must carry both an individual specificity, and a steady injunction, an everyday whispered imperative to forsake it for the logic of the universal, carried in forms of abstract law and the levelling power of commodification in global capitalism. The burden on individuals, the cost of tolerance, can be said to be borne then through technologies of the self: part of the goal of self-poiesis is to present (or struggle to present) a socially acceptable persona of prejudice and tolerance. The violence of our orders of differentiation, masked by the drive to universalise are borne by subjects, in their work to shape practices of living, being with others, goals and hopes. Thus we can say that the subtleties of post-Enlightenment administration, built on the logic of the universal and the particular, enact their violence, not just in the more
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obvious ploys of intervening in, and managing the differences in civil society, but also through the internal violence of ego formation, the layering of defences, the captivation of oneself by appropriateness, the struggle to bear values that will reveal a self suitable to the truth-telling demanded of one's position/vocation. The later Foucault's concern with parrhesia, can in some respects be seen to augment, and reciprocally be augmented, by some aspects of psychoanalysis. The vocabulary of bodies and pleasures, though at odds with the discourse of psyche and desire, intersects at questions of the politics of selfhood. We only have to think briefly of the current tensions and torsions wrought in the name of 'political correctness' to see an example of 'ethics as a politics'- working on one's self, submitting or not submitting to semantic revaluations, redefining speaking positions and one's comportment in relation to others is both a desire for a certain moral suffering and a discipline with the promise of appropriate pleasure. Following this, Foucault's later work on technologies of the self can also be seen as intimate dimensions of pouvoir I savoir that fit in with earlier formulations rather than as a radical turn or contradiction. And while for some, the emergence of more ethical problems- the question of freedom, of the self, of ethos and so on- was taken as an admission of the collapse of the earlier Foucault's anti-subjectivism, for the purposes of this project, I see an extension rather, of the analysis of the powers and manner of truth-telling. An inquiry into the specificity of human violence in modernity thus should proceed on the grounds of recognising the particularities of modern subjectivity and its embodiments, its being for itself and others as manifest in institutions demanding a violence, an articulation of the self against itself, prevailing indebtedness, we might say along with Nietzsche, our guilt (Schulden) as self-incurred debt for the truth and worthiness of a modern moral life, an economics of pleasure and self-denial foreshadowed by the horizon of secular death. While this seems a rather gloomy portrayal of an inner violence of subjectivity, it is really just a claim concerning the inevitable inner divisions/inner conflict of subjectivity, and 'abrasiveness' of selfpoiesis: shaping oneself is clearly an agonistic activity. To evade this darker side of modernity, and merely celebrate a liberal tolerance, is often to celebrate our progress by seeing just behind us, in the recent past, an age with the embryo of a golden future, and the present we might have had- the 'nearly here' which is not quite present, but still lights our way. We can look back with hope for the future. Moments of technical and social achievement that appear as seductive lights are perhaps nothing more than the refracted images of the idealised birth of modernity in Enlightenment culture. As Voltaire remarked, 'The child is the father of the man'. This here and now is not ideal we are told, but it is better than before, or 'elsewhere'- as the West realises the promise of the Aufkliirung- from the philosophical birth of the modern present in Kant's self-reflexive maxim that we release ourselves from blind obedience and dogmatisms and have the courage to use our freedoms, our self-gained wisdoms. The path to human maturity is one concerned with'thepresent', with'the event', but is clearly also a shifting temporal domain- near future, near past; an implicit calculation of the contingency of the present- what might have
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been, what perhaps will be. I would argue that part of the shock of those events deemed atrocities- where humanity and human values are radically disavowed- is the experience or the question of their contingency. When we see human life radically degraded, the supports of our modern narratives slip; we receive a shock of recognition that the ongoing drama of an ethos has radical incalculability deep in its heart. Thinkers such as Habermas, falling in, some would say with liberal sentiments, and hoping to light our way with a formal and universalist procedure- the logic of communicative action guiding us with its inherent telos oriented to mutual understanding- ultimately produce a desire to return to a golden embryonic past- the open public sphere of rational debate amongst discursively competent subjects; that which consensus and democracy might have been/ still might be. Habermas, and others not wishing to give up on the project of modernity, enjoy the axiological conceit of supposing that free and open rational discourse might lead us to happy and consensual value formation. Were the conditions underlying modern subjectivity such that the labours of these discussions could be free of divisions, internal and external, free of indebtedness of many kinds - then one could happily endorse them, but communication is also miscommunication, calculated misunderstanding and self-misunderstanding to a radical extent. We need to continue those interrogations into the so-called dark side of the Enlightenment traditions, and ask, with the sceptical spirit of Foucault and the Frankfurt School, against the background of the administration of life and our traditions of truth-telling- what brings in to being atrocities in the modern age? What is the capacity for inhumanity- how do subjects engage, with a will (a will to what end?) in the brutalisation of others? As Foucault, in the crucial, but sometimes poorly glossed, sections of The History of Sexuality asks, how is it that in their own name, whole populations are wagered in wars of extinction, or anted up in diplomatic games and political gambles, or, at the other end of the human scale, how do we construct, produce, or benignly claim to 'discover' those spectacular individual instances of infamy and perversity such as the sadist, the serial killer, the unrepentant child-abuser, rapist, or homophobe? Is there, in the midst, and crucially now, at the edges of our increasingly well-fenced fields of prosperity and tolerance, a brute mechanics - a machinery of violence and a legitimation of certain knowledges, certain aesthetics of representation, certain permissible affirmations? I would say there is. We must immediately recognise, however, the enormous diversity of the logics of modern violence, and admit that in one research project, it is impossible to employ a sufficiently large theoretical toolbox to cover all the analytical tasks. This study narrows its work somewhat by employing the term 'atrocity', and seeking, not final origins, nor human nature, nor a law of genetics to ground the parameters of modern violence, but rather, in the light of Foucault's methodologies, the 'eventfulness' of atrocities; the conditions of emergence of events that come to stand as paradigmatic instances or types of phenomena both fitting and shocking to a particular culture. This path leads to a number of problematics- that I can briefly introduce, but which clearly need further elaboration.
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In the first place, we can recognise the atrocity as a form of limit event, summed up, for me, in a particular reading of Adorno's maxim: Nature is the scar of social mutilation. The atrocity is apprehension of the inhuman; that which a culture sees as the death or limit of its ethos, its manner of living. To apprehend the inhuman is to apprehend where living gives in to perceived asocial impulse, where the order established and enforced admits of a brutality- which can only be comprehended as so radically other, outside the law, or logos, that it can only count as physis, as the visitation of something under the name of the natural. Hence, we can describe the murderer as acting as a mere animal, or treating his /her victim as a thing, an object; or the invading army commits atrocities which suspend or devolve civilisation. The natural then marks out a possible understanding a way to comprehend, seal over, socially created savagery. Certainly the motivations for many atrocities can be sheeted home to economic and/ or political motivations, to torture and kill one's enemies so as to clear a path for domination, or wealth is an ageless tactic- one not specific to modernity. But it is only recently that we deduce 'crimes against humanity', out of earlier and long-standing traditions of formulating 'the rules of war', the Rights of Man, and the grounds of social contract. This century has witnessed continuing debates and conventions on the permissible and impermissible acts of murder and torture in the name of 'legitimate war': the tete atete of bayoneting is perfectly admissible- it has in fact a rich and illustrious history going back to feudal sword fights- while the sophisticated technological capacity to release a nerve gas or virus against an enemy from afar is considered barbaric to the point of being sub-human, bestial, absolutely evil. And in between the two extremes a whole ethical and legislative world has opened up to consider the worth and validity of new technologies of violence. In an era of possible total destruction, it is interesting to remember that conventional warfare has remained supremely important as commodity- the commodity whose use value lies increasingly in the debilitation and mutilation of personnel: land-mines, napalm, cluster grenades, soft-jacketed bullets that splinter in flesh, darts that enter the body without trace only to twist and rupture internally etc.- a spiralling technology that sees efficiency in the prolongation of agony, the multiplication of injuries that maim, not kill- because the resources to save the injured deplete the enemy, reduce his resolve, allow him to measure the cost of combat in living atrocities. We should not forget that a crucial part of the logic of modern atrocities is delivered through commodification. But now the figure of 'the non-human' enters the debate at precisely the highest point of social mutilation; where capacity to effect pain and death efficiently suddenly runs up against the limit of universalising morality: 'Can we really be creatures that obliterate so calmly, so instrumentally?' At this internal limit of humanist ethos, we discover Adolf Hitler, Saddam Hussein, or Josef Stalin- the bestial figure incarnate- the emblematic leader characterised as capable of acting utterly on the side of the inhuman: hence, in the preliminaries to the Gulf War, the sense of outrage felt when Hussein was pictured patting a young British boy. Such a figure cannot be a caring father. These figures do not simply force themselves like feudal lords on the
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modern world; they are 'found', created, and required as the embodiment or 'the skin' which individuates what is deemed as the propensity for natural human violence amidst the culture of administering life. The atrocity as limit phenomena is in fact then essential to the logic of modern law: its principle of supposedly standing all and sundry equal before the law (as rational principle) reveals its arbitrary, levelling nature, but also that law requires a 'dead centre', a limit or a thing from outside erupting on the inside as the condition of the functioning of the field. AB Kant argues, and Slavoj Zizek reminds us, law is law; obedience cannot be compelled by the force of reasons given; law must be obeyed because it is and nothing else; the obedience to the law which must be categorically given. For it to work, the rationality of justice, its use of reasons and conditions requires the unconditioned. The veneer of social order therefore requires eruptions, requires the atrocity in a mechanical way - to break the surface of law, precisely to assert, through the injury to Gemeinschaft, the values of Gesellschaft. The finite place of the living subject in the order of civil society, and yet its value as end in itself, can be affirmed by the punctuating horror of a murder, a suicide - a breach, in short, of the logic of life administration. 'We' have been injured- one of an 'us' has suffered senselessly at the hands of an-other, and we occasionally see this Other in the spectacular features of the despot, the public enemy, or dangerous individual as Foucault described. Hence, the machinery of justice is required to reassert the orderliness of public life; the recognition of our contingency demands the reaffirmation of ethos, there will be theatres of judgement, which must be attended. In a second theme, then, the atrocity stands out amongst the moral events set in place by a culture, because it violates in spectacular fashion the values established to countenance suitable behaviour. Atrocities are of the spectacle, are of cultural vision ruptured and torn by the breaking of bodies and their bearing of values. Consider the atrocity of a girl abducted, raped, murdered, tied-up and thrown into a river like a disposable object (you will be aware of one such recent case); the crowd outside the courtroom celebrates the revenge of the social body on the perpetrator by testing the limits of civilised constraint; by a show of brutal anger; by making explicit the desire to wreak vengeance on the villain; by, in fact, a mimicry of barbarity and asocial impulse as the symbol and attempted guarantee of the social order. In this paradoxical quasi-celebration of the barbarity of the murderer - in the thirst for revenge, waving placards calling for death, carefully plaiting simulated nooses, etc.- the crowd discovers the limits of sociality, of its particular, socially specific humanity. By challenging the normal machinery of the judicial process, the mob call forth the police: 'police us' is the plea: or as Adorno and Horkheimer investigated in the arena of fascist rituals- that which the crowd enacts is the desire for a disciplined catharsis. How often do the police end up arresting violent demonstrators, who, breaking ranks with the crowd (in order to show the crowd), hurl themselves uselessly at the passing police van, the gates of the court, or some impassive officer? This street theatre, of course, makes for some of the best news reporting; where the media can touch the nerve of moral outrage to just
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the right displaced degree. At times of great social stress this theatre is multiplied: the gesture can be modified, codified, harnessed by an ideology and/ or the figure of a leader, and the generalised construction of dangerous others paradoxically protected by the social order, by the judiciary. The object cause can become the Jew, the Serb, those communists. This is not, however, to run together in the formula of a mass psychology the construction of otherness, its mimesis, and social captation. The value of Foucault's later technologies of the self, can apply here in demanding we recognise that the techne of the self of a fascist is not the same as a vengeful demonstrator calling for the death penalty to be returned. Atrocities work to stimulate or pacify- call forth different aspects, different practices, through the shock of broken moral vision. Such drama works, becauseitissonear. Theatrocitycompels us to feel the possible terror lying always so close, a few heartbeats away: mangled bodies in a car crash; a teenage gangster with a knife; a psychopath with a gun. The modern conditions of anonymity in public space, and a powerful privatised sphere create certain liberal benefits, but also the tensions at the limits of the two; private violence, chaos and madness can possibly manifest itself in the freeway sniper, a massacre at McDonald's and arbitrary assassinationsrandom atrocities that send forth the figure of the free individual who may, 'be anyone' and be capable of indiscriminate slaughter. Anonymity is amplified and extended by random death: the fear of random death is simply the fear of anonymity levelled at oneself to the highest degree. The fear is one of respect made impotent: aimless violence is anomie, certainly, but it is also the generalised instability of the self in the face of the Other who refuses to be an-other in which we can recognise ourselves. Random serial killing is unexplainable finally as any kind of social rationale- and that is its greatest terror- and its greatest attraction. Mainstream cinema has for some time now celebrated the transgression of murder, particularly the seductive figure of the serial killer. But this phenomenon can take on more insidious dimensions, when in some countries, under a variety of pressures, a strata of the social order finds itself purely expendable, without social welfare, without possibilities for inclusion in social production. In Colombia, these people are called disposables, and they are simply seen as the by-products, the unnecessary excess, a kind of human excrescence that can be the target of atrocities, in a process of culling or reducing numbers in certain 'problem zones'. The victims of atrocities are confirmed as 'human meat', as temporary humans only; their murder, often random, and then the mutilation and/ or use of their remains are events can set in place the figure of the social parasite. The logic of the disposable, of the human excess is but the shortest of steps to a social parasitology: the atrocities of death squads, civil militia and police murdering and dumping bodies become events of cleansing, of lopping the parasites. The atrocity can become a necessary function, almost to the point of ceasing to be of that status, as a hardening social division abandons some to aless-than-humanstatus.WhiletheseeventsaredisturbinginSouthAmerica, the increasing class divisions, inner city collapses, and gun epidemic in the United States raise the possibility of similar events in the West. The limit
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conditions for such events do not have to be at the margins of the Western world, but can shift internally. The last theme in considering the atrocity, questions of representation and aesthetic production is perhaps the largest, most discussed but there is only space here for a brief mention of some elements. Clearly there is a proliferation, even an obsession with atrocities committed by 'dangerous individuals'; the serial killer is represented as an artist of sorts- the artist of humanflesh-ormorepreciselytheartistofthelimitsofethos,the(negative) artist (paradoxically) of human dignity by the affirmation of ourselves as mere things waiting to be drained of life; we interest ourselves in the style, modus operandi, fetishisms, mannerisms of the killer. How do they kill? Why? The victims become the expression of his or her individuality: the killer as artist is also by necessity the figure enlarged- the quasi-heroic figure now capable of grounding a narrative. American Psycho, for example, lays bare the reduction of people to commodities in the killer's fetish for upmarket lifestyle and savagery as entertainment. Both literary and film production show an increased enthusiasm for gore and explicit violence, there continues to be small moral panics matching each new phase of 'explicitness'. Perhaps more important is the growing intersection of the mass media with so-called real-life reporting, amateur videos, the commodification of the violent criminal, their 'true accounts' etc. The Bulger case in Liverpool, for example, shocked as much through the open documentation of events as through the particular horror of the 'evil child'. The horrors of Rwanda or Bosnia are represented here and now. Atrocities rupture the axiological landscape; serve as crucial landmarks, boundaries, borders; they are 'needed', but as the indicators of the field itself, its human and inhuman parameters; they are an event, of an effect of a culture which administers life with tenacity; they occur with a regular irregularity. We are tempted, of course, to point at human nature and leave it at that; but this paper argues their immanence to the social logic of modernity; they are particular functions of an era which universalises and invests in a common humanity, only to include, by necessity, within that logic, unconditioned chasms of violence and instances of the total disregard for the established values of human life.
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__ _,The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, London: Tavistock, 1970.
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__ _,Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, Ed. Donald F. Bouchard, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Uni. Press, 1977.
__ _,Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1980.
__ _, Power, Truth, Strategy, ed. Meaghan Morris and Paul Patton, Sydney: Feral Publications, 1979.
___, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (vol. 1), trans. Robert Hurley Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981. __ _, 'Politics and Ethics: An Interview', trans. Catherine Porter, in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow, New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. __ _, 'What is Enlightenment?' Trans. Catherine Porter, in The Foucault Reader, ed. Rabinow, __ _,'Polemics, Politics, Problematizations: An Interview', in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow. __ _, 'The Subject and Power', afterword in Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Sussex, Harvester Press, 1982.
__ _,The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley, New York: Pantheon, 1985. __ _, The Care of the Self, trans. Robert Hurley, New York: Vintage Books, 1988. Habermas, Jiirgen, The Theory of Communicative Action: vol. 1, Reason and the Rationalization of Society, vol. 2 Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, trans. Thomas McCarthy, Boston: Beacon, 1984.
__ _, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick Lawrence, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987.
__ _,Autonomy and Solidarity: Interviews, ed. Peter Dews, London: Verso, 1986. Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith, London: Macmillan, 1983. Martin, Luther H. et al, Technologies ofthe Self A Seminar with Michel Foucault, London: Tavistock, 1988. Nietzsche,Friedrich, On the Genealogy ofMorals, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York, Vintage Books, 1969.
__ _,Twilight ofthe Idols and The Anti-Christ, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979.
__ _,The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale, New York: Vintage Books, 1968. Zizek, Slavoj, Tarrying with the Negative, Durham: Duke University Press, 1993.
__ _,The Sublime Object of Ideology, London: Verso, 1989.
The Disorder of Things: Foucault and Comic Writing 'Tony Scmmto In 'The Black Sun of Michel Foucault', an essay in Heterologies, Michel de
Certeau writes, apropos of The Order of Things, that: Over time, and in the density of its own time, each episteme is made up of the heterogeneous: what it does not know about itself (its own grounding); what it can no longer know about other epistemes (after the disappearance of the fundamentals they imply); what will be lost forever of its own objects of knowledge (which are constituted by a structure of perception). Things are defined by a network of words, and they give way when it does.Order emerges from disorder only in the form of the equivocal. Reason, rediscovered in its underlying coherence, is always being lost -because it is forever inseparable from an illusion. In Foucault's books, reason dies and is simultaneously reborn (1986:173).
I would like to firstly address, and then take up and extend this particular set of points offered by de Certeau about Foucault's work, a set of points which suggests that, for Foucault, the production of regimes of truth and knowledge are not only open to contestation; rather the production of truth, as de Certeau reads Foucault, is predicated on a certain inescapable failure and ignorance. I will address de Certeau's arguments as to why this is the case, and then move on to make two additional points, both presaged, but never explicitly articulated, by de Certeau. The first extension of this point is that if the conditions and means and practices through which discourse and narratives, knowledge and regimes of truth, establish and authorise themselves, are at the same time the conditions and moments of their disestablishment, of their self revelation as loss and ignorance, then we can say that the production of truth and knowledge needs to be understood, generically, as having strong affiliations with the comic. The second extension is that this particular consanguinity between productions of truth and knowledge and the comic, and the ramifications of that consanguinity, can be seen to be understood, taken up, and specifically utilised by Foucault as a means of avoiding what Lacan might call the imperative to close the circle of signification. The final section of this paper will be devoted to a brief and largely impressionistic analysis of precisely this kind of Foucauldian practice, specifically the Damiens section of Discipline and Punish. In his various essays on Foucault's work in The Practice of Everyday Life Practice (1988) and Heterologies (1986), de Certeau continually refers to, and insists upon, the centrality to that work of dichotomies such as ideology I procedures, words/things and signifier/signified. For de Certeau the grounds of truth are prepared through claiming both to overcome those dichotomies (that is to say, to claim to have closed the circle of signification), and to be able to have exhaustively located and identified and evaluated
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those procedures, things and signifieds; in other words, claiming to have knowledge of 'everything that is the case'. Now to a large extent, these two processes (of valuation and identification) are the same process. A thing can be identified only when it has meaning; that is to say, when it can be classified and ordered. Every regime of truth is predicated on this relationship between valuation and identification. Someone is only identifiable as human, for instance, because (at a certain time, in a certain place, for certain people) they provide markers and produce performances that have been assimilated into, and institutionalised as, cultural categories (involving say, notions of gender, race, class, age, literacy). In fact we can follow Judith Butler on this point and say, paradoxically, that materiality itself only comes into being through the agency of cultural categories of perception that are themselves dependent on, and recognisable through iteration (1993). Paradoxically, regimes of truth always call up that which they produce as evidence of their own authority and legitimacy. As Slavoj Zizek (1991) has argued, the law always makes use of the effects of the law and the power of the law to legitimate the law. Men and women, adults and children, come before the law as the (legally) evaluated categories of men and women, adults and children, categories produced by the law, which then claims to treat, disinterestedly, what it finds before it. Incongruously, truth and knowledge can only mechanically deny their own validity, can only proclaim, violating our expectations, the lie of truth and the ignorance of knowledge. Paradox, incongruity, mechanical repetition and violation of expectation are, of course, strongly associated with the comic: Freud (1981), Bergson (1921), Bakhtin (1968) and Rene Girard (1978) have built their various theories of the comic on these shifting and unstable grounds. As does Foucault in his work; he writes in The Order of Things:: This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all those familiar landmarks of my thought -our thought, the thoughts that bear the stamp of our age and our geography -breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things ... This passage quotes a 'certain Chinese encyclopaedia' in which it is written that 'animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, G) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (1) etcetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies'. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by the means of a fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking 'that' (1973:xv).
There is no need to labor the consanguinity between violence and the comic, nor any need to point out that sudden encounters with the exotic Other can be read in a number of negative ways (for instance, to confirm the Other as inhuman). Nevertheless the comic has a great deal to offer, as Foucault's work demonstrates. The comic move is always reciprocated, as Rene Girard (1978) has pointed out. In the moment I laugh, I dissolve both
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that which I laugh at and myself as laughter. Foucault's laugh dissolves truth and knowledge, but at that moment he becomes like the cartoon character who notices that he left solid ground some time ago, and has been walking on air, at which time he tumbles into the void. In the opening to Discipline and Punish (1987), we are presented with a problem to solve, a puzzle. What do we make of these accounts of the torture and execution of Damiens that Foucault has brought together? Why these details? Where do these accounts, these discourses, fit into the scheme of things? What do they mean? As Damiens is called up by and processed through the discourses of journalism, bureaucracy, religion and technology, we notice that these discourses are anything but certain in the treatment of their subject. What do his actions, his responses, his performances, mean? Can he be taken apart, carefully, rigorously, almost scientifically and then metaphorically put back together again? Most importantly, can his body be disciplined by the law? These questions are never answered satisfactorily, for as Foucault's deployment of these accounts, and his contextualising of these discourses and narratives indicate, the law is an ass that cannot even work out how many horses it takes to tear a body apart; technology finds slaughter a messy and unsatisfactory business, even when pincers are specially designed for the occasion; and confessors invariably turn up after the confessing soul ... has become a lost soul. And yet every activity and discourse and narrative in this account of Damiens works to try and make things explain and fit and mean. Executioners and torturers and technicians cut off Damiens' thighs and sever his sinews and hack at his joints, while the spectators, we are told, are edified by the solicitude oftheParishPriestofStPaul's, who 'despite his great age', does 'not spare himself in offering consolation to the patient' (Foucault 1987:3). What we have here is farce, with absurdities and blunders- and blunderers - in profusion. But whose comic accounts are these? Is the attempt to produce truth comic in itself? What is the status of Foucault's intervention? Who is the author of this farce? De Certeau is right to emphasise the ways in which discourses and ideologies babble; right to point to the comic dimension of signifiers aimlessly sliding across discursive spaces in search of signifieds. At the same time, it is the practice of deployment, the throwing together of the Same that is not, the teasing out of differends which, for instance, brings to light in the Damiens section the absurdity and impossibility of any affinity, even any easy coexistence, between the man of God and the technician; and, paradoxically, at the same, the absolute necessity of that alliance between truths that hardly recognise one another. What we have here then, in the Damiens section, is underkill (nobody can make this body behave and comply) and overkill (why does it take so many truthsandsomuchknowledgetoachievesolittle?).Foucaultdoesnotcreate this incongruity; but he does read it, and pass on that reading position, what we might term that literacy. As Foucault suggests, this kind of spectacle had to go because it gave too many opportunities for too many to observe how the law does not work. Which explains, to a certain extent, the move from punishment to discipline, from spectacle to science. But what we are dealing
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with here, in this epistemic move, is a change from one (comic) genre to another; a move that Foucault plots, not as an evolution, but as a new sleight of hand. In this regime of reason, everything that is the case is shown to be different from itself, to be ignorant of itself, to exceed itself; and in these comical, incongruous or paradoxical half-openings of discourse the 'possibility of thinking otherwise bursts in' (1973:xv).
Bibliography Bakhtin, M. (1968). Rabelais and His World, trans. H. Iswolsky, Cambridge: MIT Press. Bergson, H. (1921). Laughter, trans. C. Brereton and F. Rothwell, London: Macmillan. Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that Matter, London: Routledge. Certeau, M. de (1986). Heterologies, trans. B. Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. __ _, (1988). The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. S. Rendall, Berkeley: University of California Press. Foucault ,M. (1973). The Order of Things, New York: Vintage. __ _, (1987). Discipline and Punish, trans. A. Sheridan, New York: Vintage. Freud, S. (1981). Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. J. Strachey, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Girard, R, (1978). To Double Business Bound, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Zizek, S. (1991). The Sublime Object of Ideology, London: Verso.
Beyond Power/Knowledge, or Towards Erasing the Distinction Between the Discursive and Non-discursive (jeorge Petelin The 'Conservatism' of Foucault To me it does not seem a good method to take a particular science to work on just because it's interesting or important or because its history might appear to have some exemplary value .... But if one is interested in doing historical work that has political meaning, utility and effectiveness, then this is possible only if one has some kind of involvement with the struggles taking place in the area in question (Foucault 1980:64).
Despite the political commitment expressed in this statement by Foucault in Power/Knowledge, despite his avowed materialist aim to' question teleologies and totalisations' through a method 'purged of all anthropologism' (1972: 16), and despite his vehement dissociation of his method from structuralism with its implication that discourse can be reduced to language and hence ideas, Foucault's method and his conclusions remain vulnerable to charges of being conservative. How can such intentions have allowed him to trivialise the role of Economy, demoralise revolutionary aspirations, assassinate dialectical progress, and purvey yet another totalitarianmetanarrative as he is variously charged?
Trivialiser of Political Economy While there is now a fairly general consensus that the Economy is not as monolithic as classical Marxism conceived it, the sheer dogmatism with which it is given no role at all by some Foucauldians is terrifying to many critics. What Marx achieved, in foregrounding an articulation of global economy with particular economies, is taken by them to have been totally reversed through Foucault's dispersing of the economic domain. Consequently, even Marxists such as Poulantzas, who subscribe to the notion of diverse micro-relations of power, cannot forgive Foucault for not accounting for the development of the modern state in terms of capitalist relations of production (Jessop:1985). Whether you explain the state in terms of an economic system or not, local social relations and changes within them are undoubtedly affected by specific economic dependencies on general centralised procedures and policies. No wonder critics such as Sheldon Wolin are prompted to respond that: 'Locality is the ground that has to be defended against state-centred politics .... Theory locates the self and the local grouping in relation to the more encompassing structures of power which are the hallmark of state-centred politics' (1988:199). Foucauldian theory, on the other hand, laments Wolin, has no place for action, only for practice. Action is not identical with practice. Practice signifies doing things competently according to the appropriate
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received canons. Action is often role-breaking or custom-defying, for frequently it seeks to defend the collectivity against evils that are sanctioned by rules and traditions. Action can only play this role if it is free to respond to experience and is guided by theory only to a limited extent. By this formulation discourse is denied the pretensions illicitly gained by its incest with practice' (Wolin 1988:200).
What Wolin envisages is clearly something more substantial than the everyday practices of transgression described by De Certeau (1985), he hankers for at least the possibility of revolution.
Restorer of Metanarratives But Foucauldian theory also attracts more balanced criticism. Peter Dews' critique of post-structuralism, The Logics of Disintegration claims that Foucault's notion of power, equates with 'productivity and efficiency of those purposeful-rational forms of organization which Weber detected in modern, bureaucracies and in the capitalist organization of the labour process' (1987:151). 'The result of [Foucault's] ... simplification', says Dews, is that power,' .. having nothing determinate to which it could be opposed, loses all explanatory content and becomes a ubiquitous metaphysical principle' (1987:166). For instance, Dews reports that when asked on the relation, other than instrumental, between knowledge and power, 'Foucault's most straightforward answer ... presents power as a precondition of knowledge rather than knowledge as a precondition of power' (1987:173). Chiding Foucault together with Lyotard, Dews points out: 'If Lyotard places an exclusive emphasis on the 'revolutionizing effects of the norm-free sociality' of the market in his account of capitalist modernity, then Foucault's work espouses an equally one-sided view, in its unrelenting stress on the rationalized system of administration and social control'. Ironically, a vestige of Marxist fundamentalism leads Habermas to class Foucault, along with Derrida as a 'neo-conservative'. According to Habermas, they each claim 'a decentered, subjectivity emancipated from the imperatives of work and usefulness' (Habermas 1983). In this view, it is the total instrumental rationalism of Foucault's method that is its downfall. Thus Foucault is charged with making power the derniurge at the foundation of everything- precisely the sort of essentialism his supporters would wish to avoid; for it is essentialism that breeds the totalisation that a Foucauldian method prides in dismantling. Thus, Foucault is accused also of constructing his own totalising metatheory to take its place above the other Grand Narratives. Even a sympathetic reader such as David Couzens Hoy, for example, finds The Archaeology of Knowledge to 'look much like an attemptataself-justificationwhichwouldput[Foucault's]ownphilosophy, in Kantian fashion, on the secure path of science .... Archaeology starts looking like Kantian transcendental philosophy when it posits an a priori that can be deduced or at least indirectly inferred only by this one particular method' (Hoy 1988:31-2). Although Hoy weakly concedes that ' .. .like Nietzsche Foucault does not believe that genealogy is a privileged way to think the unthought [the 'archive' ofrules], but merely one way of doing so' (Hoy 1988:32) this only begs the question for the problem remains framed in the distinctive terms of Foucault's own meta-epistemology. Feminist critic
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Isaac D. Balbus notes that to hold 'disciplinary technologies responsible for the very constitution of the modern-individual-as-object-and-subject is necessarily to attribute to them a totalising power that only totalizing theory can name' (1988:152). At the same time, Balbus is resentful of the fact that Foucault's 'critique of totalizing reason condemns as totalitarian the very awareness of the pervasiveness of male domination which women have so painfully achieved' (Balbus 1988:150).
Assassin of Dialectic It is Foucault's' ... adoption of a monism of one dimension of force which
escapes the logic of the signifier' argues Dews which 'dissolves the link between power and oppression and desire and liberation, and therefore the political content of the concepts themselves' (Dews 1987:167). This monism puts him at odds with both Marxist and Hegelian critique. Thus Baudrillard is moved to advise us to 'Forget Foucault'. He begins by asserting that Foucault is a late Messiah whose analysis may once have been relevant but now is obsolete. Arguing from the point of view of his theoretical hobbyhorse- the simulacrum- Baudrillard surmises that Foucault can only speak of power because power is already dead; for there are no longer systems of power /knowledge to be analysed but only endless simulations thereof. And further accuses Foucault of fixing history into a 'classic semiurgy of power and sex' (1987:15). Referring to Foucault's conception of power as a filiation en abyme (1987:9) 'without origins' and without 'catastrophe' he obliquely charges Foucault with aestheticising politics by producing an account, as he says, 'too beautiful to be true' (1987:11). It may be edifying to digress for a moment here to compare this aesthetic account of Foucauldianism with a Foucauldian account of aestheticism- Ian Hunter's description of Romanticism as a technology of the self: 'its practitioners take the fact that this process has no end- in either sense of the word - as a sign of its ethical superiority. To have an end would reduce the aesthetic experience to the status of an instrument wielded for certain rationalpurposes,hencedeprivingitofitscompleteness'(Hunter1992:354). This goalless disinterestedness bears uncanny resemblance both to the ethos of Foucauldian analysis and to its conclusions. Baudrillard maintains, however, that power must start off on something like an exclusion, a division or a deniat and on that basis power can produce something real or even the real' (1987:17). For Foucault, Baudrillard claims, 'the crisis or peripeteia of power does not even exist. There is only modulation, capillarity, a "microphysical" segmentation of power, as Deleuze says'. What emerges as the core of this rather obscure, ellipticat and lyrical critique of Foucault, is a charge of evolutionism at the expense of revolution. For Foucault, argues Baudrillard, power operates right away like a genetic code, 'according to diagrams of dispersion and command (DNA), and according to a teleonomical order'. 'Teleonomy' according to Baudrillard, 'is the end of all final determinations and of all dialectic: it is the kind of generative inscription that one expects - an immanent, ineluctable, and always positive inscription that yields only infinitesimal mutations' (1987:34). The term teleonomy is borrowed from the field ofbiologywhere it means'an impression of purpose arising from adaptation through natural selection'.
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It was coined from the Greek Telos, meaning 'far off end' or 'perfect', and
nomia: 'management, law, distribution, or arrangement'. Here, it also connotes nominalism- the philosophical denial of abstract entities or universals which sees all categorisation as arbitrary. Foucault's notion of apparent unities forming out of dispersed interests is thus, not inappropriately for a genealogy, compared to Darwinian descent. Interestingly, Paul Bove draws more positive attention to how Foucault's inheritance of Darwinian genetic premises leads him to stress error rather than reason. Drawing on an introduction thatFoucaultwrote to Canguilhem's On the Normal and the Pathological, Bove concludes that: As a genealogist interested in disclosing the history and structure of power from the point of view of the present, Foucault learns his basic lessons from Nietzsche and Canguilhem: he learns what we should call 'the lesson of error'. Accident or chance, Canguilhem argues, lies at the biological basis of life, in the genetic materials themselves. Errors of genetic coding always occur. For Foucault and all genealogists, this implies that error and not reason is at the root of what makes human thought and its history. Interestingly, Bove also points out that Canguilhem's Darwinian notion of 'compensation' by which apparently stable norms or forms of life temporarily succeed in reconciling opposing demands ... translates politically into Gramsci's notion of hegemony, that is, the dominant, which gives its identity to the stable moment, achieves its position by virtue of the set of concessions it offers to the conflicting groups it directs and leads. In other words, compensation is a political process in the creation of an intellectual and disciplinary stability. It is not rational in the disinterested sense ... (1988:64-65).
However, there is one more account of this notion of teleonomy that I wantto conclude with: it issues out oflinguistics, so I must first make a point about the dualism within Foucault's notion of discourse. While discourse is now often reduced to the term 'practices'- which can practically include any and everything- it must be remembered that despite Foucault's denial that he was ever a structuralist, his archaeology also implies an ambiguous linguistic dimension with traces of Saussure's langue/parole distinction which sometimes differentiates between the discursive and non discursive, at other times not. A thorough critique of Foucault's 'Linguistic Fault' is made by Brown and Cousins (1986). They identify the chief source of confusion in Foucault's account of his method, as being the failure to adequately distinguish between the 'statement', and 'language'. Foucault, they claim, 'merely declares that a sentence and proposition exist at a different level of existence from the statement' and as a consequence of this, 'there exists a continuing thread of ambiguity' in the relation between language and statements in Foucault. An 'integrated' methodological model must recognise that though signs, as well as propositions, sentences, acts of formulation, and material things, can all participate in statements, they can all exist without being a statement and none of them is indispensable to a statement's formation. The single adjustment to Foucault's use of terminology which can allow a clear distinction between language and statement for our amended model is a differen-
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tiation between the methodology's references to part of a statement and its references to the whole of a statement. The directly visible part of a statement - manifested in what we may recognise as a sentence, a sign, an act or an object, or a group of these - can then be considered but a trace of the mechanism that differentiates it as a statement. A statement's differentiating attribute, then, is that it is not just a random appearance of one of many possible permutations of words or elements, even within conformity to a systematicity of language, or a singular thing independent of what is normally called a discursive context, but something which emerges complete with a precise appearance, and a position or status in relation to other statements, due to the multiple sites and procedures which contributed in making it possible. Therefore, a statement must be seen as distinct from a sentence or any entity considered in a purely semiotic way, or as a nondiscursive thing, through its possession of a host of non-linguistic 'correlations' within the discursive field. For this reason as Foucault at one point admits, 'the statement cannot be defined because it is not in itself a unit, but a function that cuts across a domain of structures and possible unities, and which reveals them, with concrete contents, in time and space' (Foucault 1972:87). In other words, the statement is not characterised by any aspect of its appearance but by the conditions that govern the specific emergence and existence of that appearance and endow it with dispersed social potencies and investments not identifiable with either an autonomous power of logic or with linguistic meaning. In the practical application of this model, therefore, a visible manifestation must be considered to belong to a statement if it can be shown to have correlations which regulate it and establish a status for it. Distinguishing between visible traces which coexist in a text, a site, a discipline- or in any of the other unities to which we are prone- and the rules and conditions of their existence which themselves exist in other dispersed practices, also avoids the tautological reasoning, identified by Brown and Cousins, (1986:50) by which Foucault gives statements the task of embodying rules for their own existence. In a revised formulation, it may thus be considered that a set of correlations, whose own practices and sites of operation need not coexist in time and space or within a category, form rules for the coexistence, sequencing, modality and emergence of only the traces that appear in the apparent unities of discourse. It would be quite absurd, in fact, to talk of the coexistence of whole statements when their greatest portion is, by definition, dispersed. Thus the space of visible manifestations provides an opportunity for the intersection of statements but not a coexistence. This distinction, between the statement as a whole and its more readily accessible part, has repercussions for any practical adaptation of Foucault's model of the discursive formation- particularly with regard to rules for the formation of concepts which in The Archaeology of Knowledge refer to whole statements and in a revised model must refer to only the visible figures that form a portion of statements- the' documents' and 'monuments' with which an analysis begins. This dispersal is necessary in order to avoid the idealism that results from Saussure's privileging of langue over parole in order to avoid teleology which inadvertently confers upon linguistic structure a
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causal determinacy. As well as implying a teleology based in linguistic structure, structuralism's denial of determinacy to parole would deprive the specific text of its political moment. However, this failing in Saussure was recognised even within linguistics itself - by his most ardent disciples. Jakobson writes: synchrony contains many dynamic elements and it is necessary to take this into account when using a synchronic approach .... Saussure's ideology ruled out any compatibility between the two aspects of time, simultaneity and succession. [Saussure] attempted to suppress the tie between the system of language and its modifications by considering the system as the exclusive domain of synchrony and assigning modifications to the sphere of diachrony alone. In actuality ... the concepts of a system and its change are not only compatible but indissolubly tied Gakobson and Pomorska 1983:57-58).
An account of language which avoids this idealism in an attempt to restore the power of political effect to language can be found in the work of Volosinov. Volosinov points out that considering language to be entirely dependent on linguistic systematicity - what Saussure terms langue - supposes that meaning is conveyed through 'normatively identical forms'. Yet, an objective standpoint must recognise that at any moment the forms of language are also undergoing transformation. This leads him to the conclusion that no such system actually exists at' any real instant of historical time' (1973:66). Language, thus, is in a continuous process of becoming, and any static slice of it is necessarily only a convenient fiction. When Volosinov reasserts the primacy of language performance over structure he makes some useful distinctions: between recognition and understanding, and between signals and signs. He grants that, to an individual consciousness, the recognition of a perceived normatively identical form constitutes a signal- an utterances/ he is making or receiving. But what constitutes communication - enables that signal to be a sign- is the 'new and concrete meaning it acquires in the particular context'. He goes on to argue that 'what is important for the speaker about a linguistic form is not that it is a stable and always selfequivalent signal but that it is an always changeable and adaptable sign' (1973:68). Thus the constituent factor for the linguistic form, as for the sign, is not at all its self-identity as signal but its specific variability; and the constituent factor for understanding the linguistic form is not recognition of 'the same thing' but understanding in the proper context of the word, ie. orientation in the particular, given context and in the particular, given situation- orientation in the dynamic process of becoming and not 'orientation' in some inert state (Volosinov 1973:69).
Jakobson's associates in the OPOJAZ group, Trubetzkoy, Tynjanov and others also did not see change as arbitrarily related to the system but neither did they wish to visualise it as a causal chain. The best summation of their position possibly comes from the poet Boris Pasternak who attributes linguistic change to 'a confluence of circumstances that makes the historical and psychological principles coincide in their function' (1983:67). It is in this spirit, as a member of the Prague circle, that Jakobson replaced teleology
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with teleonomy- changewhichis goal-directed without being diachronically caused (Holenstein 1974:118) This vision of an opportunistic confluence of unconnected systems bears some similarity to Althusser's notion of overdetermination but more to Foucault's discourse. A clarification of how diachronic changes of language may be observed 'simultaneously'- in a synchronic sense- is supplied by another member of the Prague circle, Jan Mukarovsky (1976:54,83). Adopting from Volosinov the notion of a 'semantic dynamics' he notes that our interpretation of language is always goal-oriented. We are oriented towards some unity of syntactic meaning the moment we conceive of some beginning semantic series as a sentence. Our interpretation, he maintains, is served by a' semantic accumulation'- every new unit is perceived against a background of the one before it and all the preceding ones so that 'the entire set of semantic units of which the sentence is composed is simultaneously present in the listener's or reader's mind at the conclusion of the sentence' (1977:51). He stresses that the order in which this accumulation has occurred is significant to the meaning of the final sentence. Importantly, he also notes, that 'the sentence is not ... the last and the highest step in the hierarchy of semantic units' and that the sentence itself 'very often refers semantically to a broader context, especially that which has preceded it' (1977:53). As Volosinov writes: 'A book, ie., a verbal utterance in print, is also an element of verbal communication... ' (1973:95). Jakobson visualises the process of linguistic change as follows: the beginning and end of each change are always recognised as such during a period of coexistence in the community. The point of departure and the end point may, however, be distributed in different ways. The older form may be characteristic of an older generation and the new one to a younger, or both forms may belong from the outset to two different styles of language, different subcodes of a single common code, in which case all members of the community have the competence to perceive and chose between the two variants .... In as much as the start and the finish of a change simultaneously belong to the common code of a system of language, one must necessarily study not only the meaning of the static constituents of the system but also the meaning of the changes which are in statu nascendi. Here the Saussurian idea of changes that are blind and fortuitous from the point of view of the system loses ground. Any modification takes place first at the synchronic level and is thus a part of the system, while only the results of the modifications are imparted to the diachronic dimension (1983:58-9).
The speech community tends to include the temporal axis among the linguistic factors which are directly conceived. For example, obsolete elements of a linguistic system are felt as archaisms and new elements as the latest fashion (1983:60). Thus Mukarovsky's model- the 'Prague prism' as Holeinstein (1974:31) calls it - is adapted by Jakobson to describe the accumulation and struggle of alternative language uses. It should no less instruct an investigation of the rise and decay of practices in the discursive formation. In viewing the construction of a text as a struggle for meaning, Mukarovsky distinguishes between the simple act of selecting from a set of permissible paradigms, in the Saussurian manner, and designation, the creation of a sign
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against the background of an existing system (Mukarovsky 1976:73). This notion derives from the work of another member of the Prague circle named Karcevskij to whom, as Steiner and Steiner (1976) report, every use of a linguistic sign is a new fitting of signans to signatum, extending the range of reference of the signans, if ever so slightly. In this sense, Karcevskij claims, using a word transforms it into a homonym, the sound referring to a new reality. But at the same time, since the particular situation is generalised through the code into a type of situation, the sign applied to it becomes a synonym of all the words which have been or might be applied to such a situation (Steiner and Steiner 1976:73-76). What this means is that every utterance is in fact a linguistic change; every statement is in itself a political effect. As Volosinov contends, every 'utterance is above all an evaluative orientation. ... a change in meaning is, essentially, always a re-evaluation: the transposition of some particular word from one evaluative context to another' (Volosinov 1973:105). My concluding point is this: it is patent that the work of discursive transformation operates even as we examine it. The same principle can be seen as arch conservative in one context and as liberatingly dialectical in the next. While Foucault would claim the 'economy' of discourses - their intrinsic technology, the necessities of their operation, the tactics they employ, the effects of power which underlie them and which they transmit -and not a system of representations- is what determines the essential features of what they have to say (Foucault 1980:68-69), their relation to each other and to the apparent unities they produce, although not always strictly linguistic, must transform neither more, nor less, dialectically on the many local levels of their 'utterance' than does language.
Reference Balbus, I. D. (1988). 'Disciplining women: Michel Foucault and the power of feminist discourse', inJ. Arac (ed.) Humanistic knowledge, postmodern challenges. London: Rutgers University Press, pp.139-160. Baudrillard J. (1987). Forget Foucault. New York: Semiotext(e). Bove, P. (1988). 'The rationality of disciplines: The abstract understanding of Stephen Toulmin', in J. Arac (ed.) After Foucault: Humanistic knowledge, postmodern challenges. London: Rutgers University Press. Brown, B. and Cousins, M. (1986). 'The linguistic fault: The case of Foucault's archaeology', inM. Gane (ed. ), Towards a Critique ofFoucault. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. de Certeau, M. (1985). The practice of everyday life, trans. S. Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press. Dews, P. (1987). Logics ofdisintegration: Poststructuralist thought and the claims ofcritical theory. London: Verso. Foucault, M. (1980). Power/Knowledge. New York: Pantheon Books. __ _, (1980). The history of sexuality: An introduction, trans. R. Hurley. New York: Random House, Vintage. Habermas,J.(1983).'Modernity-anincompleteproject',inH.Foster(ed.),Postmodern culture, London: Pluto Press. Holenstein, E. (1976). Roman Jakobson's approach to language phenomena. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
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Hoy, D. C. (1988). 'Foucault: Modernorpostmodern?',inJ. Arac (ed.),After Foucault, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, pp.12-41. Hunter, I. (1992). 'Aesthetics and cultural studies', in L. Grossberg, C. Nelson, and P. Treichler, (eds ), Cultural Studies, New York and London: Routledge, pp .347-72. Jessop, B. (1985). Nicos Poulantzas: State, class and strategy, London: Macmillan. Mukarovsky, Jan (1976). On poetic language. J. Burbank and P. Steiner (eds.) Lisse: Peter de Lidder Press. Mukarovsky,Jan(1977). The word and verbalart.J. BurbankandP. Steiner (eds.),New Haven: Yale University Press. Steiner, P. and Steiner, W. (1976). 'The relational axes of potetic language' (postscript), in J. Mukarovsky, On poetic language. Lisse: Peter de Lidder Press. Volosinov V.N. (1973). Marxism and the philosophy of language, trans. L. Matejka and I. Titunik,New York: Seminar Press. Wolin, S.S. (ed.) (1988). 'On the theory and practice of power', in After Foucault: Humanistic knowledge, postmodern challenges, in J. Arac (ed.). New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, pp.179-201.
Foucault's Sublime: E-Mail to Postumius Terentianus 1
It is always difficult to trace beginnings - as such a tracing requires a figure
already there which mediates between beginning and end. Reflecting on the absence of both- by chance I found a translation of Longinus' letter -now known as On Elevation of Style or The Sublime. What attracted my attention was that it was a peculiarly Australian event: translated by T.G Tucker, Emeritus Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Melbourne, printed in Australia and published by Melbourne University Press in 1935. It was a message from the colonies to an Empire in decline and a message introduced by a profound index of its placement: 'In a gold-mining country one may perhaps be excused for putting it that the "Longinus claim" keeps on crushing nearly twenty hundredweight to the ton'. 2 It was the irony that claimed me and led to my astonishment- a communication from the mining colonies to the Empire claiming the high ground on the Elevation of Style, with a mining analogy. Not only this, but like the mine, the text is one of bits and pieces, spaces and odd remnants. Unfortunately the sublime has for the most part not managed to recover from the ravages of the Enlightenment when separated from other possible beginnings, it was set into opposition with itself. An opposition from which it has still not yet been able to completely take flight and that in eighteenth century Romanticism found expression in the misleading dichotomy of the sublime and the beautiful.3 It now seems clear that the Enlightenment had mistaken a misanthropic solitary asceticism for a dialectic of the sublime. In order to give weight to the beautiful, its antithesis the sublime, was distorted from an active force existing in itself- to being the ugly, shadowy counterpart of the beautiful. But if the history of the Enlightenment has been marked by this curious opposition we must ask whether it is possible to re-present the sublime as an active force? And if this is so, what metaphor most appropriately draws us towards it? To return to Longinus: For the effect of superlative passages is not merely to persuade the hearer, but to carry him off his feet. The cogent or the pleasing must always give way to the startling effect of the wonderful. Whereas it generally lies with ourselves to be persuaded or not, the fine passages in question carry with them such an irresistible force and mastery as to overpower any hearer. Moreover, skilful argument and a deft arrangement and handling of our materials, are not made apparent by one or two sentences, but must reveal themselves gradually from the whole texture of a speech, whereas a splendid utterance produced at the proper moment, comes like a thunderbolt, pulverises all mere facts, and displays the full power of the speaker in a single flash. 4
And so here we have delineated the constitutive features of the sublime -elevation, revelation, a proper moment, a thunderbolt- a single flash. All
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this carries one away - to new heights. Demosthenes is the archetypal transmitter of the sublime who is compared by Longinus to:' ... a lightning stroke or thunderbolt for the vehemence, rapidity, energy, and terrific effect with which he both fires and shatters? and again: ..... I say, because he absorbed all these potent gifts - which are apparently god-sent, for one dare not call them human - he surpasses any and every speaker by the virtues which he possesses, while dispensing with those which he does not possess, and so overcomes by his thunder and lightning all the orators of all time. It would be easier to confront a rushing thunderbolt with open eye than to face his rapid flashes of passion.6
This sublime is almost irresistible, but is a wholly active productive experience- enlightening- a blinding flash. And yet what is it about this sublime of Longinus that would allow us to distance it from that of the Enlightenment? As Longinus tells us: With the practical argument the orator has combined a vivid presentation, and has, by the joint effect, gone further than mere logical persuasion could go. In such cases we always instinctively obey the stronger call, and for that reason we are forcibly diverted from that which merely demonstrates to that which carries us off our feet with its vividness, whereby the literal argument is buried in a blaze of light. That experience is not surprising; for, when two forces are brought into line with each other, the more potent always absorbs the virtue of the other?
This is a sublime that by virtue of its brilliance absorbs the rational, the dialectical- in the single line of its own release of energy. One can only experience an ironic amusement in the knowledge that the Enlightenment -one of the most profoundly dark moments in our history invented itself on a strange opposition, a strange dialectic and in a moment of arrogant pride declared it had overcome the darkness of the Dark Ages. Since that time it has survived by maintaining the weakness of one side of this opposition- in a repulsive and cunning parasitism - that zombies the enemy it feeds on. Presumablythatis whyitrefuses to giveitthe coup de grace and is why at this exact moment the Enlightenment discovered the conjunction of history, anthropology and aesthetics.s The brilliance of the sublime is that it creates multiple transparencies, at worst translucencies. Darkness is inimical to the sublime. But allow me to re-examine the letter of Longinus which draws our attention to the constitutive features of the sublime. Longinus tells us that there are five 'fountainheads' of the sublime all resting on the command of language 'without which we can do nothing': 1. a capacious grasp of thoughts and ideas; [natural] 2. strong and vehement passion. [natural] 3. the construction of figures (which are of two kinds, one consisting in the turn of thought, the other in the turn of expression). 9 4. admirable diction (of which, again, the parts are the choice of words and the coining of imaginative turns); 5. serving as a frame compacting all the rest, a masterly structural arrangement.
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According to Longinus, the first two, a capacious grasp of thoughts and ideas and strong and vehement passion, are natural capacities, the last three are techniques that can be learned. Allow me to concentrate on the first two in the context of examining where we find the combination of a capacious grasp of thoughts and ideas and vehement passion. Following Longinus, I would argue that we find it where a conception covers a great distance from heaven to earth, a conception that amplifies the extraordinary, that astonishes, that startles: a conception as magnificent and unpredictable as thunderbolts and lightning themselves. This brings together elevation, height and motion under the sign of the sublime. Longinus goes on at some length to detail the parameters of these conceptions for his contemporaries but for us this is an impossible returnfor us, what remains is just the lightning flash, the thunderbolt and the possibility of abduring dialectics. 1o This allows us to provisionally redraw a figure of the Enlightenment and its carefully constructed double problematics- sublime/beauty, rational/irrational and so on without being for or against it. 11 In this way we can address the question of what it is today that restores to us a wholly active non-dialectical moment of the sublime a moment which Michel Foucault has discussed variously as attraction (Blanchot), desire (Sade), force (Nietzsche), transgression (Bataille), materiality of thought (Artaud), or collectively thought from the outside. 12 This becomes a counter-restoration, an analytic that elevates precisely at that moment when all that is recognisably human disappears, not into darkness, but because of the extreme brilliance and energy with which it is bathed, a brilliance so intense that it clears the ground around it - like lightning.13 To a certain extent the intensity of the sublime always involves the concept of relative distance: close I far, bright I dull, descent I ascent not in terms of oppositions but as magnifications, amplifications, modulations and so on because proximity is constitutive of the possibility of any specific determination. 14 Butproximityfromortowhat?Proximityfromtheproduction of oneself as a subject. But what is it to be a subject- to be subjected? 1S Itissurelytosubjectoneselftotheknowledgeofone'sownmaterialfinitude. And from where could this astonishing moment have come? From the clearing around the finitude of one's being- death. Has anyone ever existed who was not aware of the finite materiality of their own existence? Is this not the general problematic of existence? But nowadays, far too often, this amounts to reifying and refusing to transform an age old question - why must we die? Now there is a new question to be answered - a profoundly nominal question - what is the effect of problematic of finitude on our everyday existence? And further to this and much more terrifying, does a language yet exist that will allow us to engage with this problematic? This is Foucault's thought from the outside which transfigures the work of Artaud, Blanchot, Nietzsche, Sade and Bataille and draws out the impossible limit of our finitude. Will the event of death take place with greater speed than it can be formulated within language? Will we dissolve into the outside faster than we can articulate the experience of its arrival or disappearance? This 'unrepresentable' of language, this limit, then returns as a critique of the possibility of any complete, essential universal system of representation. 16
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This is what draws transgression beyond its own limits, to a language not yet heard but which already exists - a drawing that lies in wait for its figuration. Neither beautiful or ugly just sublime. But if this moment of capture is not essential, on what does it rest? Perhaps it rests on the provisional, on uncertain repetitions, coincidental flights? The same coincidence that put the madness into [Fou]cault's name. But is this not far too cerebral and do I not privilege my imagining over my own material existence - another idealism - another Platonism? Worse still am I not constructing another active passive relation, waiting to be struck by lightning, by the puissance of the gods? Another dialectic? Perhaps I can only give the proper respect to these questions by not attempting to answer them just now and instead reconfigure the already said. The moment of the experience of the sublime- of the disappearance of the unified self is bound by the materiality of the finitude of physical existence. A moment that is sublime precisely because it is configured within the experience of finitude. Lightning requires of the clearing that it surrounds the space of the flash. It is the clearing that elevates itself at the moment the lightning earths. It is our limited materiality that draws into being the 'immaterial'. It is our finite existence that allows us to elevate ourselves to the infiniteP But if lightning and distance are constitutive of the sublime we must not forget passion, the second of Longinus' natural elements. It is the possibility ofpassionthatallowsusanactivelivingengagementwiththesublime-with its eroticism, its brilliance, its danger bordered by the ever present revelations that accompany the thrilling terror of looking directly at a brilliant light, of looking directly into the sun. 18 A passion that disperses and multiplies is a passion that draws the sublime. A draught of the future that is an implicit critique of Plato's poisonous potion and always threatens its own violent Annunciation. Every possible dispersal conjures up this sublime possibility. In so far as we are aggregates of materials and forces- then to multiply the possibilities of the exchange is to encounter the limit - the outside. Cell to cell- synaptic flash with synaptic flash, fold with fold. This limit is also the encounter of the limit - in the clearing of the sublime. As Foucault has suggested: Transgression carries the limit right to the limit of its being; transgression forces the limit to the fact of its imminent disappearance, to find itself in what it excludes (perhaps, to be more exact, to recognise itself for the first time), to experience its positive truth in its downward fall. And yet, toward what is transgression unleashed in its movement of pure violence, if not that which imprisons it, toward the limit and those elements it contains? What bears the brunt of its aggression and to what void does it owe the unrestrained fullness of its being, if not that which it crosses in its violent act and which, as its destiny, it crosses out the line it effaces?19
A limit that is also the limit of the language of our own materiality: this is the foundational relation we have with ourselves - this is the inside of the curve or the fold. 20 This is both the separation and the unity of the inside and the outside. This relation is inscribed within Foucault's third aspect of the
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struggle of the subject; 'that which ties the individual to himself and submits him to others ... '. 21 This moment has revealed itself in our epoch and presents a diagram of an ethics of the self which flashes into light- particle and wave - sketching a transformed aesthetics. It is an aesthetics that is neither Greek -nor Romantic European- nor the uniform trajectory of one to the other but that turns on the thetic which is characterised as: laying down or setting forth; involving [only] positive statement. This necessarily leads to Foucault's limit attitude which involves 'a critique of what we are saying, thinking, and doing, through a historical ontology of ourselves'. 22 This limit attitude places thought at the frontier of its own limit - abandoning the search for the discovery of continuously repeated universal structures and instead focusing on how it is that we have come to recognise ourselves as the subjects which we recognise ourselves as. In attending to this task we must necessarily transgress the limits of our being in history. This in turns announces itself as another historical event that effects and requires another modulation of ourselves. This is as Foucault suggests: 'the undefined work of freedom'. 2 3 But why does this require an encounter with a diagram of the sublime? Perhaps it is because at this time in our possible existences we encounter the thought that at some time in the foreseeable future the thought of the sublime may no longer exist. The being of the sublime would be forever concealed. There was a time when it was conceivable that the gods would no longerinhabitourworld. There was a timewhenitwasconceivablethatGod had died. Now we live in an age of conceiving of the death of the entire species, even of all life forms on the planet. This presents the possibility to us that the sublime may no longer be thought- the outside might trace the inside - every fold might be pulled into a straight line, every straight line might just be discontinuous dots, death may no longer be the clearing but be all there is. The passionate embrace of the sublime may dissolve into an empty lifeless landscape: everything reduced to the inanimate. Lifeless objects- orbiting through the space of the real, encountering multiple lifeless substrata, a point of absolute irreducibility, of absolute presence. And yet what is so astonishing in this vision is not its cataclysmic millenarian pessimism- but its appalling anthropomorphism, its irresponsibly naive attempt to imply that the existence of anything meaningful is dependent on human reflection of the sublime? Does the sublime demand of itself that it be recognised? Or is it rather that today humanity demands of itself that it recognises its unique dependence on the problematic of the sublime. In other words, today, encounters with the sublime are profound encounters with ourselves. 24 This surely is the return of Foucault, whose work constantly forces us to encounter ourselves - in the production of knowledge about ourselves. An inescapable return, an inescapable encounter which does not have to be endured but can be worked upon as we work upon ourselves. An ethical, thetic dimension, a passionate dangerous dimension that embraces the sublime in the production of thunderbolts and lightning- and for that instant temporarily defers the slippage of outside and inside.
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This is the conjunction of a line of flight of Longinus and Foucault. Their work is itself sublime- as it storms, rails, thunders and now and again strikes the ground with a brilliant and enlightening flash. But today there are no gods to encounter, today the encounter is with ourselves in our finitude and in the knowledge that we are constructed as what we are as an effect of power /knowledge relations circulating within analysable practices and regimes. 25 It is here that we meet Foucault's insistence that we question this moment in our epoch with rigour and an irritating persistence that may create an opening for ourselves. As Foucault suggests referring to Raymond Roussel: It is true that the first text one writes is neither written for others, nor for who
one is: one writes to become someone other than who one is. Finally there is an attempt at modifying one's way of being through the act of writing. It is this transformation of his way of being that he observed, he believed in, he sought after, and for which he suffered horribly.26
Just as Foucault never met Roussel- I never met Foucault- I never shook his hand- nor kissed his cheek. But this is of no importance in 'using him' because in his work we do not encounter him- he is gone- but in the already said of Foucault we can encounter ourselves. We can encounter new surfaces, new folds, new lines, new meanings and in these encounters we have the opportunity of reaching out to the sublime as we also engage in a flight from ourselves- and from everything that we have become. Then our epitaph and Foucault's momentarily fuse in the line of reciprocal flightmost beautifully drawn out by Nietzsche: Flight from oneself - Those men given to intellectual spasms..... who are impatient and gloomily inclined towards themselves and in all they do resemble rampaging horses, and who derive from their own works, indeed, only a short lived fire and joy which almost bursts their veins and then a desolation and sourness made more wintry by the contrasts it presents- how should such men endure to remain within themselves! They long to dissolve into something 'outside'.. P
Now that's a sublime Foucauldian thought.
1
For a collection of important essays on the sublime see Jean Fran<;ois Courtine et al. Of the sublime: presence in question, New York: State University of New York Press, 1993.
2
Longinus, Longinus On Elevation of Style, trans. T.G. Tucker, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1935, p.S.
3
See I. Kant, Observations on thefeelingon the beautiful and the sublime, trans. John T. Goldthwait, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1991. Kant allows for there to be three kinds of sublime, the third the splendid sublime incorporates a certain beauty, however, the fundamental opposition is still the beautiful and the sublime, as is suggested by the title of the work. 'Finer feeling, which we now wish to consider, is chiefly of two kinds, the feeling of the sublime and that of the beautiful. The stirring of each is pleasant in different ways ... In order that the former impression could occur to us in due strength, we must have a feeling of the sublime, and, in order to enjoy the latter well, a feeling ofthe beautiful. Tall oaks and
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lonely shadows in a sacred grove are sublime; flower beds, low hedges and trees trimmed in figures are beautiful. Night is sublime, day is beautiful. Temperaments that possess a feeling for the sublime are drawn gradually, by the quiet stillness of a summer evening as the shimmering light of the stars breaks through the brown shadows of night and the lonely moon rises into view, into high feelings of friendship, of disdain for the world, of eternity. The shining day stimulates busy fervor and a feeling of gaiety. The sublime moves, the beautiful charms. The mien of a man who is undergoing the full feeling of the sublime is earnest, sometimes rigid and astonished. On the other hand the lively sensation of the beautiful proclaims itself through shining cheerfulness in the eyes through smiling features, and often through audible mirth. The sublime is in turn of different kinds. Its feeling is sometimes accompanied with a certain dread, or melancholy; in some cases merely with quiet wonder; and in still others with a beauty completely pervading a sublime plan. The first I shall call the terrifying sublime, the second the noble, and the third the splendid. Deep loneliness is sublime, but in a way that stirs terror' (p.46). See also E. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, J.T. Boulton (ed. ), London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958. See the Preface to the First Edition p.1, 'He [Burke] observed that the ideas ofthe sublime and beautiful were frequently confounded; and that both were indiscriminately applied to things greatly differing, and sometimes of natures directly opposite. Even Longinus, in his incomparable discourse upon a part of this subject, has comprehended things extremely repugnant to each other, under one common name of the Sublime'. 4
Longinus 1935, p.12.
5
Ibid, p.28.
6
Ibid, p.52.
7
Ibid, p.34.
8
Foucault makes the point that a certain blackmail exists in discussions of the Enlightenment in so far as the possibility of a rational critique of rationality is denied. You are either a supporter of the rational or irrational.
9
Figures of 'thought' are: insistence, extenuation, hyperbole, irony, questionform, correction of oneself, aposiopesis. Those of expression are: repetition, antithesis, asyndeta, play on words etc. But a real distinction between the two classes is scarcely possible.
10 It is of note that later discussions of the sublime [including this one] ignore the conceptualising of 'sound' in the sublime and only seem to focus on the visual. See Librett 1993, Michel Deguy, The Discourse of Exaltation, pp.10-11. See also G. Deleuze, and F. Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987, p.310. 11 M. Foucault, 'What is Enlightenment?', in P. Rabinow (ed.) The Foucault Reader, New York: Pantheon Books, 1984, p.45. 12 M. Foucault, and M. Blanchot, Foucault/Blanchot, New York: Zone Books, 1987, p.27. I am not saying that they are all exactly the same concept. 13 This is the moment of Heidegger's entry. SeeM. Heidegger, 'The Origin of the Work of Art', in Basic Writings, Krell, David Farrell (ed.), London: Routledge, 1993, p.178. 14 Hence the importance of Zarathrustra's descent from the mountain. Above everything else Zarathrustra is a geography teacher!
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15 M. Foucault,'Afterword: The Subject and Power' in Hubert L. Dreyfus, and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982, p.208. 16 This is the basis of a nominalist critique of both metaphysics and realism. 17 These relations are not dialectical but are amplifications and magnifications. 18 The dangerous nature of the sublime is typified by the work ofSade. See Marquis de Sade, Justine: Philosophy in the Bedroom and Other Writings, New York: Grove Press Inc., 1965 pp.741-2, 'Terrified, Madame de Lorsange begs her sister to make all haste and close the shutters; anxious to calm her, Therese dashes to the windows which are already being broken; she would do battle with the wind, she gives a minute's flight, is driven back and at that instant a blazing thunder bolt reaches her where she stands in the middle of the room .... transfixes her. Madame de Lorsange emits a terrible cry and falls in a faint; Monsieur de Corville calls for help, attentions are given each woman, Madame de Lorsange is revived, but the unhappy Therese has been struck in such wise hope itself can no longer subsist for her; the lightning entered her right breast, found the heart, and after having consumed her chest and face, burst out through her belly. The miserable thing was hideous to look upon; Monsieur de Corville orders that she be borne away ... ...The prosperity of Crime is but an ordeal to which Providence would expose Virtue, it is like unto the lightning, whose traitorous brilliancies but for an instant embellish the atmosphere, in order to hurl into death's very deeps the luckless one they have dazzled'. 19 M. Foucault,'Preface to Transgression', in Bouchard (ed.) Language, CounterMemory, Practice, New York: Cornell University Press, 1980, p.34. 20 Or Moebius strip. 21 Foucault 1982, p.212 22 Foucault 1984, p.45. 23 Ibid, p.46. 24 This is a profound index of the modem. 25 This is the beginning of a neo-nominalist critical practice. 26 M. Foucault, 'Postscript: An Interview with Michel Foucault', in Death and the Labyrinth, The World ofRaymond Roussel, trans. Charles Ruas,New York: Doubleday and Co., 1986, p.182. 27 F. Nietzsche, Daybreak- Thoughts on the prejudices ofmorality, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, Cambridge University Press, 1983, p.221.
Part Five Psychoanalysis
Foucault, Hegel, Psychoanalysis and Anthropologies of Truth
In this paper I want to recontextualise Foucault's thought according to a
number of influences which constitute what I call a metaphysics of alterity in his thinking, that is, a metaphysics based on self-other relations which is evidentinhiswork. ThisrecontextualisationwillinvolveexploringFoucault's work in relation to French Hegelianism and to the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. The place I want to begin in this recontextualisation is with the work of Alexandre Kojeve, a philosopher made popular in more recent times by the end of history polemic, (here I am thinking of Francis Fukuyama, New Times theorists and Jean Baudrillard). Like Julian Pefanis in his 1991 book Heterology and the Postmodern, I want to completely affirm the 'now conventional argument that Alexandre Kojeve' s reading of Hegel in the 1930s at the Sorbonne constituted a decisive moment for the development of a theoretical counter-tradition in France'.l Kojeve's reading of Hegel concentrates on the Phenomenology ofSpirit, and in particular on a moment within the Phenomenology in relation to which history is said to be overcome by an anthropological structure of alterity for which History as a teleological or evolutionary process, makes no sense. 2 This structure arises out of an equilibrium or decentering that results from the metaphorical encounter of two desiring subjects, what in Hegel is called Desire in general. Whereas with subject/ object relations, the desire for an object is, according to Kojeve, to consume it, or to break open its secret in a relation of totalisation, the relation between two subjects is characterised as an endlessly asymptotic or productive kind of Desire which transcends the capacity of any one subject to totalise or represent its relation with an other. Anthropogenic Desire is not the Desire of an object, but the Desire of a Desire. It is the reflection of a reflection- a double mirror relationship, which is endlessly renewable and productive, never coming to rest in self-consciousness. It is productive, says Kojeve, because of the inability of an individual desire to attain an exhaustive relation of desire with the other, to be certain of possession, to be transparent receiver of intention, to totalise the desire of the other in a one to one correspondence. Kojeve' s privileging of alterity, in its specular form, is not a movement toward the death of the subject, but a positive account of a structure of subjectivity in which historicity dissipates or implodes within self-other relations. This account of historicity is the opposite of historicism, which for Kojeve, subordinates human desire within the metaphorical model of subject-object relations. Kojeve insists that history and historicity are an outcome of unstable because always unachievable relations between a subject and an other, rather than a stable world of object relations (mappable in spherical and linear ways). For Kojeve, the question ofidentity and concomitant questions of origin, telos, causality, meaning and the referent are completely subordi-
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nated to this metaphysics of alterity. This is the subject world and timeworld of a double-mirror in which alterity is inextricably linked to a dialectic of metonymy, the simultaneous folding and multiplication of the subject in a specularity without beginning or end, where the representation of historical circumstance is without point. Representation is without point, not because the subject is mystified or in possession of false consciousness, but because in the very process of representation, history is continually produced and modified to a degree that the subject is unable to maintain a singularity or distance from it. And this is the status of the subject, whether or not we are talking about action or consciousness. This complete breakdown of historicity is not, for Kojeve, a fall from historicism, it is rather merely the revelation that anthropologically, history is merely a contingent mode of experience that is internal to alterity. Actual historical struggles and encounters are therefore merely contingent expressions of the eternal return of Desire in general, merely a phenomenal expression of the equilibrating fact that no subject can ever pose the axis in which its existence can be presented to it. As a metaphysician of history, Kojeve was an important precursor to contemporary philosophies of history such as Foucault's because of the way he stressed the extreme fragility of circumstances, the continuous and localisable seesaw of struggles which are only ever grounded in historically arbitrary structures of recognition, which in another moment, another scene, might switch to new ways or recognising and new ways of constituting truth in accordance with this recognition. At the same time, the localisable nature of power relations in Kojeve, are nevertheless mediated by way of two anthropological dialectics which he called 'dialectics of the real'. 3 Firstly there is a dialectic of the struggle for definition, what in Kojeve is a dialectic of a death-driven symbolic fight for recognition;whilstsecondlythereisadialecticofWorkorBildung,whichfor Kojeve is not production, but the transformation of the social contexts which structure recognition (the information society), what for Kojeve is embodied in modern technique. What is common to both these dialectics is the anthropological importance of recognition and alterity, which could be compared in Foucault with forms of power he once described as structuring the field of the eventual action of others, be it techno-architecturally (panoptic power), or by representation (forms of bio-power or pastoral power). 4 How these dialectics relate to the end of history that Kojeve is speaking about is that such practices achieve, not a heightening of evolution or spirit, but an auto-negation of the very historical contexts which give them meaning. For Kojeve they result in the construction of a last world in which the decentering of recognition relations is universalised (here one might think of Lyotard's petit recit). This is a world in which instrumental control is rendered meaningless in its traditional sense, as neither means nor ends are given, and representation as a function of the division between subject and object is no longer tenable. The end of history is, for Kojeve, at best revealed to be an irreversibly cybernetic, self-referential or circular reality, in which memory is overcome by the prevailing structures of recognition. Kojeve' s last world is one in which eternal verities become untenable, the question of truth problematic in the sense that history as the realisation or
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generalisation of Desire in general has made them redundant. Kojeve's dialectics of the real produce a state of paralysing imprisonment in a kind of permanent present, in which case the historical itself becomes meaningless. The present, therefore, is never simply self-present but an irreducibly political construct, which for Kojeve is mediated by the risk of Life and Work; that is, Desire in general. Kojeve's is a very pragmatic definition of politics and truth where, for him, the true is the outcome and the moral is on the side of the victor. It is my view that one could write an excellent philosophical investigation of the similarities between Kojeve' s idiosyncratic brand of Hegelianism and Foucault's analytic of power. Through the themes of alterity, of the dialecticallyproductivenatureofpower,andofthefunctionofresistance,Foucault, like Kojeve, adopts the view that the very powerfulness of power, relies on the fact that it can never be possessed, totalised, or captured. For example, in a formulation from one of his late interviews, he argues that to understand how power works is to understand 'the way the reflexivity of self upon self is established' at a given moment. (ie. power always entails a recognition structure). 5 In his essay 'The Subject and Power' Foucault says Every power relationship implies, at least in potentia, a strategy of struggle, in which the two forces are not super-imposed, do not lose their specific nature, or do not finally become confused. Each constitutes for the other a kind of permanent limit, a point of possible reversal... For a relationship of confrontation, from the moment it is not a struggle to the death, the fixing of a power relationship becomes a target- at one and the same time its fulfilment and its suspension.6
I could multiply these citations from Foucault here in many directions but I want to move on to a more biographical account of Foucault's debt to French interpretations of Hegelianism, which is to consider his relationship to the philosopher who is often described as being at the centre of a second Hegelian Renaissance in France- Jean Hyppolite. According to commentators such as James Bernauer and Vincent Descombes, Hyppolite's greatest contribution to intellectual trends in France between the wars, was his Hegelianisation of Nietzsche. In this, he, like Kojeve, magnified the anthropologies of power that arose out of the master slave dialectic. In Hyppolite's Studies on Hegel and Marx, many formulations are an exact reinstatement ofKojeve's central pre-occupation with desire-ingeneral, and alterity: self-consciousness is for Hyppolite 'generalised desire? Or again: 'the desire that constitutes the self can only exist if it is for itself an object of another desire. Thus the desire of life becomes the desire of another desire, or rather, in view of the necessary reciprocity of the phenomenon, human desire is always desire of the desire of another'. 8 In what has been seen by many as a rather puzzling adulation, Foucault, in his inaugural lecture at the College de France, credits Hyppolite, as the most powerful influence on his work, 9 exclaiming: 'I have borrowed both the meaning and the possibility of what I am doing from him' .10 What is more, it is here that Foucault hails as Hyppolite's most important achievement precisely the introduction of Hegel into the heart of intellectual circles.
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Foucault, who once described Hegel as the 'philosopher of the greatest differences' but who 'nevertheless recuperates all play to a system', 11 found occasion at his address to praise Hyppolite's conviction that Hegelian thought needed to be encountered and understood, in order to begin an interrogation in which an opposition to the Same could have any meaning. To truly escape Hegel involves an exact appreciation of the price we have to pay to detach ourselves from him. It assumes that we are aware of the extent to which Heget insidiously perhaps, is close to us; it implies a knowledge, in that it permits us to think against Heget of that which remains Hegelian. We have to determine the extent to which our anti-Hegelianism is possibly one of his tricks directed against us, at the end of which he stands, motionless, waiting for us. 12 Could this motionless Heget be a figure who, in one of Foucault's last interviews is referred to as a silent influence: one of'a small number of authors with whom one thinks, with whom one works, but about whom one does not write'? 13 Since the early fifties when Foucault had been making himself acquainted with the texts of Marx, Hegel, Heidegger and Nietzsche, he wrote very little on the configurations of their influence on his thought, and even less on these figures as philosophers in their own right. 14 But certainly Hegelian thought, as introduced to Foucault by Hyppolite's Hegelianisation of Nietzsche, had exercised a foundational influence on Foucault's intellectual trajectories throughout the 1950s and 1960s.15 The Kojevian and Hyppolitean rereadings of Hegel's Phenomenology were ones which, as Vincent Descombes has remarked, 'might well attract a Nietzschean'. But it was never the case for Kojeve and especially Hyppolite that Hegel was simply a figure that might add support to Nietzschean theses on a post-historical superman, rather, for them, Hegel had already anticipated the critique of humanism in the form in which it is usually attributed to Nietzsche.16 On the other hand what could be interpreted, in Kojeve at least, as a Nietzschean reading of Heget is Kojeve' s terrorist conception of history and its related pragmatic definition of truth. Kojeve's account of the Phenonemology does contain much that is excessive, violent and sanguinary. As Vincent Descombes puts it: 'It contains an element of risk and adventure, it endangers the thinker's very person, his identity and reaches far beyond the generally accepted measure of good and evil'. 17 Here, Truth and Morality are not grounded in a philosophical will to know (the understanding of Being) but in an action-oriented desire for knowledge where: 'The true is the outcome' and sinful action is forgiven by its success, just, as in Foucault 'Truth is that which functions as the truth' or 'for something to be true it must already be in the true'.lS The philosophies of Being, Time and Ontology are supplanted in Foucault by the genealogy of the event and the situation. The philosophical is subordinated to the historical, but not in a way in which the historical itself becomes an absolute, raised to a transcendental principle. It was around this reversal that Foucault had much admiration for Hyppolite's encounter with Hegel. In the fragile and multiple events of history and politics, philosophy itself has little place to aspire to an absolute consciousness. To engage with Hegel, therefore, in the Hyppolitian sense is to demonstrate the very folly and risk that philosophy encounters in imagining for itself a Voice that
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speaks for the Infinite or the Eternal, when in fact the fragile events of culture, and the way thought is divided and contained by them constantly remind philosophy of its own Event- that of a discursive theatre. 19 In Hyppolite's teaching, philosophy had become, according to Foucault, 'that which could be rejected by the extreme irregularity of experience'. 20 Philosophy as the thought of an inaccessible totality disappears. It is revealed, by this teaching, to be nothing more than the endless interrogation of the events of popular memory, life and death and those instances of culture that are so often assigned to the non-philosophical. It was Hyppolite's refusal to make of Hegel a philosopher of the absolute, that was so attractive to Foucault. In this, Hyppolite shared with Kojeve an atheistic anthropology, which, whilst often leading to Marx, as frequently led to Heidegger and Nietzsche. But more striking continuities between Kojeve and Hyppolite can be found in a repetition of interpretive themes in the Phenomenology which lend themselves more fully to anti-humanist and anti-historicist appropriations: the preoccupation with negating negativity and an ethos of permanent critique,21 the development of trans-individual notions of desire coming out of the master-slave dialectic, and finally, the contention that alienation is not, as humanism would see it, an aberrant condition, but a productive and universal'eternal return' of alterity in the present. 22 On this last aspect, I would argue that Foucault had taken from Hyppolite and ultimatelyfromKojeve, the idea thatthehumansubject, 'by objectifying itself in culture ... becomes other than itself, and discovers in this objectification an insurmountable degeneration which it must nevertheless try to overcome. This is a tension inseparable from existence'. 23 It is in relation to this tension, which can also be viewed positively as the affirmation of an anthropology without a subject, that I will also argue that, throughout his intellectual work, Foucault became interested in an empirical anthropology for which he transposed the philosophical anthropologies of Hyppolite. This trend in Foucault's thought, which led him to declare in 1982 that it was not power, but the subject, that was the central concern of his work, drew himintoanambivalentrelationwithacontemporarythinkerwhoseinterest was also in an empirical anthropology of the subject and who also embraced Hegelian readings of desire- Jacques Lacan. Lacan was perhaps the most famous disciple of Kojeve's lectures in the 1930s which were also attended by thinkers of alterity including Georges Bataille, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Paul Sartre, Alexandre Koyre Pierre Klossowski, and Raymond Queneau. It is now commonplace for commentaries on Lacan to document the way Kojeve's reading of specular Desire had influenced Lacan's models of subjectivity. It is beyond the scope of this paper to investigate these influences, although, in passing we can mention the links that have been sketched between Lacan's notion of 'transitivism' (as a function of what he calls the mirror phase) and Kojeve's focus on the 'pure concept of recognition'. One also notes their common preoccupation with Desire as a function of alterity, and even Kojeve' s notion of 'the Real as that which resists' and Lacan's paradoxical notion of the real.
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What I want to single out here, however, is how Lacan's concern for an empirical anthropology, shares with Foucault, a concern for the priority of alterity over identity, which is also a concern for understanding the ways in which the human subject necessarily mis-recognises its historical agency as natural. It is not to argue that Foucault and Lacan are interested in the death of the subject, as if illusion were related to substance, rather their projects consist of positively evoking the complexity of the subject in forms of alterity and contradiction which problematise the subject. In this, Foucault conjoins his own project with that of Lacan's over the problematic of the subject in an interview with an Italian newspaper, conducted shortly after Lacan's death in 1980 where he remarks: We discovered that philosophy and the human sciences lived on a very traditional conception of the human subject... we discovered that it was necessary to attempt to free everything that was hidden behind the apparently simple use of the pronoun 'I', the subject is a fragile complex thing about which it is so difficult to speak, and without which we cannot speak at all.24
Foucault celebrates Lacan's very style, which he said resisted the attempts to reduce the complexity of the subject: [Lacan] wanted that the reading of his texts were not simply a 'prise de conscience' of his ideas. He wanted that the reader would discover himself as a subject of desire through such reading. [He] wanted that the obscurity of his writings would reveal the very complexity of the subject.
For both Foucault and Lacan the repression of specular forms of desire as a basis for epistemology is enshrined in the human sciences which have invariably sought to banish the emergence of alterity in the formation of subjectivity, by essentialising forms of subjected individuality. In the case of Lacan, this tradition is highlighted by the confessional metaphysics of egopsychology,25 and in Foucault's case by European humanism. Humanism invented a whole series of subjected sovereignties: the soul (ruling the body, but subjected to God), consciousness (sovereign in a context of judgment, but subjected to the necessities of truth), the individual (a titular control of personal rights subjected to the laws of nature and society), basic freedom (sovereign within, but accepting the demands of an outside world and aligned with destiny). In short, humanism is everything in Western civilisation that restricts the desire for power, it prohibits the desire for power and excludes the possibility of power being seized. 26 The various modes of subjection which Foucault sketches coincide with the formation of the subject as a psycho-philosophical construct in the early seventeenth century, a new experience based on the moi- Descartes' 'soul', Pascal's 'hateful self' or Kant's 'transcendental ego', which emerged at the beginning of the Enlightenment.27 Lacan himself argues that the moi as consciousness of individual experience, has not always been synonymous with 'the subject', whose 'inaugural moment' he dates also from the beginning of the seventeenth century.2s Psychologisms and sociologisms of the subject are criticised by both Lacan and Foucault, because of the way they effectively take situational power relationships and naturalise them as universal ones - in Lacan's criticism, subordinating psychoanalytic categories to philosophical ones.
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This particular practice is a defining trait of metaphysical anthropologies, whose powers of definition represents, for Foucault, 'man' as 'speaking for others', whilst for Lacan it is blatant dishonesty as opposed to the asymptotic 'truth' of the ex-centricity of Being in the unconscious. 29 Whilst Foucault and Lacan reject and rehistoricise metaphysical anthropologies of the subject they are interested in the category of the subject in terms of the modes in which it is empirically and historically constructed. Insofar as the subject, as anthropos, as spirit, as self-consciousness, has never existed except through the being-centred fantasias of philosophical discourse, their approach is anti-foundational. But insofar as human beings consistently misrecognise their historical agency as 'natural', Foucault and Lacan seek to provide foundational and quasi-anthropological explanations as to why this is so. The implications of these divergent commitments involved in a theory of the subject mean that the structure of the subject itself cannot be adequately studied from either a foundational or anti-foundational standpoint but necessitates an interminable equivocation, an always-suspended tension between the two. The oscillation between the foundational and antifoundational expresses itself in a similar ambivalence toward appealing to general conditions over particular ones. As opposed to foundational being-centred and speculative approaches, Foucault and Lacan, in different ways, privilege the particular. Foucault's enthusiasm for linguistic psychoanalysis in The Order of Things is an exemplary instance of this, namely, that psychoanalysis cannot be deployed as pure speculative knowledge or as a general theory of man.... All analytic knowledge is thus invincibly linked with a praxis, with that strangulation produced by the relation between two individuals, one of whom is listening to the other's language, thus freeing his desire from the object it has lost... This is why nothing is more alien to psychoanalysis than anything resembling a general theory of man or an anthropology.3o
Lacan's claim that 'psychoanalysis is a science of the particular' can be viewed in the light of his remark that the term 'world-view' is antithetical to psychoanalytic discourse and that all 'philosophical ologies (onto, theo, cosmo and psycho alike) contradict the basic tenet of the existence of the unconscious'. 31 In order to approach a sensibility of the particular, therefore, neither Foucault or Lacan are concerned so much with a Copernican unseating of the Subject-in-general from the locus of meaning and action, as with the ways in which subjects are constituted as subjects, in complex relations of reciprocal recognition, where 'subjectivity' is endlessly displaced along relations of power and signification. Their respective work on power and the subject proposes to reveal the localised forms in which 'subjectivity' is constituted as in a sense 'transindividual'. Subjects do not 'speak' language anymore than they' exercise' power. There are no pregiven subjects to speak of without speaking of these modes of constitution. Subjects are nothing outside of these relations such that to 'know' the subject implied by them is to be implicated in them. The problematic of the subject of Wisdom, the subject on the way to a finite knowledge, is for Foucault and Lacan a scandalous fiction.
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For both Lacan and Foucault the possibility of agency or substance is irredeemably bound up with the fact that subjects and objects are only ever effects, real and imagined, of constitutive processes that always precede them in the manner of an always-already. This peculiar kind of historicity is not a free-floating phenomenon, but is grounded in reflexive recognition structures which transcend and contain the subject. There are no pre-given subjects with an experience of the real, rather, subjects become what they are through definite structures of recognition, and because of this, Lacan and Foucault both insist, in the manner of Kojeve and Hyppolite, that selfconsciousness is impossible in its constituent form, because the self is only ever a moment in a process of endless self-objectification in otherness, what in Kojeve is designated as generalised alterity. Foucault's commitment to this metaphysics of alterity which I have been outlining, and which underwrites his progressive interest in an empirical anthropology led to a shifting and ambivalent relation to Lacan across the archaeological, cartographic and neo-ethical phases of his work which often involved the question of whether Lacanian thought was to be included in his critiques of psychoanalysis. During his archaeological phase, Foucault is concerned to pinpoint those internal forms of Western knowledge which analytically undermine anthropological conceptualisations of human culture, thereby 'reversing' the analytic of finitude. It is here that Foucault claims that the emergence of linguistics, ethnology and linguistic psychoanalysis, in particular, began to demonstrate the untenable nature of philosophical anthropologies, and arrive at ontological questions which would lead 'the other positive sciences back to their epistemological bases'. 32 It is from the point in Foucault's own historical survey of this crucial fold in the positive human sciences that, I would argue, following the work of Peter Cotton,33 Foucault increasingly conceptualises the subject as an empirical ontology, rather than simply an organising principle for regimes of truth. In doing so, Foucault begins a relationship with linguistic psychoanalysis, and its Lacanian particularism, that was to structure and preoccupy his work on the subject for the remainder of his writings. Following the positive discussions of linguistic psychoanalysis in The Order of Things and The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault completely displaced his appraisal of psychoanalysis as a counter-science by a new project of historicising psychoanalysis as a vast technology of the psyche. About Freudian psychoanalysis in general, Foucault aims his criticism, throughout his analytic of power, towards its inability to account for its own historical and political status, and its technical operation as a primary agency for the constitution of a secret psychological self. In charting the emergence of this new form of a deep desiring-self in The History ofSexuality Volume 1, as a bio-product of various pastoral incitements to the 'power over life', Foucault nevertheless distinguishes between psychoanalysis as a technology of constituting a secret self, and psychoanalysis as a meta-theoretical critique of naturalistic conceptions of desire. In discussing the objectives of rethinking the repressive hypothesis, Foucault in fact compares his own model of power with that which can be contributed, 'from another quarter and doubtless in a more radical fashion: a critique
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conducted at the level of a theory of desire'. 34 He says that he bases his central arguments in The History of Sexuality Volume 1 on the disqualification of the repressive hypothesis, while 'feigning ignorance' of the existence of this more radical critique. In point of fact, the assertion that sex is not 'repressed' is not altogether new. Psychoanalysts have been saying the same thing for some time. They have challenged the simple little machinery that comes to mind when one speaks of repression; the idea of a rebellious energy that must be throttled has appeared to them inadequate for deciphering the manner in which power and desire are joined to one another. 35 Cotton summarises this declaration as a dilemma for Foucault: 'On the one hand, Foucault is unequivocal that classical psychoanalysis is the paradigmatic confessional technology. Yet he possibly wants to exempt 'certain psychoanalytic investigations' from genealogical critique. According to Cotton, Foucault wishes to keep a distance from Lacan's thought only because he is uncertain about how to contextualise it. 36 Consequently, this uncertainty expresses itself in an ambivalence about the direction of his entire project, resulting in an almost unrecognisable leap in the approaches taken in the first and second volumes of the History of Sexuality. Foucault's shift to the study of modes of self-constitution, which materialises from the publication of The Use of Pleasure onwards, sets a stage for a renewed critique as well as an obvious ambivalence toward Lacanian psychoanalysis. The idea of self-constitution, what Foucault describes as subjectivisation, implicitly deals with a rather gaping lacuna in his analytic of power; the fact that in constructing an alternative to foundationalism he has collapsed historical modes of constituting and regulating the subject into the one moment, which beckons a return of the mystery-effect of the subject's pre-constitution. It is in the preface to The Use of Pleasure that Foucault confronts this issue most fully redefining his account of the subject as a 'third shift', a move necessitated by the need to break away from the conceptualisations of desire that had come to be associated with his genealogies of power relations. At this point, Foucault actually concedes the framing role of Lacanian notions of desire for his account of power, and the dilemma he faced in breaking with them.37 He grants that the concept of 'the desiring subject constituted, if not a theory, then a generally accepted frame', allowing that because he was not able to historicise the Lacanian formulation of desire, it had allowed his appropriation of this frame to be mistaken for naturalistic conceptions of desire and a foundational approach to the subject. 38 At the same time, Foucault recognised that his theory of power, whilst providing a useful tool kit for the analysis of concrete instances of the regulation and normalisation of subjectivities, could not explain the historical constitution of agency in the mode of substance as a precondition of the circulation of disciplinary procedures and regulatory forms of power. So much so, that for the first time ever, in the introduction to The Use ofPleasure, Foucault deploys the term 'being' in the vocabulary of the de jure, rather than the defacto, where he remarks that in choosing to chart the slow formation of a hermeneutics of self rather than a 'history of desiring man', he is concerned with 'the
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games of truth and error through which being is historically constituted as experience'. 39 But here, and in a number of interviews he gave at this time, Foucault does not designate a constituent version of being, but an empirical anthropology based around the reflectivity of self to self. Foucault remarks, in a late seminar on the self, that he had 'insisted too much on the technology of domination and power', and has become more interested in the interaction between oneself and others, and in technologies of individual domination, the history of how an individual acts upon himself or herself, in a technology of self. It is in this very late period in his work that Foucault proposes to rewrite his entire project in terms of this new ontology: 'my own problem has always been the question of truth, of telling the truth... and the relation between "telling the truth" and forms of reflexivity, of self upon self'. 40 So, whilst Foucault is still interested in the constitution of the subject as a metaphysical identity, it is for him, nevertheless, the ontological outcome of a definite anthropogenic structure of recognition which is grounded in the particular rather than the universal. 41 What Foucault designates as the constitution of the self, through games of truth, has little to do with the positions of the subject, but of a subjective structure for which substance is merely an illusory repression of the emergence of alterity, byway of the reflexivity of self to self. In speaking of reflexivity here, in his last interviews, Foucault articulates more concretely the ontological commitments to an empirical anthropology with which he had been working in his post-archaeological projects although he has shifted his metaontology from relations of power to relations of truth and the ethical constitution of the self. In conclusion, I would like to restate the thesis that, from his cartographic period onwards, Foucault never departed from an analysis of the subject that began in the particular. In this he shared Lacan's sentiment that 'the idea of a unifying unity to the human condition has always had the effect on me of a scandalous lie'. From the position of the particular, and of the recognition structures grounded in Hegelian models of alterity, Lacan and Foucault generate analyses which are positive rather than negative critiques of a totalising anthropologism. Their positivity derives not from epistemological principles but from a permanent and active discourse that the structures of subjectivity and experience are of a form that ontologically resist totalisa tion. 1 Julian Pefanis, Heterology and the Postmodern: Bataille, Baudrillard, and Lyotard, North Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1991, p.l. 2 Kojeve's reading of Hegel can be found in Alexandre Kojeve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, Assembled by Raymond Queneau, ed. Allan Bloom, trans. J. Nichols Jr., New York, Basic Books, 1969. In what has been described as the second Hegel renaissance in France, Jean Hyppolite also espoused the anthropological version of Hegel. In his Existential Marxism in Postwar France, Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1975, Mark Poster claims that Hyppolite 'taught the French to look at the magisterial unfolding of the historical shapes of consciousness for the secret of a new philosophical anthropology' (p.19). Those who attended Hyppolite's lectures included Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze and Derrida. Foucault, for one, not only attended Hyppolite's lectures but dedicates his work to him in his inaugural address to the College de France claiming that
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'I have borrowed both the meaning and the possibility of what I am doing from him'. 'The Discourse on Language', The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith, London, Tavistock, 1972, p.237. As Mark Poster has noted: 'Hyppolite directed his students to the Phenomenology,not only in his lectures but even in his work on Hegel's Logic' (Poster, Existential Marxism p.19). Kojeve and Hyppolite were the only French intellectuals to translate the Phenomenology into French, Kojeve in part and Hyppolite in the form of the first full edition. Hyppolite's anthropological interpretation of Hegel is best represented by the following works: Jean Hyppolite, Studies on Hegel and Marx, trans. J. 0' Neill, London: Heineman, Basic Books, 1969, and Genesis and Structure of Hegel's Phenomenology ofSpirit, trans. S. ChemiakandJ. Heckman, Evanston: Northwestem University Press, 1974. See especially Kojeve, 'The Dialectic of the Real and The Phenomenological Method in Hegel', ch. 7 of Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, 1969. Foucault, 'The Subject and Power', afterword to Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Brighton, Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1982, p.222. Foucault, 'Structuralism and Post-structuralism'. Interview with Gerard Raulet, Telos no. 55, Spring 1983, p.208. Foucault, The Subject and Power, 1982, p.225. Jean Hyppolite, Studies on Hegel and Marx, 1969, p.161 Ibid, p.162. Hyppolite's lectures were well attended by Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze and Derrida; Hyppolite supervising Foucault's doctoral thesis on Kant. Foucault, The Discourse on Language, 1972. Foucault writes: 'dialectics does not liberate differences; it guarantees, on the contrary, that they can always be recaptured. The dialectical sovereignty of similarity consists in permitting differences to exist, but always under the rule of the negative, as an instance of non-being. They may appear as the subversion of the Other, but contradiction secretly assists in the salvation of identities'. Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault, Donald, F. Bouchard (ed.),trans. Donald. F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986pp.184-5. Foucault, The Discourse on Language, 1972, p.235. Foucault, 'Final Interview', Interview with Gilles Barbadette and Andre Scala, Raritan, Summer 1985, p.99. Foucaultremarksthatthemoreintensely a thinker's work figures as an instrument of thought in his own work, the less inclined he is to write about them directly. I have never written anything on Heidegger, and I wrote only a small article on Nietzsche. Ibid, p.9. We might add that Foucault has never penned an essay on either Hegel or Marx either. Even into the 1980s, Foucault could be heard Hegelianising Nietzsche, and embracing contradiction as the generalised possibility of discourse and action: 'I try to see, on a number of points, and to the extent that it is possible, with the aid of Nietzsche's texts- but also with anti-Nietzschean theses (which are nevertheless Nietzschean)- what can be done in this or that domain', Ibid, p.9. See, for example, Hyppolite, Logique et Existence: Essai sur La Logique de Hegel, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1953, p.243. Vincent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, trans. L. Scott-Fox and J. M. Harding. London: Cambridge University Press, 1986, originally published in French as Le Meme et L'Autre (The Same and the Other), 1979, p.14. Foucault, The Discourse on Language, 1972
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19 Like Hyppolite, whose chair he succeeded at the College de France, Foucault was careful to identify himself as an historian of philosophical systems and texts rather than a historian or philosopher of ideas. Foucault renamed his chair at the college: Professor of the History of Systems of Thought. 20 Foucault, The Discourse on Language, 1972, p.236. 21 Hegel's philosophy is a philosophy of negation and of negativity' Logique et existence, 1953, p.135. 22 As Mark Poster puts it, for Hyppolite; 'because self-consciousness always required self-objectification, alienation was a timeless quality of the human condition', Poster, Existential Marxism, 1975, p.120. 23 Hyppolite, Studies on Hegel and Marx, 1969, p.87. 24 Foucault, 'Lacan, il Liberatore della psicanalisi', Carriere Della Sera, 11th September 1981. 25 For a review of Lacan's anti-academic and anti-philosophical vehemence towards ego-psychology, see David Macey, Lacan in Contexts. London, Verso, 1988, pp.ll0-11. 26 Foucault, Language, Counter-memory, Practice, 1986, pp.221-2. 27 Macey, Lacan in Contexts, 1988, p.92. 28 Ibid, p.93. Lacan's claim should also be set beside his comment that psychoanalysis would have been impossible were it not for the Freudian Cogito. 29 With Lacan this ex-centricity is represented by Freud's discovery of the unconscious as 'the discourse of the Other'.lt points to 'the self's radical ex-centricity to itself with which man is confronted, in other words, the truth discovered by Freud'. Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan, London: Tavistock, 1980, p.171. Foucault and Lacan's anti-universalist situationism here is comparable with the way in which, for Kojeve, self-consciousness is only a 'situational' resolution of the dialectic, a moment of imaginary misrecognition which can nevertheless acquire all of the force of a 'final state'. Such imaginary resolutions occurring as a ruse of Semblance, are moments when Hegel becomes the most political (crystallised in his ideology of the transcendence of the Prussian State). Semblance is not to be equated with an illusory reality, rather it is the production of a 'false' terminus in the dialectic which in political terms may be Real, All Too Real. 30 Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London: Tavistock, 1985, p.376. 31 Cited in Macey, Lacan in Contexts, 1988,p.81. 32 Foucault, The Order of Things, 1985, p.379. 33 Peter Cotton, 'Foucault and Psychoanalysis',Arena: New Series, no.1, 1993, pp. 63105. This article charts Foucault's position in relation to individually-centred experiences of selfhood, from the time of his Mental Illness and Psychology, trans. Alan Sheridan, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1987, and his Introduction to Ludwig Binswanger's Dreams and Existence, to The Care of the Self Cotton does so by way of a Heideggerian reference which is interested in 'the question of the ontic-psychological status of the human self vis-a-vis the process of world constitution' (p.73). Cotton wishes to ask of Foucault: 'Is the self a wholly constituted product of socio-historical processes, an epiphenomenon of shifting cultural forms, or is it a dimension of the human self implicated at a core constitutive level -however this might be conceived?' (p.73). 34 Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984,p.81. 35 Ibid. 36 Cotton, Foucault and Psychoanalysis,1993, p.89. At this time Foucault refused to comment on his, his only known discussion with a Lacanian analyst, JacquesAlain Miller, being one in which he refused to demarcate definitive positions.
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37 As Cotton points out, in The Use of Pleasure, Foucault refers to La can as 'the man of desire', See Cotton, Foucault and Psychoanalysis, 1993, p.94. 38 Foucault once defined humanism as everything that restricted the productive side of the 'desire for power', Language, Counter-memory, Practice, 1986, p.221. 39 Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, The History of Sexuality Volume 2. London: Penguin, 1988, p.6. 40 Foucault, 'Structuralism and poststructuralism', 1983, p.204 (my emphasis). 41 Certainly these statements about the ontology of self-constitution are a long way from his 1971 comment that: 'Nothing in man- not even his body- is sufficiently stable to serve as the basis for self-recognition or for understanding other men'. Language, Counter-memory, Practice, p.153.
Cathexis: Metaphorics of Power 'Tony '11iwaites Power is not simply a set of mechanisms or institutions whose purpose is to ensure our subservience; neither is it subjugation according to rule; neither is it a top-down domination of one group over another. Foucault says as much, as we all already know, in The History of Sexuality, Volume I. It is in the chapter called simply 'Method', right at the beginning of the second chapter in Part Four, 'The Deployment of Sexuality', where Foucault starts laying down those meticulous methodological guidelines which are so much a feature of his work since The Archaeology ofKnowledge. I am sure it is the most frequently cited chapter of the whole book. What I want to draw attention to, however, is the rider which immediately follows that celebrated set of reversals: 'The analysis, made in terms of power, must not assume that the sovereignty of the state, the form of the law, or the over-all unity of a domination are given at the outset; rather, these are only the terminal forms power takes'.l These may be forms power comes to take on, but they are not its primary mechanisms. Foucault's work is not a denial of the state, or its effectivity, so much as an attempt not to take it for granted as an explanatory force. This, I think, is very often glossed over entirely, so Foucault's work is often read in quite contradictory ways by many of his critics. Two of the most frequent complaints about Foucault's analysis of power are, after all, that on the one hand, in his flight from the bad totalising state he is forced to fall back on a complete atomisation of power into the haphazard of strategy; and, on the other hand, that his picture of power as something in which the entire socius bathes, with no simple outsides, means that it is, on the contrary, an all too fearfully monolithic and seamless 'total system'.2 The two arguments may seem opposed, but they often occur in the same text, flipping like the Slothrop of Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow between paranoia and anti-paranoia: everything connects, nothing connects, to much the same paralytic effect. 3 It may be somewhere other than in the space offered by those two nostalgic false alternatives of individual self-determination and cybernetic social determinism, that questions of agency might begin to emerge.
Super-ego Let me for a moment move very fast through some complex arguments, at the risk of grossly oversimplifying things. In the later Freud, the superego comes to represent one of the most obvious points of the subject's embedment in the social. The earlier concept of the ego-ideal, which figures so largely in the papers on narcissism and mourning of the mid 1910s,4 is somewhat ambiguous. On the one hand, it is largely projective, working from the inside out: in the melancholic, the depressive, 'one part of the ego sets itself over against the other, judges it critically, and, as it were, takes it as its object'. 5 On the other hand, it is also introjective, from the outside in:
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melancholia arises in the first place because an object- a real object, out there beyond the subject - has been lost, and the response of ego has been to introject it where it can now serve as psychic object for all the affect which had previously been connected to that lost object. 6 By the time of The Ego and the Id (1923), the superego is emerging quite clearly as the site of an introjection not only of a real and highly cathected object, but of an immensely complex web of social relations: The superego retains the character of the father, while the more powerful the Oedipus complex is and the more rapidly it succumbs to repression (under the influence of authority, religious teaching, schooling and reading), the stricter is the domination of the super-ego over the ego later on- in the form of conscience or perhaps of an unconscious sense of guilt.7 This is a weight the super-ego will come to take on increasingly in the later sociological speculation, such as the 1930 Civilization and its Discontents, where the establishment of the super-ego is precisely and explicitly what allows this internalisation of authority to take place.s Authority: as the prefix implies, means the super-ego watches from above; its function lies in 'keeping a watch over the actions and intentions of the ego and judging them, in exercising a censorship'; it works by coercion, fear of punishment, and above all by guilt; its 'aggressiveness ... keeps up the aggressiveness of the [external] authority': civilisation, in short, 'obtains mastery over the individual's dangerous desire for aggression by weakening and disarming it and by setting up an agency within him to watch over it, like a garrison in a conquered city'.9 All of these are terms of power, and of power as repression - in the Foucauldian rather than the Freudian sense this time. For Freud - or for a certain Freud - the superego is an intra- and supra-psychic domination, from the top down, which assures the psychic subservience of the citizens, whom it subjugates, subjects, through a rule sublimating and internalising a certain social violence. The very picture of what Foucault labels the repressive hypothesis of power. Except for two things: one of them (and here, once again, I'll move fast, sketching out an argument which needs the justice of detail) - one of these qualifications is that even in the later Freud, this process of superego-as-introjection is never unalloyed. It never works simply from the outside in. There is always something going the other way as well: According to one view, [the aggressive energy with which we suppose the super-ego to be endowed] merely carries on the punitive energy of the external authority and keeps it alive in the mind ... ; while, according to another view, it consists, on the contrary, of one's own aggressive energy which has not been used and which one now directs against that inhibiting authority.... The first view seemed to fit in better with the history, and the second with the theory, of the sense of guilt.lO
Elsewhere, the super-ego may be the introjected external authority, but it is also 'the representative of the internal world, of the id'. 11 For the superego, the direction is never just repressive. Even if Freud everywhere attempts to argue that these two directions nevertheless act in unison,12 the model remains inescapably dynamic: its outcome is the product of forces which may in principle be considerably askew, not sharing the same source
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or ends. The super-ego is never just introjective: despite appearances, it is never simply subsumable in what Foucault calls the 'repressive hypothesis' of power. Let us get ahead of ourselves, just a little: the super-ego may be one of those 'terminal forms' of power, but let us not take it for granted as any explanation: it may not, in itself, quite be power's mechanism within the psyche.
Cathexis The second of those two exceptions is the one on which I want to spend the most time here, still keeping Foucault in the vicinity. The super-ego is not the only point at which the Freudian topographies are embedded in the social, though it is one of the more obvious. Here, I want to suggest another such point, from which it will be possible first of all to ask some rather different questions about the Freudian subject and power, and then, turning things around, ask some questions about the concept of power itself and the ways in which it functions in discourse. And that brings me, at last, to the term which gives this paper its title. Cathexis: It is only in English that the term is such an obvious neologism. The term Freud uses is the quite ordinary German word Besetzung, though he uses it in a distinctly idiosyncratic way. (Its ordinary meanings include trimming, bordering, edging; occupation in the military sense; nomination to an office;fillingof a vacancy; distribution of parts; casting of a play). Freud resisted his English translator's Greek cathexis for years (or so Strachey says), but was eventually to use it himself in his article on psychoanalysis for the 1926 Encyclopedia Britannica.13 Cathexis or Besetzung, whether you read the English or the German Freud, it is everywhere, from the beginning to the end of his career, though almost everywhere it is entirely without definition. He seems to have first used it in the Studies on Hysteria and the abandoned 'Project for a Scientific Psychology'. Both of these are from 1895 (that is, from somewhere just approaching the middle of that long transferential relationship to Wilhelm Fliess which stands in for Freud's own crucial self-analysis), and both of them are texts which in which we can see what will become psychoanalysis still in the process of disengagement from other sorts of investigation (the psychiatric practice of Breuer, still largely based on hypnosis, and the 'Project's' attempted synthesis of psychology with the new discoveries of neurophysiology). And then, though these are the first occurrences of the name, the concept itself seems to have been around a bit longer.14 There is a paper on 'The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence' from early in the previous year, 1894, which does not yet use the name but manages to give the closest Freud will ever get to a definition. It is a transitional paper like all the writings of this time, not yet quite psychoanalysis but no longer quite psychology either: a marginal bit of Freud, one of the pieces you do not find in the Penguin Freud. Tucked away in these margins, then, you find Freud's only explicit statement about what cathexis is- and even then, it is very brief. Here it is in its entirety, two short paragraphs at the very end of the paper, separated from the rest by a blank line:
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I should like, finally, to dwell for a moment on the working hypothesis which I have made use of in this exposition of the neuroses of defence. I refer to the concept that in mental functions something is to be distinguished- a quota of affect or a sum of excitation - which possesses all the characteristics of a quantity (though we have no means of measuring it), which is capable of increase, diminution, displacement and discharge, and which is spread over the memory-traces of ideas somewhat as an electric charge is spread over the surface of a body. This hypothesis, which, incidentally, already underlies our theory of' abreaction' ..., can be applied in the same sense as physicists apply the hypothesis of a flow of electric fluid. It is provisionally justified by its utility in coordinating and explaining a great variety of psychical states. 15
Cathexis stands at the gateway to psychoanalysis. It emerges as a concept at the very moment that psychoanalysis itself does. In these early articles, one can see psychoanalysis emerging from electro-neurological trappings, in a way which is increasingly metaphorical, less and less literal. Cathexis will gradually free itself from these too, but it will remain the underpinning of the entire venture of psychoanalysis: it will be the basis for the twin mechanisms of the dreamwork, condensation and displacement, from which point on it will remain untouched by the constant revisions of demarcation lines within and between unconscious and conscious, by the emergence in the 1920s of the ego/id/superego schema, or by the radical and speculative doubt of texts such as Beyond the Pleasure Principle and 'Analysis Terminable and Interminable'. Indeed, it is tempting to see cathexis as the psycho-analytical term par excellence, the term which more than any other makes psychoanalysis possible. The four fundamentals for Lacan may well be the unconscious, the drive, repetition and transference, but what is cathexis if not the very mechanism, the very possibility of these? 16
Metaphorics Cathexis has the electrical properties of the neurone as its model, though it is never- even in the 'Project', which is Freud at his most optimistically positivistic - itself an electrical phenomenon. From the beginning, cathexis is already a metaphor: affects are cathected from one idea to another just as electrical charges are distributed and redistributed over a surface. As a metaphor, cathexis is doubly a logic of exchange: on the one hand, the metaphor sets up an exchange between one system (psychic affect) and another (neural electrodynamics); on the other, it also pictures the system of psychic affect as itself an incessant exchange, in which a sexual anxiety, say, can be manifested in anything from an obsessive repetition to a fear of thunderstorms. Cathexis, we can say, both makes distinctions and connects the distinct, in the one doubled movement, or at least doubled. It provides a space in which disparates can coexist in a dynamic and not necessarily resolvable play of forces, while maintaining at the same time their separation (as it has to as part of its function of defence). It spills out everywhere into the metalevel as well, as the discursive space which the term produces- psychoanalysis- is precisely itself a cathected space. In this space, a number of discourses which may even have no place together (neuro-anatomy, physiology, fluid
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dynamics, psychology, philosophy, sociology, ethics and the arts) are drawn in a disjunct synthesis, signalled by relations of defence, strategy, management, antagonisms, ad hoc solutions. Cathexis cathects itself. Here, what I would really need to do would be to offer a thorough discussion of how that problematic of displacement, of metaphorics, is found throughout Freud's texts and at all levels. Cathexis begins by importing terms from neuroanatomy and fluid dynamics. In doing this, it provides at least two simultaneous narratives: one of them is a narrative of how the subject comes to be formed, in terms of homeostatic systems which have the organism seeking to minimise the unpleasure of perturbation; and the other, along with this, irreducible to it but entering into all sorts of exchanges with it, is a narrative of the formation of psychoanalysis itself, from discourses including those to which these homeostatic systems belong, or which have themselves borrowed them: physics, but also psychiatry, anatomy, neurology, sociology, literature and philosophy, to name only a few. 17 In this doubling, psychoanalysis becomes the name of an institution, with lateral links to all sorts of others (medical, legal, educational, archival and informational), none of which can be seen as outside the ambit of the subject, or of cathexis. In itself, cathexis is without definition, without quantity, yet it functions as if it were a quantity, as if defined: as if cathexis itself comes about in the very movement between things, in the transfer of something from one place to another, in the very (discursive) movement of psychoanalysis's disengagement of itself. As Laplanche and Pontalis point out in The Language of Psychoanalysis 18 cathexis may be a problem for definition, but it is next to indispensable for psychoanalysis. Theirjustificationforitis precisely Freud's for the hypothesis of the unconscious in the 1915 article on it: 19 its value as hypothesis is simply that it has a massive explanatory power. Like the unconscious, cathexis may not in its very nature be amenable to any sort of direct observation, but take it as hypothesis and suddenly a large number of hitherto separate and scattered data reveal themselves as linked in all sorts of ways. It is, in other words, economical (in doing a lot with a little) and economic (in that it exists only in exchange, as the possibility of relations among terms). Here again, let me move fast, and at the risk of appearing somewhat cryptic throw out a suggestion time will not let me elaborate on here; and that is, that I think this metaphoricity, this cathected metaphoricity, provides the very possibility ofFreudianmetapsychology. As exchange, cathexis most immediately provides an economic model of the psyche: the psyche acts as if it is the product of something quantifiable, which circulates, is distributed, charmelled, and is exchanged in various ways within and beyond its own system. What this 'something quantifiable' might be, is purely a product of the metaphor, and of that folding-back by which cathexis (metaphor to the end) describes its own meta-system. From this reflexive metaphoricity of cathexis, this general economy, come the other aspects of Freudianmetapsychology: a topography, a surface of elements related to each other by certain greater or lesser distances, and by adjacencies or separations; and across that surface, the psychic dynamic of pressures which,
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through the logic of breaching of Bahnung first suggested in the early quasineurological'Project', ensure that certain routes get laid down to direct such pressures and minimise disruption to the system as a whole. Through these routes, an intense exchange of affect takes place, according to the mechanisms Freud will later isolate as displacement and condensation. The topographic, the dynamic, the economic: with cathexis, the three components of an adequate metapsychological description of the psyche become possible.
Power Cathexis is rootless, a figure of exchange which produces certain effects of grouping, distribution, disjunction, space, dynamics. It names itself. The space it produces is a strategic space, utterly unlike and yet subtending the devolutionaryhanding-downofpowerwhichisthesuper-ego. Withcathexis, and precisely because of its awkwardness in any dimension except the metaphorical- precisely because it is the term, which more than any other of Freud's, resists being anything more than metaphor, which is to say it resists being anything but a figure of exchange- with cathexis, it may be possible to think of the relation of the subject to power in a very different way from that of the super-ego and the repressive hypothesis. Cathexis gives us a metaphorics of power precisely to the extent that that phrase is caught between subjective and objective genitives: power as metaphor, yes, but also metaphor as power, the very figure of power. As a strategic space, it is not too far from the sort of discursive space that Foucault traces out in The Archaeology of Knowledge, a discontinuous space of exchanges and uneven distributions. If the superego is, as Althusser hoped, that place where the subject is called from above by the systematicity of ideology, then cathexis is the writing of the subject into discourse, which is not a resolution, even an imaginary one, so much as a tort, a management of differends. Cathexis is a multiplicity of force relations, strategic, tacticat irreducible to a single system. As a general economy, it is always open to the unforeseeable, the perpetual aleatory remainder of all system which Lacan will call tuche, the throw of events. (Hence Freud's continual fascination with happenstance and the supernatural- not to mention the possibility of Jung.) Cathexis is of necessity an open-ended strategy of managing the unmanageable, a purposive calculation of interests which are not necessarily those of the subject which only begins to emerge in this very calculation: a logic of tactics. What this leads to, -to sum up briefly what has already been little more than a sketch- is the possibility of conceiving the relationship of Freud, the Freudian subject, to power, the politicat in a somewhat different way. Rather than a Freud who provides a model of the subject which can be seen as governed by a superego which is an internalisation of the sociat we have a Freud for whom the subject is somewhere in waiting, a sort of fable required for the working of a complex apparatus whose functioning is strategic rather than juridical. Here, I think, it is necessary to heed Foucault's warning: the superego is not simply some sort of myth, but a terminal form
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this other cathectic mechanism takes. Cathexis is always there from the beginning in the very places inhabited by the superego, subtending it. What I would like to suggest, at the moment as nothing more than a hypothesis is that such a mechanism suggests a way of conceiving agency which is somewhat different from that provided by the model of a subject called into social being through the superego. What would describe this cathectic subject is not so much Althusser plus Lacan, but a different set of tools altogether, a ragbag I will not even try to pretend forms a single whole: it may involve the language games of the later Wittgenstein, Lyotard's generic differends; Bourdieu's theories of practice, and the distinctions he makes between rules and regularities; and, of course, Foucault and the metaphorics of power. This is a metaphorics, I would suggest, because power exists only in that incessant exchange. As Foucault puts it in The History of Sexuality, following on immediately after that rider I began by citing, power exists only 'as the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organisation'. It is 'the support which these force relations find in one another, thus forming a chain or a system, or on the contrary, the disjunctions and contradictions which isolate them from one another', of which power would be the 'immediate effect'.20 Or, as he puts it elsewhere: The exercise of power is not simply a relationship between partners, individual or collective; it is a way in which certain actions modify others. Which is to say, of course, that something called Power, with or without a capital letter, which is assumed to exist universally in a concentrated or diffused form, does not exist.21 1
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality. Volume I: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1980, p.92. My emphasis.
2
The term is Fredric Jameson's, from The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981, p.90.
3
Here, ideally, I would have an exhaustive reading of a number of Foucault's critics, including Jameson, Merod, Harvey and Said, the point of which would not so much be to defend Foucault as to trace through the ways in which such arguments the1nselves implement that flipping between too much and too little, the macro and the lnicro, the system and the strategy.lt should be obvious from the switch into footnote mode that I am not even going to attempt that here. Let me cite only one example, to stand for many: Jim Merod tends to see the result of an actual Foucauldian politics as a fragmentation of interests with little, if anything, in common, futilely opposed by 'the infinite, scattered power of intellectuals and revolutionaries, without any integrating force or focus, against the infinitely dispersed but nonetheless localized and integrated power of econolnic exploitation, class oppression, state oversight, and disciplinary regulation in schools, laboratories, homes, and elsewhere' (Merod, The Political Responsibility of the Critic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), p.170; in particular, seechapter7, 'On the Political Use of Critical Consciousness'). See also Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, pp.90-93; David Harvey, The Condition ofPostmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins ofCultural Change, Oxford: Blackwell, 1990, particularly inch. 3, 'Postmodernism'; Edward W. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983.
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Sigmund Freud, 'On Narcissism: An Introduction', On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, Pelican Freud Library, vol. 11, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984, pp.65-97; 'Mourning and Melancholia', On Meta-psychology, pp.25168.
5
Freud, 'Mourning and Melancholia', p.256.
6
Ibid, p.258.
7
Freud, The Ego and the Id, On Metapsychology, p.374.
8
Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, New York: Norton, 1961, p.72.
9
Ibid, pp.83, 74, 70-71.
10 Ibid, pp.84-5. 11 Freud, The Ego and the Id, p.376. 12 Freud continues, immediately after the last passage cited: 'Closer reflection has resolved this apparently irreconcilable contradiction almost too completely; what remained as the essential and common factor was that in each case we were dealing with an aggressiveness which had been displaced inwards. Clinical observation, moreover, allows us in fact to distinguish two sources for the aggressiveness we attribute to the super-ego; one or the other of them exercises the stronger effect in any given case, but as a general rule they operate in unison'. (Civilization and its Discontents, p.85) 13 See the entry for 'cathexis' in J. Laplanche and J.B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, London: Karnac Books, 1988 [1973], pp.62-5, Greek cathexein, to occupy. 14 Ibid, p.62. 15 Sigmund Freud, 'The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence', The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume III (1893-1899): Early Psycho-Analytic Publications, London: Hogarth Press, 1953-1974, pp.60-l. 16 Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamentals of Psychoanalysis, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979. 17 See Jacques Derrida, 'To Speculate- on 'Freud", The Post Card: from Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. 18 Laplanche and Pontalis. The Language of Psychoanalysis, p.65. 19 Sigmund Freud, 'The Unconscious', On Metapsychology, pp.167-222. 20 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. I, pp.92, 94. 21 Michel Foucault,' Afterword: The Subject and Power', in Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983, pp.219-20.
Part Six Feminism
Foucault's ./Care of the Self': Some Implications for Feminist Politics
!Moya .Lfoya As feminist notions of the unified subject 0N oman) come under threat from both within and outside of feminism, the whole relationship between the feminist agent and feminist politics comes under scrutiny. Acceptance of the fragmented or polysemous nature of female subjectivity, of necessity, problematises traditional understandings of the connections between the subject and politics raising additional questions about the nature of autonomy or agency. One reaction amongst feminists to the kind of investigation of feminist politics which fractures the notion of collective action, unity amongst or between sisters (albeit differentially constituted sisters), has been to ditch the notion of constitutiveness. Thus as Christine di Stefano argues: if feminists adopt the idea of 'mobile subjectivity' (Ferguson:1993) 'any semblance of feminist politics [becomes] impossible' (1991) for feminism requires a stable constituency. Hitherto much of this debate around the subject and politics within feminism has remained locked into a logic that assumes that the only kind of viable feminist politics is one that can speak of and to the experiences of a previously defined group of women. It operates within a logic of identity that aims to fix, in advance, the features that signify group membership. It operates, as Judith Butler notes, with both presentist and descriptivist assumptions; that is, it attempts to make a description of the traits presently shared by individuals the foundations of political coherence (1993:221). However, as the work of Michel Foucault has graphically demonstrated, attempts to fix identity work by exclusion, normalisation (identarian politics are not merely descriptive but also prescriptive/normative), and the production of a realm of abjection (Butler 1992, 1993; Flax 1992). The signal failure of feminism to identify traits that can incorporate all women adds weight to the idea that a rethinking of notions of female I feminine subjectivity is required. But it also begs another question about the relationship between the subject and politics. As Judith Butler observes: To claim that politics requires a stable subject is to claim that there can be no political opposition to that claim. Indeed, that claim implies that a critique of the subject cannot be politically informed critique but, rather, an act which puts in jeopardy politics as such. To require the subject means to foreclose the domain of the political, and that foreclosure, installed analytically as an essential feature of the political, enforces the boundaries of the domain of the political in such a way that that enforcement is protected from political scrutiny (1992:4, original emphasis).
This debate, if it is to escape the aporia within which it is presently confined, needs to ask at least two kinds of question: first (and here I am borrowing from Jane Flax) 'What kind(s) of subjectivities can demand and support feminist politics?' (1992:446). What kind, that is, other than the
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supposedly necessary (and axiomatic) stable female/feminine subject? And, second, what kinds of feminist politics could they demand? The aim of this paper is to explore the kinds of feminist politics made possible through an adoption of a Foucauldian (style) ethics. In so-doing I will be reading Judith Butler's notion of gender performativity as an example of a feminist stylistics of existence against a series of criticisms posed by Lois McNay in her recent book Foucault and Feminism (1992). Feminist attention to the work of Michel Foucault has tended to focus on his middle works - those genealogies of prisons and sexuality where he deploys his radical analytic of power and where he excavates the various ways in which both bodies and selves are produced by power (Diamond and Quinby 1988; Sawicki 1991). Comparatively little feminist interest has been shown in his later ethical works (McNay 1992; Probyn 1993). However, it is these later works that furnish the clearest indication of the types of 'political' activity that polysemous subjects might conceivably engage in. In particular,IwillarguethatFoucault'slaterworkoffersatleasttwopossiblepolitics: politics as critique, or what Hennessy (in a non-Foucauldian context) calls 'critiqu(al) politics'; and politics as an 'ethics' or 'stylis tics' of existence- the so-called 'care of the self' referred to in the title of this paper. Without overstating the lines of either continuity or discontinuity between them, I want to argue that both are underwritten by the concept of transgression: transgression of the boundaries of discursive constitution, (self)understanding, and disciplinary or governmental practices. While critique offers a mode of challenging the 'historical ontology of ourselves', those factors which define 'what we are saying, thinking, and doing' (1984:44-5), enabling subjects to push up against the limits set by (this arbitrary and contingent) historical constitution, politics as ethics (in Foucault's sense) presents a practical means of reinventing the self. It furnishes a set of practices for self-subjectification, or what Foucault alternatively calls a 'technology of the self' (in Martin 1988:18). Leaving aside questions about the coherence of Foucault's oeuvre as a whole, it is clear that there is a shift in emphasis from the genealogical to the ethical works. Why this shift occurs is a matter of debate, but it is clear that one of the effects of turning to 'technologies of the self' is to expose certain ways in which the' government of individualisation' discussed in Discipline and Punish and in volume one of The History of Sexuality can (potentially) be subverted (1982:212). As Foucault observes in 'The Subject and Power', the current economy of power relations: applies itself to immediate everyday life which categorises the individual, marks him by his own individuality, attaches himself to his identity, imposes a law of truth on him which he must recognise and which others have to recognise in him. It is a form of power which makes individuals subjects (1982:212).
It is this binding of the individual to the 'truth' of his/her identity that is especially problematic for Foucault, for it is this that permits the' simultaneous individualisationand totalisation of modern power structures' (1982:216). It is this that ensnares and subjugates the individual. Foucault's response to this double bind is to suggest that individuals should engage in a politics of
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refusal: to 'refuse what we are', to refuse the 'kind of individuality which has been imposed on us for several centuries' (and which is encapsulated in the sexual subject). But refusal alone is not sufficient; in addition 'we have to promote new forms of subjectivity' (1982:216). In order, to evade the ever more invasive reaches of modem power, Foucault contends that subjects contest the terms of their identity and develop alternative modes of subjectification. It is in this latter context that the idea of 'the ethic of care as a practice of freedom' appears (1988). But exactly what is at stake in 'technologies of the self'? What kinds of ethical work is Foucault proposing? I want to begin to answer these questions by looking first at the essay 'What is Enlightenment?' In this essay, Foucault attributes to Kant a particular innovation: the importation into philosophy of a concern with what he earlier calls 'the history of the present' (1979:31). This 'attitude of modernity' represents a mode of relating to' contemporary reality', not on the basis of metahistorical continuity or the promise of teleological conclusion, but in terms of difference, the difference that 'today introduce[s] with respect to yesterday' (1984:34). In particular, the attitude of modernity contains not only a relationship to the present, but more importantly here 'a mode of relationship that has to be established with oneself' (1984:41). This mode of relating to oneself, which Foucault terms an ethos or 'historical ontology of ourselves' (1984:45), comprises three features: a 'limit-attitude', experimentation, and, what I will call, constant vigilance. Foucault is clear that by 'limit-attitude', he does not mean a gesture of rejection, rather a constant questioning of the boundaries of identity. Thus the critic ferrets out 'whatever is singular, contingent... the product of arbitrary constraint'. Critique, thus, becomes: a historical investigation into the events that have led us to constitute ourselves and to recognise ourselves as subjects of what we are doing, thinking, saying... this criticism is not transcendental .. .it will separate out, from the contingency that has made us what we are, the possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think (1984:45-6, my emphasis).
This 'historico-critical attitude' involves more than simple reflexivity. It also invites transgression and experimentation (1984:48). It requires that individuals identify both possible points of and particular forms of selftransformation. It engenders practices of self-invention and self-creation. It is, in essence, an account of self-stylisation. Finally, Foucault is categoric that any such practices of self-transformation should be subject to constant vigilance for they are always localised, partial and potentially normalising. Such a philosophical ethos, then, is both critical/ theoretical and practical. While 'What is Enlightenment?' offers an overview of the relations between critique and askesis, it is in the later volumes of the History of Sexuality and the interviews on those texts, that Foucault's account of care of the self as an instance of freedom gets its fullest articulation. First, ethical work is an 'ascetical practice', not in the Sartrean sense of the attainment of authenticity, rather as an exercise of self upon self through which individuals attempt to transform themselves and their behaviour (1988:2). 1 Second, it is a 'practice of freedom'. By this, Foucault means something very specific:
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self-transformation is not an act of liberation, for that would connote the releasing of a pre-discursive subject from the strictures of oppression and the arrival at some end state of freedom as telos. Instead, although dependent on a certain degree of liberation- that is, the ability to affect relations of power (free individuals are those 'who are faced with a field of possibilities in which several ways of behaving, several reactions and diverse comportments may be realised' (1982:221), practices of freedom are continuous, even never-ending. Freedom, thus becomes, for Foucault, an ethical problem. This ethical relation is also simultaneously an aesthetic relation: a mode of stylising one's life. Finally, ethics of self-care is also the foundation of care for others; by exercising self-mastery others can be protected from the abuse of power (1988:8). Foucault's ethical work thus results in a 'hermeneutics of the self' which, Probyn argues, entails a two-fold process: a theoretical formulation of the self, and a relation of the self to an ensemble of practices (1993: 122-3). For Foucault, one of the motivations for technologising the self, of transforming the self into, say, a work of art was that it has the potential to subvert or disrupt the regulatory mechanisms of governmentalising power. It offers a means of transgressing the boundaries of normative identity. It is in this context that the work of Judith Butler on gender is significant as an example of what a feminist stylistics might look like (Butler 1990b:139).2 Foucault wishes to resist the 'government of individualisation', those regulative practices that tie individuals to normative (and thus restrictive) identities. It is these identities that Foucault wishes individuals both to refuse, and to reinvent. One of the key concepts within feminist theory has been the notion of gender. Strong arguments have been presented for retaining gender as the primary focus of feminist analysis (albeit with some recognition of other structures of oppression) on the grounds that it is the codification and organisation of the world into a gendered hierarchy that explains women's oppression under patriarchy. Implicit in these claims is the acceptance of a binary structure to gender which maps onto a binary biology dividing the population into male/masculine-female/feminine subjects. Butler's argument in such texts as Gender Trouble (1990b) and Bodies That Matter 1993; see also 1990a, 1992) is that this binary framework within feminism itself helps to regulate and indeed to constitute or fix the very ontologies of gender that feminism is seeking to overcome. A feminism committed to picturing in advance those features of gendered identity that unite all women (such as the maternal body within French feminism, or reproduction and mothering within object relations theory) is, in effect, not describing a reality but establishing a normative, and thus exclusionary, injunction 'determining what qualifies as intelligible sex, invoking and consolidating the reproductive constraints on sexuality' thereby setting 'the prescriptive requirements whereby sexed or gendered bodies come into cultural intelligibility' (1990b:148). Such processes foreclose what counts as womanliness, a move which effectively discounts the experiences of certain other women (or non-women since they are outside the category established by a prior fixing of gendered attributes) positioning them beyond the realms of intelligibility or signification.
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It is at this point, I contend, that Foucault's notion of the politics of refusal is given expression. If we accept Butler's charge that gender is generally understood as the expression of some underlying identity, then it is this version of subjectivity that feminists must refuse and resist. This is precisely what Butler endeavours to do. In order for the expressive model of gender to work (as a descriptive ideal) all expressions of gender identity have to fall into two opposed camps: male vs. female. The problem with this cartography is that there are already a multiplicity of gender discontinuities fracturing the model: 'discontinuities which run rampant within heterosexual, bisexual, and gay and lesbian contexts in which gender does not necessarily follow from sex' (1990b:l35). It is the proliferation of gender discontinuities which exposes the normative dimensions of the heterosexual matrix. So, in place of the idea of gender as expressive, Butler advances the idea of gender as performative. All those gestures, acts, desires that are taken as indicative of gender identity are revealed as so many fabrications 'manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means'. The supposed core of gender identity is disclosed as 'the public regulation of fantasy through the surface politics of the body' (1990a:336). There is no interior psychic space that determines identity; it is all the effect of 'corporeal signification'. To illustrate how performativity works, and how it unmasks the constitutive nature of gender, Butler examines the case of drag. Drag is presented by Butler as only one example of the ways in which gender transgression might work: it is illustrative rather than paradigmatic. Drag is emblematic of gender performativity insofar as it reveals the extent to which 'gender is a kind of persistent impersonation that passes as the real' (1990b:x). The performance of the drag artist destabilises the distinctions between the 'natural and the artificial, depth and surface, inner and outer through which discourse about genders almost always operates' (1990b:x). Drawing on the work of the anthropologist, Esther Newton, Butler notes the way in which, according to Newton, drag operates by a double inversion: first, in terms of appearance for the drag artist appears feminine on the outside at the same time that her /his essence or inside is masculine; and second, symbolically, the opposite inversion is at work: the body and gender is masculine while the essence (the 'me'?) is feminine. The performance of drag appears to operate via the distinction between the body of the performer (anatomically male) and the gender being performed (symbolically female). However, for Butler, a closer reading reveals three separate dimensions of 'significant corporeality': namely, anatomical sex, gender identity and gender performance (1990a:338). The distinctions between all three dimensions suggest, therefore, not only a dissonance between sex and performance, but also between sex and gender, and gender and performance. 'In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself- as well as its contingency' (1990a:338). What was previously assumed to be natural in gender identity is exposed as fabricated; it is denaturalised in the process of performance. This has a number of effects: first, it challenges the presumption of heterosexual coherence at the base of gender identification - the drag artist
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suggests the fluidity and contingency of gender positioning. Second, such parodic identities indicate (and here the possibility of alternative modes of self-subjectification are suggested) a 'perpetual displacement' which allows for the constant resignification and recon-textualisation of gender stylisation. 3 As a practice of freedom, then, parody has to be on-going: it is a process of continuous refusal and subversion. In addition, however, I want to contend that parodying gender also involves processes of selftechnologisation; that is, it is also productive. In the essay 'Technologies of the Self', Foucault defines this practice as one which permits: individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and a way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality (in Martin 1988: 18).
For feminists, this way of being is (in Butler's terms, at least) political: the rejection of a naturalised gender binarism. This rejection, or what might be called gender dissonance, functions primarily at the level of the body. Technologising the self, in this context, involves the development of a corporeal style. It consists in an '"act", as it were, which is both intentional and performative, where "performative" suggests a dramatic and contingent construction of meaning'. Gender is thus a repeated performance- 'a stylized repetition of acts' (1990b:139)- which seeks to evade the false fixing of identity. It operates by continually destabilising and denaturalising gender expectations. It is, thus, a constant game of self-invention and reinvention; a continuous re-enactment of gender, a kind of 'improvisational theatre' (Segal et al. 1994:33) where the body is repeatedly remade or resignified. As with Foucault's own notion of ethical practice or askesis, these practices of self-formation are circumscribed to some degree: pure or extreme voluntarism in the presentation or production of the self is not possible. As Butler observes at the start of Bodies That Matter, her conception of the performativity of gender did not mean that 'one woke up in the morning, perused the closet or some more open space for the gender of choice, donned that gender for the day, and then restored the garment to its place at night' (1993:x; see also Segal 1994:32), for that would imply an individual who could somehow step outside of its gender in order to don its gender. The being is always already interpellated by gender in some way; what is possible is that gender practices are a site of contestation and' critical agency', and that some degree of subversion, reformulation, slippage is possible. The fact that 'sex', 'gender' and 'sexuality' are forms of enforced cultural performance does not preclude the option of creating gender trouble. So, the broad context for Butler's work is a concern with the question of identity, and its place within feminist theory. By rendering untenable the possibility of stable identity Butler is also casting doubt on the politics of identity: the idea of female solidarity as the foundation of feminist emancipatory politics. Her aim is to show how the very indeterminacy of gender, far from heralding the failure of feminism as a politics, is a resource which
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feminists can use to expose the regulatory framework of compulsory heterosexuality. Her work, therefore, problematises the relationship between identity, agency, and emancipatory politics. In this section, I have explored some of the ways in which Butler's notion of gender performativity resembles Foucault's idea of the care of the self, and have demonstrated ways in which a feminist stylistics might operate as a feminist politics. In the next section I want to explore some of the criticisms levelled at Foucault by the feminist theoretician Lois McNay. Again, I will read Butler against Foucault. In her book Foucault and Feminism (1992), Lois McNay offers a series of criticisms concerning the proprieties of a feminist utilisation of Foucault's ethical works. In this final section of the paper I want to address a selection of them in relation to feminist politics.4 Her first objection is that Foucault's stress on practices of the self fails to differentiate between different practices of the self, such that each is seen to be equally valuable (1992:74). In particular, Foucault is condemned for not offering criteria to separate out those principles which are 'suggested' to individuals and those 'imposed' upon them. Without criteria for prioritising between practices, McNay argues, these practices cannot be unequivocally positioned as practices of freedom (1992:77). Here I wantto make two comments: first, that it is unclear to me what guarantee could exist in advance to determine which practices of freedom are'suggested' and which are 'imposed' (see Foucault 1988:11 ). For instance, feminists have amply demonstrated the various ways in which women's bodies are disciplined by diet, exercise, and the corset. However, it has been possible for women not only to escape some of the more pernicious effects of femininity, but also to begin to make themselves over in ways which they want; to technologise themselves. The difficulty is that there is no guarantee that these 'liberatory' practices will not be appropriated by 'patriarchal' power. However, there is also no guarantee that they will be. The problem is one of contingency: women are not simply locked into regimes of disciplined femininity. There are interstitial possibilities for refusal, subversion and even productive action. 5 What is crucial in determining the positive and negative dimensions of any action is critique. Second, McNay in extending Habermas' critique of Foucault to the ethical works, appears to be suggesting that a set of pre-defined priorities is a necessary basis for political action. However, as the work of Foucault and Butler has indicated, identities or positions proffered in advance of political action may have the effect of reinforcing existing regulatory frames of reference in addition to proscribing certain forms of identity or action in a normalising fashion. McNay's second and more persuasive point is that self-stylisation is not sufficient to overcome those 'deeply entrenched cultural norms (such as certain unspecified biological phenomena) in which our bodies are embedded'. She notes that 'the concepts of stylization and aesthetics are not appropriate categories with which to tackle the various issues involved' (1992:80). This raises the issue of whether or not self-aestheticisation is an adequate strategy with which to resist the government of individualisation (1992:165). Can it escape relations of power? Can the (putatively) solitary
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nature of ethics translate into' a politics of difference that could initiate deepseated social change'? (1992:177) I want to make a number of observations here: first, McNay writes as if any feminist adoption of Foucault's ideas on ethics would be wholesale, without change. Even supposing Foucault himself neglects the question of social hierarchisation and inequality in the context of self-stylisation, there is no need for such a total adherence to Foucault's ethics as the work of Butler illustrates. Leaving that aside, there is clearly an issue concerning the validity or effectiveness of individual action in the face of social structures of domination. One individual's refusal to conform to gender stereotypes does not of itself fissure the edifice of gender hierarchy. As already noted, there is the potential problem of recuperation (Foucault's idea that power is neither good nor bad but dangerous). In addition, the notion of ethics or stylis tics does not address those issues of political economy that might have a bearing on how an ethics could be performed, and by whom. However, as Butler's work demonstrates, a stylistics is not necessarily the isolated work of the individual. When discussing acts of parody or subversion, Butler has in mind acts that resonate publicly, that impinge upon social consciousness, that involve people learning to read particular practices in different ways. It is in the challenge to conventional ways of understanding the symbolics of certain actions, modes of behaviour and gestures that parody has its political impact (1994:38). Butler is well aware that parody, in itself, is not politically subversive; that certain parodic representations of gender may be potentially recuperable. The difficulty, and this I think is the real crux of McNay's reluctance to endorse Foucault, is that the 'legibility' of gender protest is not predictable in advance. It is this lack of predictability that troubles McNay: for her a workable politics is one which assigns values to different practices so that programmatic action becomes possible. The point for Foucault and Butler is that they both categorically reject the predictive model of politics. It is the indeterminacy of transgressive politics that is at the heart of the debate. Furthermore for Foucault (and for Butler), self-aestheticisation is not, as McNay's argument implies, the sole means of resisting the government of individualisation. Foucault mentions both the centrality of critique, and the active refusal of existing practices alongside his notion of technologies of the self both of which could be collective projects. McNay ignores this and argues as if self-stylisation is presented by Foucault as the only category of political action. This desire for collective action connects with a related criticism of Foucault: 'Although Foucault's idea of an aesthetics of existence is informed by a respect for difference, without showing how a strategy of self-formation relates to a politics of solidarity, it runs the risk of lapsing into an atomized politics of introversion' (1992:157-8, my emphasis). The 'intense subjectivism' of Foucault's work, contends McNay (1992:161), compromises its political effect. Foucault's ethics (and any feminist adoption of them) privileges a privatised relationship of the self to the self over the social self, the self formed through social interaction. Central to her claim is Foucault's apparent rejection in a 1983 interview of a necessary link between ethics and the broader social, political and economic structures of society
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(1984:350). McNay reads this as an indication of Foucault's belief that the formation or aestheticisation of the self is 'predicated on the severance of links between the self and other social structures' (1992:165). In the process McNay transforms Foucault's remark about the contingency of the ethical self-society relation into a universal principle of his ethics. There are two factors of note here: first, the context for Foucault's remark is historical: he suggests that at present our moral code is such that we believe all moral/ immoral actions have implications ('an analytical or necessary link') for society both at the private and public level. An exploration of Greek and Roman ethics, by comparison, indicates that there are other ways of understanding the ethical relationship (such as, an aesthetic relation (1984:350). Furthermore, as he notes elsewhere (1988:11) no individual can stand outside their culture; no one can escape all forms of social conditioning (much in the way that women cannot evade the heterosexual matrix). This implies that all ethics do indeed have a social dimension, albeit differently articulated. What is also significant about McNay's critique of the political ramifications of a feminist turn to the ethics is that for her the only defensible feminist politics seems to be a 'politics of solidarity'. The dynamics of this argument have, to some extent, already been discussed. Feminist notions of solidarity tend to require the delineation of some sort of pre-given identity capable of uniting women in a common struggle against patriarchy. As Butler and Foucault have persuasively shown, such politics of identity operate against a notion of abjection, denial, exclusion. What Foucault and Butler indicate via the ethics are alternative modalities of political activity. My intention in this paper has been to suggest that one possible feminist version of Foucault's ethics can be found in Judith Butler's conception of gender performativity: the continuous subversion of the categories of the heterosexual matrix. In presenting this comparative study my purpose has been two-fold: to allay some of the criticisms targeted at this type of project, and to explore the alternative sorts of political activity made possible by its adoption. 1
It is important to note that Foucault rejects the idea that contemporary subjects
can merely imitate their Greek ancestors ('you can't find the solution of a problem in the solution of another problem raised at another moment by other people' 1984, 343). What he distils from this excursus into pagan ethics in the later volumes of The History of Sexuality is evidence of other modes of historical constitution of the self by the self which draw on particular games of truth (1988:10). 2
Although Butler does not systematically develop themes from Foucault's ethics she does explicitly equate her account of gender performativity with the kind of 'stylistics of existence' advocated by Foucault (1990b:139).
3
These imitations do not presume an original; they are parodies of the idea of an original.
4
McNay also talks about the lack of normative criteria in Foucault's work. Since I have dealt with this issue at length elsewhere I will not deal with it here (Lloyd 1993:437-60).
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The fact that certain feature of identity are deeply inscribed or installed may mean they cannot be easily overthrown, but it does not necessarily signify that they cannot be modified or revised.
Bibliography Butler, Judith (1990a). 'Gender Trouble, Feminist Theory and Psychoanalytic Discourse', in Nicholson, L. Feminism/Postmodernism, London: Routledge. __ _, (1990b). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, London: Routledge. __ _, (1992). 'Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of "Postmodernism'", in Butler, J. and Scott, J. Feminists Theorize the Political, London: Routledge. __ _, (1993). Bodies That Matter, London: Routledge. Butler Judith and Scott,Joan (1992). Feminists Theorize the Political, London: Routledge. di Stefano, Christine (1990). 'Dilemmas of difference: feminism, modernity, and postmodernism' in Nicholson, L. Feminism/Postmodernism, London: Routledge. Diamond, Irene and Quinby, Lee (1988). Foucault and Feminism: Reflections on Resistance, Boston: Northeastern University Press. Flax, Jane (1992). 'The End of Innocence' in Butler and Scott, Feminists Theorize the Political, London: Routledge. Foucault, Michel (1979): Discipline and Punish, Harmondsworth: Penguin. __ _, (1982). 'The Subject and Power' in H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Brighton: Harvester. __ _, (1984). 'What is Enlightenment?', in The Foucault Reader, P. Rabinow (ed.) Harmondsworth: Penguin. __ _, (1988). 'The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom', in J. Bernauer and D. Rasmussen: The Final Foucault, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Lloyd, Moya (1993). 'The (F)utility of a Feminist Tum to Foucault', Economy and Society, 22, p.4 McNay, Lois (1992). Foucault and Feminism, Cambridge: Polity. Martin, Luther et al. (1988). Technologies of the Self A Seminar with Michel Foucault, London: Tavistock. Nicholson, Linda (1990). Feminism/Postmodernism, London: Routledge. Probyn, Elspeth (1993). Sexing the Self Gendered Positions in Cultural Studies, London: Routledge. Sawicki, Jana (1991). Disciplining Foucault: Feminism, Power and the Body, London: Routledge. Segal, Lynne and Osborne, Peter (1994). 'Gender as Performance: An Interview with Judith Butler', Radical Philosophy, 67, Summer.
Feminist History After Foucault
In this paper I want to explore some directions that feminist history1 might
take post-Foucault, and in the light of postmodem thinking. Feminism's encounter with poststructuralism and postmodernism (for example, Barrett and Phillips 1992; Nicholson 1990; Weed 1989), and with Foucault in particular (Hennessy 1990; Alcoff 1988; Diamond and Quinby 1988), is currently the subject of intense debate. With the publication in the mid to late 1980s of work by Joan Scott, Denise Riley and Mary Poovey, feminist historians could no longer avoid a series of difficult and unsettling questions arising out of the trend towards deconstruction, discourse theory and textual analysis: the so-called linguistic tum in historical scholarship. For many of us, trained in social history and women's history, the shift from experientially-grounded accounts of historical reality to discourse theory has produced something like a crisis of faith in our home discipline. More than any other writer associated with poststructuralism, Michel Foucault has provided feminist historians with a legible set of guide maps for this hazardous journey out of structuralist and modernist thinking. Foucault is seen as perhaps the most accessible and relevant representative of a wider critical tradition which has questioned structuralist and essentialistmodesofthinkingabout'man'andsociety.Importantlyforhistorians,his work shows in a series of practical applications how these new approaches to knowledge, power and discourse can change the way that history is thought about. Reference to Foucault's historical works is now almost mandatory for feminists working on the history of sexuality, the body, madness, crime, and sexual difference. A number of feminist historians have, however, expressed serious reservations about some or all aspects of the swing to discourse analysis (Hoff 1993; Jeffreys 1993; Downs 1993). This important debate reminds us of the need to remain critical of new theories and frameworks. For the purposes of this paper, I want to put to one side arguments about the advantages and pitfalls for feminists of adopting a Foucauldian perspective per se (for example, Hekman 1992; McNay 1992; Sawicki 1991). What interests me here isnotwhetherornotfeministhistoriansoughttouseFoucault,butratherhow and with what effects they might apply Foucault to their historical projects. In particular I am concerned with the limits placed on the effectiveness of feminist history as a social critique when Foucault's poststructuralism is welded on to traditional disciplinary assumptions about the know ability of 'the past'. In theory, many feminist historians sympathetic to Foucauldian approaches accept that all knowledge is discursively constituted. In practice, the disciplinary desire to know that which exists outside of discourseparticularly the historical context and the terrain of 'the past' itself- asserts itself over theoretical scepticism (see for example Newton 1990:451).
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As the ongoing debate surrounding the impact of poststructuralism on feminist history suggests (see Scott and Gordon 1990; Scott and Downs 1993; Canning1994),historiansareparticularlyreluctanttofollowpoststructuralist theories to their logical conclusions. Much effort has gone into finding ways of avoiding what is often termed the 'excesses' of 'pure' discourse analysis. There are frequent calls not to abandon the female subject of history- 'real' women- and to retain a materialist analysis of social and politicalformations as a necessary corrective to a focus on discursive construction. Even within feminist Foucauldian history, the past is taken to consist of discourses plus other things that are not discourses- contexts, institutions, social relations, or a general epistemological backdrop. This dual historical vision of a world comprised of both discourse and whatever produces it is not unrelated to an ambivalence in Foucault's own thinking on the positioning of the nondiscursivewithinhistorical analysis. In The Archaeology ofKnowledge, Foucault proposes a historical method centred on the description of the rules and conventions governing the discursive formation of objects, statements and concepts. He makes it clear that, while a history of the referent is possible, his own project is aimed at dispensing with the 'things' anterior to discourse in order to allow the discourse to 'emerge in its own complexity' (1972:47). But, later in the same work, Foucault states that the archaeological description of discourses 'seeks to discover that whole domain of institutions, economic processes, and social relations on which a discursive formation can be articulated'. Because discourse does not have 'the status of pure ideality and total historical independence', archaeology wishes to uncover 'the particular level in which history can give place to definite types of discourse' (1972:164-5). Foucault's statement leaves unexamined the question of how we come to know the history that 'gives place to' various discourses. There are, however, persuasive reasons for feminists to develop a critical perspective on the domain of institutions, economic processes and social relations. Writer Barbara Brooks distinguishes between her own memories and images of a Queensland childhood and 'a historical voice that says something like this- 'Queensland history is characterised by an emphasis on material progress and development, and the lack of an urban industrial base' (Brooks 1989:30-1). The materiality of history- its economic forces, its social institutions, its political structures- represents for many women a different voice, or a'shadow history', inherited from an intellectual tradition and world view not their own (Ermarth 1989:42). That shadow history is itself a product of discourse. The Foucauldian retention of the non-discursive as a separate analytic field runs counter to that strand of postmodern thought that stresses the primacy of language and systems of thought in the production of social or historical reality. One of the principles of ironic social theory says that reality is discussable- but not much more than this (Lemert 1992:23). There may be a historical'reality'- a terrain of the non-discursive, or 'the past'- but that reality and that past cannot be known independently of the meanings given to non-discursive objects. Those meanings depend on their discursive context and thus cannot be fixed or determined in advance. Take, for example, the corset. The physical object exists, and can often be
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seen and touched. We engage with this particular assemblage of cloth, frame and fasteners as a corset - and not as a petticoat or as a hat - because it conforms to certain rules: it covers the female torso between breasts and hips, it is laced tight around the waist, it is worn under and not over a costume, it may be worn for tennis but not for bathing, it is white or pastel, hardly ever bright green. We recognise corsets as corsets because of the meanings they have acquired from pornography, from medicine, from advertising, and from feminism. These different discursive contexts give us different objects: a sexual fetish, a surgical appliance, a fashion garment, an instrument and symbol of women's oppression. To paraphrase Laclau and Mouffe, a corset is only a corset as long as it is integrated within a system of socially constructed rules (1990: 100-1). As long as every non-linguistic act is meaningful, it is also discursive. Thus the non-discursive is knowable as discourse in much the same way as, in psychoanalysis, the unconscious is knowable as dreams. What is at issue is not so much the existence of things, bodies, events, or abstract forces, but rather how we know, how we analyse and interpret, and how we use that analysis of the material phenomena of the past as a grounds for political intervention. The most corporeal of historical events, rape for example, are known, analysed and transformed through the discourses which produce them (Marcus 1992). Thus the critical work of history is necessarily performed on texts, not on whatever may lie beyond them. What does this premise, that language makes the world knowable, mean for the writing of feminist history? It suggests, for one thing, that we need to find ways of dealing with the non-discursive on the same analytical plane as the discursive. Reading even the most consistently discourse-centred history sometimes involves a jarring shift of gears between context and text. Kathleen Canning's account of the ways in which women workers contested discourses of labour, for example, moves without comment from an introductory summary paragraph describing industrial and political developments in Weimar Germany to an analysis of the discursive construction of female bodies (Canning 1994:384-5). Historical context here provides a nondiscursive and explanatory foil to the discourses which are assumed to the primary analytic object. But wars, government policies and union politics, necessarily known to us through texts, are as much discursive constructions as the pregnant, sexualised or maternal body. Which suggests that feminist historians who choose to focus on discourse need to find ways of acknowledging and dealing with the textual character of contexts and subjecting them to informed criticism. We need at least to ask ourselves how and on what intellectual and sociopolitical grounds we select and mobilise certain contexts in the reading of texts. Looked at in this way, the problem of text and context becomes in part a matter of how to theorise the exchange between past and present (LaCapra 1989:203-8; see also Kramer 1989:114-16). Feminist history's difficulties with context suggests that many of the conceptual problems that arise out of the discursive/non-discursive split apply equally to notions of the past itself. In traditional and discourse histories alike, the past is typically treated as a coherent and hitherto existing
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terrain of investigation, knowable separately from the discourses that may be found within it (Hindess and Hirst 1975:308). Foucauldian histories like other histories, refer to 'the nineteenth century', 'the Classical Age', 'the 1950s' or 'the period from 1869 to 1939'. Such formulae are taken to stand for inert, already-existing backdrops to particular epistemic moments. They are rarely treated as discursive constructions in themselves. Foucault refers to, and appears to endorse, Nietzsche's criticism of the kind of history that reduces the 'diversity of time into a totality fully closed upon itself'. Foucault then appears to leave questions of temporality aside to focus on traditional history'sbeliefineternaltruths,constantsandcontinuities(Foucault1977:1527). Other critiques of history, however, reinforce Nietzsche's observation that history tends to homogenise and totalise time. Hindess and Hirst argue that, no matter how much the past is divided up into different periods, subjects or regions, history is always constituted as a unity, as 'whatever is past' (1975:309). Mark Cousins explains history's unity in terms of the distinct theoretical protocols of upper-case History. These protocols produce the historical as a distinctive form of existence. Ultimately, all historical differences are subordinated to the identity of History itself (Cousins 1987:129). Feminist histories of discourse, too, proceed as if History is a single, discrete and containable terrain. The description of discursive complexity, contradiction and incoherence within that terrain is often very detailed, but those differences are ultimately subsumed beneath a prior difference: that between past and present. Foucault's history, claim Bennington and Young, can say about the relationship between history and the shift from one episteme and the next 'nothing more powerful than "it happened"'. History is organised around a closure, an explicit shutting down of historicity (Bennington and Young 1987). Hindess and Hirst argue from a Marxist perspective, that, because of this shutting down, 'no matter how it is conceived, [history] cannot affect present conditions. Historical events do not exist and can have no material effectivity in the present' (1975:312). Bearing in mind the familiar cry of politicians who do not want to be troubled by their past to 'leave history to the historians', Hindess and Hirst's claim warrants some consideration. Most feminist historians would, of course, argue that a historical analysis of the situation of women, or of constructions of sexual difference, or of specific discursive formations of sexuality, do have important things to say in relation to contemporary feminist politics. However, if we accept that the driving force of feminism is the analysis of the current situation- of sexual inequalities as we experience them in the present moment- then it seems to me that the political impact of feminist histories that effectively quarantine the past from the present will be relatively contained. The political implications of this closure need to be taken seriously. For those individuals and groups who are actively engaged in current political and intellectual debate, from whatever position, feminist analyses of the past may be viewed as interesting, important and worthwhile. Feminists, indeed anyone, may draw strategically on the evidence of history to support their case. History's amicable relationship with all political causes renders suspect its authority to speak in the present. Because
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the object of historical analysis is, by definition, bracketed off from present concerns, history functions as rhetoric, not as critique. Those who do not like feminist versions of history always have the option of saying that it may have been so, but what happened then has no direct bearing on now- it is only history. Any kind of inquiry conducted on the terrain of the past can be disqualified from any truth game. There may be distinct political gains for feminism if feminist history reconsidersitsattachmenttothepast.Suchareconsiderationmay,ofcourse, lead to the disturbing conclusion that without a past there can be no feminist history. Some notion of 'the past' is, after all, axiomatic to 'history' as it is usually practiced. However, it is also possible to rewrite the historical agenda in such a way that historical work does not become marginalised by a postmodern culture in which the past has lost its immunity as a separate and privileged state of existence. We might start by taking a closer look at what Foucault had to say about the relationship between history and thinking. For Foucault, history is 'the unavoidable element in our thought' (Barker 1994:53). His notion of the archive, sketched out in The Archaeology of Knowledge, offers a valuable means of investigating the process by which history is positioned within contemporary thought. Consisting of the systems that establish statements as events, the archive is the law of what can be said. The archive creates patterns out of what would otherwise be an amorphous mass of accumulated statements (1972:129). Statements are not lost in the past, but enter various fields of use according to certain rules of formation and transformation. One of the tasks of historical investigation is to discover how statements are preserved, reactivated, used, forgotten or destroyed (1972:122-3). Foucauldians engaged in what has come to be known as the history of the present have begun to indicate the value of an archaeological method to contemporary feminism. Unlike histories of discourse, the history of the present is a form of historical investigation that permits a thinking of contemporary problems in different ways. It can reveal the unstable and contingent nature of categories often taken as self-evident within feminist history- those of women, men and gender (Tyler and Johnson 1991:5). The history of the present can also open up for reflection contemporary feminism's own commonplaces and habitual actions (see for example Bell1994, and Johnson 1993).2 Archaeological projects nevertheless follow established historical practice in associating the archive with what is past and therefore clearly marked off from current truths. The analytical framework maintains a rigid past/ present dichotomy that is not always evident in linguistic practice. Wittgenstein likened language to an ancient city made up of houses extended and added to in different periods, and of older streets and town squares being constantly joined by new streets and suburbs (Lyotard 1987:40). Where Foucault's archive is time-bound, Wittgenstein's urbanisation metaphor allows us to see current discourses as a fluid amalgam of the old, the new, and every stage in between. In terms of everyday usage, it is of little significance whether a statement belongs to the past or the present or, if it belongs to history, to what period of history. Archival statements are
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fused so neatly with contemporary statements that any sharp distinction between past and present effectively dissolves. Feminists know as well as anybody else that 'we live in a world in which things have been said' (Barker 1994:79). One variety of poststructuralist feminist history might then be conceived of as the archival analysis of what is currently being said about sex, gender, the family and sexuality. History does not lie dormantly behind, it actively constitutes, all the discursive positions on single parent families, homosexual law reform, the relative disadvantages suffered by boys and girls at school, prostitution, or the effects of reproductive technology. The construction of these events as social 'problems' rests on statements produced by medical, religious, sociological or sexological systems of thought that are historical only in the sense that they are subject to a constant process of generation and regeneration. Some historians may worry that a focus on the present smooths out history's complexities and erases its false starts and blind alleys. A Foucauldian eye for discontinuity and for the principles according to which some things are said and not others- the 'law of rarity' (1972:118-20)- should avoid any slide into presentism. Deconstructive methods which expose hidden binary structures and their textual effects provide a practical means by which the history that is silenced within discourses of the present might be subject to analysis. That which is absent in one text- the repressed binary - will be present in another text or texts that precede it. The silenced other then becomes analysable as a statement from the archive, muted but essential to the production and disruption of meaning. An archival historical practice might be adapted to allow for investigations of the symbiosis of past, present and self. The development of forms of historical writing that abandon any attempt to 'say what happened' and instead acknowledge the indissolubility of fact and fiction, past and present, self and history, would be consistent with a postmodern feminist politics. One of feminism's long-standing projects has been to destabilise, not only the discipline of history, but more broadly western Enlightenment forms of knowledge that have positioned the female as inferior or subordinate to the male. Feminist historical practice that makes less safe the demilitarised zone between past and present is in this context a disruptive and explicitly political action. Kate Grenville's historical fantasy Joan Makes History (1988) suggests that histories freed from an objectivist notion of the past can produce startlingly imaginative political knowledges. This kind of historical writing not only makes new moves in the language game of history, it reinvents the rules. Thinking past and present together does not implyjettisoning the practice of historical investigation altogether, although it may provoke a more selfconscious and critical examination of history's uses, taken-for-granted rules of professional practice and theoretical assumptions (Said 1988:10; see also Cousins 1987). With history reformulated as a 'specific discursive regime' (Bennett 1990:50), feminist scholarship can begin to focus on the dynamic relationship between culture and the discursive practice of history. To take some examples from my own work, this might include looking at the function of historical narrative within arguments for and against welfare
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support for single mothers; the effects of incorporating archival footage of unmarried mothers into television documentaries on teenage pregnancy; or the different strategic uses to which Hawthorne's nineteenth century novel The Scarlet Letter has been put in historical and other social scientific accounts of the 'problem' of illegitimacy. These are examples of what I would call a 'history and' approach, as opposed to a 'history of approach. As Philip Barker argues specifically in relation to Foucault's systems of thought, thinking in terms of 'history and' disturbs the passive status granted 'history' in the 'of' formulation. The conjunction'and' gives the two concepts on either side of it equal weighting, so that each can be seen as active, mutually dependent and constitutive of the other (Barker 1994:40). The 'history and' mode can do even more useful work as a metaphor for a wider reconsideration of historical thinking. It suggests that 'history' is as much a discursive construction, and therefore requires as much intellectual scrutiny, as the object with which it is linked. In so doing, 'history and' approaches expose the political nature of historical narratives and their indispensability to processes of cultural formation. This approach might produce, for example, different readings of oral history's significance to feminism. It is now generally accepted that oral history cannot provide a reliable account of a certain event. It might, as in Luisa Passerini's work, tell us something about how female subjects deal with their memories of those events, and suggest the political significance of culturally and gender-specific ways of remembering (Passerini 1992). We can also textually analyse oral history transcripts and autobiographical accounts for the ways in which some notion of history or the past figures within, structures and facilitates the construction of personal narratives. In talking informally about my own project, I have been struck by the ease and frequency with which a variety of speakers refer to 'the past', by the different ways in which that past is imagined, and by the enabling function served by those historical references in the process of them making sense of the here and now. In this instance, the 'history and' mode opens up the relationship between thinking historically and identity formation. Another line of possible development consistent with postmodem ideas lies in investigations of how, and with what effects, the past is represented and rhetorically positioned within cultural texts of gender and sexual differencesuchastheAustralian Women's Weekly(Evans 1993;seealsoHealy 1993; Game 1991; Hamilton 1991). Historical narrative routinely serves a legitimating function in feminist as well as conservative discourse as a secure and objective foundation for political opinion. Historical scholarship has recently provided support for arguments for and against the proposition that the nuclear heterosexual family should be privileged over other, less desirable, arrangements. Historians can also contribute to a more selfcritical feminist discourse by analysing the uses of history in, for example, feminist anthropology and sociology. Other, perhaps more familiar, forms of feminist history writing effectively bypass the non-discursive. Joan Scott's essays on women's history as a field of feminist inquiry, on the contribution of deconstruction to historical analysis, and on the history of women's history as a profession, discuss the
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relationship between feminism and historical practice primarily on discursive terrain (1988a; 1991). These essays use deconstructive techniques to analyse the practice of history rather than retell the past. Scott's blend of discourse theory and historiography suggests at least one way in which feminist history can build on its status as a self-referential and critical discourse; that is, as a discipline that engages critically with the discursive construction of knowledge, including its own (see for example LaCapra 1985). I have tried to suggest here some political and intellectual advantages of working out alternative routes by which 'those who think historically' might extend and exploit feminism's relationship with poststructuralist thought. If poststructuralism requires feminists to 'think even more dangerously than usual' (Hennessy 1990:252-3), for feminist historians that means thinking dangerously about the past. But I believe that feminist history has more to lose than to gain in exempting itself from that strand of contemporary intellectual culture that has irretrievably lost faith in an objectively knowable reality. By relinquishing its professional attachment to a real past and remaking itself as an archaeological but present-centred project, feminist history becomes a quite specific and indispensable tool in the analysis of contemporary sexual cultures. The kind of feminist historical practice that reveals how history works in the present, that discovers the ways in which the archive gives to us what can be said and thought now about sex and gender, promises to make historical work a much more dangerous pursuit.3 1 By 'feminist history' I mean histories which take as their central problematic questions, those to do with sex, gender, women and sexual difference and in which feminist modes of thought, political strategies and research constitute the main epistemological frame of reference. Although I have chosen to focus here on a relatively discrete body of historical literature, my comments apply to most forms of contemporary history writing. 2 My impression is that Foucauldians with a background in literary and cultural studies write histories of the present, while historians usually write histories of discourse. Australian Foucauldians who have adopted a history-of-the-present approach have tended to focus on issues surrounding childhood, education and citizenship. This division of labour suggests that feminist historians have so far been reluctant to adopt wholesale Foucault's archaeological method. 3 My thanks to Barbara Sullivan, Sarah Lloyd, Carolyn Strange, Maureen Perkins, Jill Matthews, Alison Mackinnon, Jonathan Fulcher,Alison Bashford and Christine Owen for helpful comments and suggestions. I am also grateful to Tony Bennett for comments on an earlier, related paper, which helped me write this one.
References Alcoff, Linda (1988). 'Cultural Feminism versus Post-Structuralism: the Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory', Signs, 13(3):405-436. Barker, Philip (1994). Michel Foucault. Subversions of the Subject. St. Leonards: Allen and Unwin. Barrett, Michele and Anne Phillips (eds) (1992). Destabilizing Theory. Contemporary Feminist Debates, Cambridge: Polity Press. Bell, Shannon (1994). Reading, Writing and Rewriting the Prostitute Body, Bloomington:
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Bennett, Tony (1990). Outside Literature. London and New York: Routledge. Bennington, Geoff and Robert Young (1987). 'Introduction: Posing the Question', in Derek Attridge, Geoff Bennington and Robert Young (eds), Post-Structuralism and the Question of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brooks, Barbara (1989). 'Maps', in Drusilla Modjeska (ed.), Inner Cities. Australian Women's Memory of Place. Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin. Canning, Kathleen. (1994). 'Feminist History After the Linguistic Turn: Historicizing Discourse and Experience', Signs, 19(2):368-404. Cousins, Mark (1987). 'The Practice of Historical Investigation', in Derek Attridge, Geoff Bennington and Robert Young (eds ), Post-Structuralism and the Question of History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Diamond, Irene and Lee Quinby (eds). Feminism and Foucault. Reflections on Resistance, Boston: Northeastern University Press. Downs, Laura Lee (1993). 'If 'Woman' is Just an Empty Category, Then Why Am I Afraid toWalk Alone at Night? Identity Politics Meets the Postmodern Subject', Comparative Studies in Society and History, 35(2):414-437; and Reply to Joan Scott, pp.444-51. Evans, Kathryn (1993). 'Constructions of the Past in the Australian Women's Weekly in the 1980s', M.A. thesis (Applied History), University of Technology, Sydney. Foucault, Michel (1972 [1969]). The Archaeology of Knowledge, New York: Pantheon Books. __ _, (1973). The Order of Things. An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, New York: Vintage Books. __ _, (1977). Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. __ _, (1990 [1976]). The History of Sexuality Vol. 1, London: Penguin. __ _, (1991 [1975]). Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison. London: Penguin. Game, Ann (1991). Undoing the Social: Towards a Deconstructive Sociology, Buckingham: Open University Press. Gordon, Linda (1990). 'Response to Scott' and 'Review of Joan Wallach Scott's Gender and the Politics of History, Signs, Summer, pp.852-8. Grenville, Kate (1988). Joan Makes History. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Hamilton, Paula (1991). "Stranger Than Fiction': the Daily Mirror 'Historical Feature", in John Rickard and Peter Spearritt (eds), Packaging the Past? Public Histories, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press/ Australian Historical Studies. Healy, Chris (1993). 'Eliza Back in Danger: Historical Events and Cultural Imagination', paper presented to the 'Bring a Plate' Feminist Cultural Studies Conference, Melbourne. Hekman, Susan J. (1992). Gender and Knowledge: Elements of a Postmodern Feminism, Oxford: Blackwell. Hennessy, Rosemary (1990). 'Materialist Feminism and Foucault: The Politics of Appropriation', Rethinking Marxism, 3( 3-4):252-274. Hindess, Barry and Paul Q. Hirst (1975). Pre-capitalist Modes of Production, London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
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Hoff, Joan (1993). 'The Pernicious Effects ofPoststructuralism on Women's History', The Chronicle of Higher Education, 20 October. Jeffreys, Sheila (1993). The Lesbian Heresy. A Feminist Perspective on the Lesbian Sexual Revolution, North Melbourne: Spinifex Press. Johnson, Lesley (1993). The Modern Girl. Girlhood and Growing Up, St. Leonards: Allen and Unwin. Kramer, Lloyd S. (1989). 'Literature, Criticism, and Historical Imagination: The Literary Challenge of Hayden White and Dominick LaCapra', in Lynn Hunt (ed.), The New Cultural History, Berkeley: University of California Press. LaCapra, Dominick (1985). History and Criticism, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. __ _, (1989). Soundings in Critical Theory, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe (1990). 'Post-Marxism Without Apologies', in Ernesto Laclau (ed.), New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, London and New York: Verso. Lemert, Charles (1992). 'General Social Theory, Irony, Postmodernism', in Steven Seidman and David G. Wagner (eds), Postmodernism and Social Theory, Cambridge, MA. and Oxford: Blackwell. Lyotard, Jean-Fran~ois (1984 [1979]). The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Manchester: University of Manchester Press. McNay, Lois (1992). Foucault and Feminism. Power, Gender and the Self, Cambridge: Polity Press. Marcus, Sharon (1992). 'Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words: a Theory and Politics of Rape Prevention', in Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (eds),Feminists Theorise the Political, New York and London: Routledge. Newman, Louise M. (1991). 'Critical Theory and the History of Women: What's at Stake in Deconstructing Women's History', Journal of Women's History, 2(3):5868. Newton, Judith (1990). 'Historicisms Old and New: 'Charles Dickens' Meets Marxism, Feminism and West Coast Feminism', Feminist Studies, 16(3):449-470. Nicholson, Linda J. (ed.) (1990). Feminism/Postmodernism, New York and London: Routledge. Passerini, Luisa (1992). 'A Memory for Women's History: Problems of Method and Interpretation', Social Science History, 16(4):669-692. Poovey, Mary (1988). Uneven Developments. The Ideological Work of Gender in MidVictorian England, Chicago: University of Illinois Press. __ _, (1990). 'Speaking of the Body: Mid-Victorian Constructions of Female Desire', in Mary Jacobus, Evelyn Fox-Keller and Sally Shuttleworth (eds), Body/Politics. Women and the Discourses of Science, New York and London: Routledge. Riley, Denise (1988). 'Am I That Name?' Feminism and the Category of 'Women' in History, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Said, Edward W. (1988). 'Michel Foucault 1926-1984', in Jonathan Arac (ed.), After Foucault. Humanistic Knowledge, Postmodern Challenges, New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press. Sawicki, Jana (1991). Disciplining Foucault. Feminism, Power and the Body, New York: Routledge.
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Scott, Joan W. (1988a). Gender and the Politics of History, New York: Colombia University Press. ___, (1988b). 'Deconstructing Equality-versus-Difference: or, the Uses of Poststructuralist Theory for Feminism', Feminist Studies, 14(1):33-50. __ _, (1991). 'The Evidence of Experience', Critical Inquiry, 17, Summer, pp.773-797. __ _, (1991). 'New Perspectives on Historical Writing', in Peter Burke (ed.), New Perspectives on Historical Writing, Cambridge: Polity Press. Tyler, Deborah and Lesley Johnson (1991). 'Helpful Histories?', History of Education Review, 20(2):1-8. Weed, Elizabeth (ed.) (1989). Coming to Terms. Feminism, Theory, Politics, New York and London: Routledge.
Poststructuralism, Feminism and the Question of Rape: Rethinking the 1 Desexualisation' Politics of Michel Foucault !l(jjfie Steplien Introduction Feminists have drawn extensively on the poststructuralist argument that subjectivity is constructed through language and is therefore a culturally specific mixture of various subject positions. Specifically, Foucault's idea that sexuality is not a natural quality of the body, but rather the effect of historically specific power relations has provided feminists with a powerful analytical framework by which to explain how women's experience is controlled by culturally determined images of feminine sexuality. Foucault's theory of the body has given feminist thought a way of conceiving of the bodyasaconcretephenomenonwithoutaligningitsmaterialitywithafixed biological essence (McNay 1992:2-11). It is amid this strategic use of Foucault's work that feminists have made significanthiscommentsonrapeandrapelawreform.Foucault'scomments on rape were recorded as part of a series of debates on Criminal Law Reform in France (1977) and fed into feminist discussions of sexuality and power as they affect women in the rape context. Largely, his work on rape was criticised for not paying enough attention to the unequal nature of sexual disciplinary techniques on the body and was considered unable to be utilised for a feminist theory on rape. The aim of my paper is to explore the possibility of maintaining Foucault's 'desexualisation politics' for a feminist discourse on rape. First, I will outline Foucault's position on rape, illustrating how his thoughts on rape are premised on his theoretical arguments relating to sex and sexuality as presented in The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (1986). Second, using Bell's (1991) analysis, it can be argued that different views on what constitutes 'sex' in rape discourse have led to an impasse in theorising the function of rape in society between Foucault and feminist theorists. I argue that an awareness of this issue can be helpful in directing a more productive collaboration on the problem of rape. Third, I will present a critique of Foucault's position on rape. Specifically, I will argue that Foucault's conceptions of 'sex', 'power', and 'violence' are limited in that they fail to recognise how the nonegalitarian social structure of sexuality between men and women, is crucial to understanding the harm of rape and hence why violence as a discursive solution to rape is problematic. I also argue that the discursively constructed body plays a significant role in defining its own subjectivity, and consequently, has the ability to resist rape and the cultural meanings attached to rape. Fourth, I will compare Foucault's ideas on rape to those of a contemporary deconstruction feminist, Sharon Marcus. My overall contention will be that feminism can utilise Foucault's framework of
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rape analysis for actively fighting against rape, as illustrated in the work of Marcus.
Foucault on Rape In a volume published in 1977 by the Change Collective, titled La folie
encerclee Michel Foucault proposed that rape should be treated as an act of violence, like a punch in the face, rather than a sexual act. Whereas rape has traditionallybeendefinedasasexualactinthatitinvolvesthesexualorgans, is frequently a sexual activity, and often involves the two sexes (male and female), Foucault argues for the 'desexualisation' of rape, whereby only the physical violence of rape should be punishable (Plaza 1981:27). This is a strategic approach he is taking towards rape law. It is not that Foucault thinks there is no sexual element to rape only that he wants to remove the focus on the sexual element. Foucault's position on rape can be seen to be premised on his theory of sex and sexuality as explicated in the History of Sexuality (1986). In this text, Foucault argues that sex is a fictitious object that functions as an instrument of domination. Sex purports to refer to a transcendent entity existing independently of all social practices. However he states: 'the notion of sex made it possible to group together, in an artificial unity, anatomical elements [and] biological functions,. .. and it enabled one to make use of this fictitious unity as ... an omnipresent meaning' (Foucault 1986:154). Foucault denies there are any positive characteristics of bodies 'as they really are'. Foucault argues instead that sex is socially constructed for 'sex is [an] element in a deployment of sexuality organised by power in its grip on bodies and their materiality' (Foucault 1986:155. Emphasis added). Sexuality is the technology of the self by which individuals turn themselves into subjects. Sexuality is a discursive formation, it is not a fact or property of the body, nor does it derive from the sex of the body. Both sex and sexuality are deployed for reasons of constraining and manipulating bodies and individuals. In relation to rape, Foucault argues that we should refuse to see the 'sex' of our bodies as anything more or different from other parts of the body, in order to avoid 'the operations of the discourses of the deployment of sexuality' (Bell1991:96). To treat rape as a sexual crime and to separate it out from other crimes against the body 'colludes with the deployment of sexuality' that Foucault talks about (Bell1991:87). Foucault contends, therefore, that rape be 'desexualised' because it has only been 'regarded as a sexual crime due to the operations of power /knowledge which have structured our understanding of the body' (Bell1991:96). For Foucault, a discursive strategic focus on violence is seen as the solution to the problem of seeing rape as sexual. He believes that 'by collapsing the crime of rape into the crime of assault, one avoids power' (Bell1991:90).
Bell's Discussion of Foucault When Foucault wrote on rape in 1977 his work entered into an existing debate between feminists over the nature of rape. Foucault appeared to take the side of those feminist thinkers, such as Brownmiller, who were demanding that rape be considered an act of violence, just as feminist theory seemed to be moving to a position of discussing rape as sexual again, only in terms
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of sex-as-sexuality and not as desire (the work of MacKinnon and Plaza falls into this latter category). An important analysis of the debate between Foucault and feminist theorists who advocate that rape is sexual, has been made by Vicki Bell in her article 'Beyond the "Thorny Question": Feminism, Foucault and the desexualisation of rape' (1991). Bell suggests that the form of the question, 'Is rape about sex or violence?', upon which the debate between these theorists takes place, is unhelpful in fully understanding and appreciating the specificity of the arguments of the various contributors to the debate (Bell1991:83). Bell contends that there are a number of different meanings attached to the central term of the debate- sex. Consequently, the proposition that rape is/is not sexual can convey a number of different perspectives. First, there is the conception of sex as anatomy that is directly utilised by Foucault where sex is equivalent to the genitalia. Foucault contends, however, that this anatomy is inherently unstable because it is discursively constructed by particular power/knowledge regimes. For Foucault, then, rape is not about sex if sex is about the genitals. Second, there is the conception of sex as sexuality. Catherine MacKinnon argues that rape is about sex in that the social construction of sexuality is relevant to the analysis of rape. She suggests that the violation of women has been sexualised in Western culture, and as such, rape needs to be theorised in relation to sex because to fail to do so only 'preserve[s] the myth that sex is an untainted realm of mutual desire' (Bell1991:93). Rape is also sexual for Dumaresq because it is the location at which discourses intersect to construct particular sexual behaviours through rape and rape law. She contends, that what is problematic about these specific sexualities is that they function to construct permissible and impermissible spheres of sexuality for women (Dumaresq 1981:55 I 56). Third, there is the conception of sex as gender. Plaza argues this position by claiming that it is social sexing which underlies rape, because it is about the ways in which masculine people treat feminine people. Rape is sexual because it is about the relations between men and women. Bell concludes that the dualistic structure of the question 'Is rape about sex or violence?' works to conceal these different usages of the term sex (Bell 1991:91). The significance of Bell's analysis for an evaluation of Foucault's theory on rape is twofold. First, being aware that there are different conceptions of sex that are employed in this debate leads to an appreciation of how the impasse between theorists of rape has occurred. Second, from this position of analysis, a space opens up from which change to rape discourse, which incorporates both Foucauldian and feminist conceptions, can occur. ItmaybethatFoucault'stheoriesofpower,discourseandsexualitystillhave utility, but in relation to a different conception of what constitutes the 'sexual' of rape. From this analysis we are able to recognise the problem of rape as a discursive conflict and, thus, develop new discursive ways of understanding it further.
A Critique of Foucault's Position on Rape Following Bell's analysis that it is the manner in which three key terms, sex, violence and power, are theorised in relation to each other that leads to the various positions in the rape debate, I wish to critique Foucault's position on
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these key terms. I aim to move beyond Bell's study, by indicating a manner of theorising these three key terms by which we do not have to abandon Foucault's 'desexualisation politics' as unfeminist. As previously stated, Foucault argues that in order to avoid the deployment of power that constructs sexuality in the rape scenario, rape should be treated as an assault of violence and not as a sexual crime. By violence, Foucault means direct physical force. Thus, Bell argues, like those early feminist theorists who discussed rape as violence in order to avoid the sex-as-desire contraction, Foucault uses violence as a 'category of behaviour' which denies the other person autonomy over their body (Bell1991:97). However, violence cannot be used unproblematically in the sense that Foucault wishes it could - as a discursive solution to the problem of rape. First, there is the question of 'What constitutes violence, or how do you define violence?' Using violence as the basis on which rapists should be punished poses problems of how the violence that is rape should be categorised in relation to other forms of violence, in the same manner that crimes against the person have been traditionally considered according to the terms of physical damage inflicted. I assert that in the context of rape, Foucault 'forgets' his own perception of 'discourse as a violence which we do to things, or in any case as a practice which we impose on them' (Foucault 1981:67), as playing any part in the construction of physical violence. Thus, he forgets that physical violence is discursively constructed. Second, there is the specifically feminist concern that by using the term violence as a discursive solution to the problem of rape, the interrelations between the terms violence and sexuality are hidden (Bell1991:98). I argue that MacKinnon has made a substantive argument that in contemporary Western society 'to the extent that coercion has become integral to male sexuality, rape may even be sexual to the degree that, and because, it is violent' (MacKinnon 1989:173). In this sense then, violence, and the form violence takes is always contextual, and an evaluation of this context, in whatever form, is essential to formulating violence as a 'category of behaviour' which can become the basis for punishment of a particular act- namely rape. Foucault conceptualises power as operating through discourses that shape our understandings of our body and hence ourselves (Bell1991:96). It is this power which 'shapes' that Foucault wishes to escape. However, a powerful critique of this notion of power, comes from feminists who, Bell argues, contend that '[p ]ower is seen to be the model of authority, and the ability to do as one pleases. It is, furthermore, embodied as opposed to formed within discourse' (Bell 1991:97. Emphasis added). In trying to avoid the deployment of sexuality, feminists argue that Foucault is ignoring a specific component of that power, the existence of social differences between the sexes which, they argue, are an element of rape. Thus, feminists such as Plaza, argue that Foucault's 'desexualisation politics' of rape is asking us to accept the status quo of nonegalitarian social and sexual relations as they relate between men and women. In terms of my analysis of Foucault's work on rape, this analysis of power means a number of things. First, it indicates that the notion of power is
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central to both Foucault and feminists who theorise rape, but that they engage the term with a different aim and premised on different theoretical underpinnings. Second, I argue that the strength of feminist analyses of rape, is that they understand that there are different levels at which power operates, and that the level of power operation between men and women is a significant component of rape analysis. Third, I argue that Foucault's principle for 'desexualising' rape is a suitable means by which to fight rape from a feminist perspective, if used in relation to the specific form of power that feminists identify. Foucault has recognised the operation of power at the very general level of the deployment of sexuality and has suggested that this power can be subverted in the instance of rape by denying the significance that social constructions of sex establish in terms of the self. Feminists on the other hand, have fought for the recognition of specific forms of power and deployments of sexuality that relate to rape, but have remained at the point of claiming their reality for women. In constantly affirming the reality of sexual inequality, feminists are placing themselves in a position from which the possibilities for a solution to the problem of rape are limited because they too are affirming the status quo of unequal social and sexual relations. In terms of the third concept, sex, what can be determined from the discussion so far, is that Foucault's conception of sex as anatomy is limited because it is premised on a limited principle of power and the deployment of sexuality. In trying to subvert the power that shapes our understandings of our bodies, Foucault forgets that there are at least two kinds of bodies male and female- and that there is a significant critique to be made in terms of how different kinds of bodies are discursively marked in different ways and how the discursively marked body shapes its own subjectivity. A significant but, I argue, overlooked element ofFoucault's conception of power as it relates to subjectivity, is his premise that 'where there is power, there is resistance' (Foucault 1986:95). Foucault argues that there are a plurality of resistances to power (Foucault 1986:96). Thus, could not the body itself be a site of resistance? Even when Foucault contends that resistance should not be attributed to some unique locus of revolt, it can be argued that the 'body as discourse' can thwart power, because although 'discourse transmits and produces power ... [it] also undermines and exposes it' (Foucault 1986:101). An examination of the conception of resistance to power through the body can be located within the work of two contemporary Australian feminist theorists who analyse the sex/ gender distinction- Elizabeth Grosz and Moira Gatens. The theoretical principles which both Grosz and Gatens apply to their conceptions of the body in terms of the sex/ gender debate, can be used in terms of rethinking Foucault's theory of power and the subversion of the deployment of sex in rape, through a politics of' desexualisation'. Grosz argues, like Foucault, that bodies are moulded, constructed, socially formed and culturally specified. However, Grosz contends that the body should not be seen as a mere writing surface through which 'the body's interiority is produced through its exterior inscription' (Grosz 1987:10). Rather, she argues, we need to consider the ways in which subjects are able
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to act, for the body not only disseminates power, but is a 'potential object of resistance to power' because it is 'capable of being self-marked, self-represented in alternative ways' (Grosz 1990:64). Grosz argues that for Foucault's theory of the body to be relevant to feminist theory, feminists have to make clear that there is no neutralised corporeality, but only sexed, specific bodies. Gatens contends further that different kinds of bodies have different social value and significance that, in turn, has a marked effect on the way we perceive and make sense of our bodies (Gatens 1983:148). Gatens does not mean to 'imply any commitment to an essence of the social significance of bodily functions or experiences'. Her point is to indicate that 'the body can and does intervene, to confirm or to deny, various social significances' (1983:149). Gatens argues that the same behaviour has different social significance when acted out by the male subject on one hand and the female subject on the other. Masculine and feminine forms of behaviour are not arbitrary inscriptions on neutral and indifferent bodies. Rather it is biology as lived in particular social contexts that accounts for the cultural construction of sexuality. By drawing attention to the way in which bodies are not passive, neutral objects upon which discourses construct identity, the notion of the unproblematic biological body as the factual base upon which sexuality is ascribed is subverted. Drawing attention to the way in which bodies actively create and recreate themselves, also illustrates that bodies are lived and constituted within a network of bodies; the action of one effects the actions and experiences of others. Thus, a conception of the body as a point of resistance to power and a means of subverting the deployment of sexuality, becomes available to the subject through their very lived existence. This modification on Foucault's conception of power creates a discursive space in which feminists can theorise rape and a means of preventing it, based on Foucault's principle for 'desexualising' rape.
Marcus on Rape - Similarities and Differences with Foucault In her article, 'Fighting bodies, fighting words: A theory and politics of rape
prevention' (1992), Marcus criticises those feminists who posit rape as a fact of women's lives and who oppose the textual, poststructuralist view of rape as insisting on the indeterminacy of rape as an event, on the basis that their theories always posit rape has already having occurred, and as women as either already raped or rapable (Marcus 1992:386). Marcus argues that poststructuralists also discuss rape as something which has already happened, and women as inherently rapable. Both attack the problem in the form of after-the-event strategies, for example rape law reform. Marcus contends that continuing to discuss rape in this manner only contributes to, and reinforces, the view of women as inherently able to be violated. However, Marcus does believe that there is something which can be salvaged from the poststructuralist position, and that is its focus on the textuality of rape. Marcus argues that in order to refuse to recognise rape as the reality of women's lives, rape should be treated as a language (Marcus 1992:388). Understanding rape as a language involves understanding that 'rape is
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enabled by narratives, complexes and institutions which derive their strength ... from their power to structure our lives as imposing cultural scripts' (Marcus 1992:388). Thus, where rape is understood as language, we can account for rape's prevalence and its potential prevention, because the language of any cultural script is open to change. Where does Marcus' work intersect with Foucault's work on rape? How does it differ? First, where Foucault understands 'sex' to mean anatomy in the rape context, Marcus conceives of 'sex' in the sense of both 'gender' and 'sexuality'. Marcus utilises the perspective of sex as gender when she talks about rape as being scripted. In this instance, Marcus is referring to cultural constructions of what constitutes men's and women's behaviour. Sheargues that the rape script determines that men and women follow the social roles set out for them within the cultural dialogue of unequal sexual relations. When discussing rape as scripting, Marcus applies the notion of sex as sexuality. Like Dumaresq, Marcus is concerned with rape as the site of specific constructions of female and male sexuality, that of the active male and the passive female. Second, where Foucault discusses violence as directphysicalforce, Marcus focuses on the notion of violence as discourse and language. In theorising rape as a language, Marcus asserts that there is a discursive representation at work which determines the concept of violence and its manifestation as social practice. There is an' order of language which speaks violence- names certain behaviours and events as violent, but not others, and constructs objects and subjects of violence' (de Lauretis 1987:32). Marcus is also concerned with the ability of language to itself produce violence. Thus, Marcus takes on board Foucault's theory that discourse is violent because it is controlling of subjectivity. However, she applies this theory to the construction of 'physical violence' itself- the type that Foucault considers to be a discursive solution to the problem of rape. Thus, Marcus attempts to subvert the construction of what constitutes violence and who is allowed to be the legitimate object and subject of violence. This would appear to amount to a 'desexualisation of violence', for the construction of violence in rape is a part of the deployment of sexuality. This is something that Foucault does not address in his theory of rape. Third, power for Marcus, as for Foucault, is associated with discourses that surround the body and create sex. In defining rape as a language, Marcus is illustrating the manner in which sexuality is socially constructed through the capacity of language to 'name'. Marcus is quite comfortable with the poststructuralist notion of the inseparability of 'text and world', and illustrates this by arguing that there are means of intervening in the rape script which can subvert the manner in which the language of violence has positioned, and continues to position, women as amenable to the realisation of rape. However, there are two differences between Marcus' understanding of power and Foucault's. First, Marcus is specifically interested in how power and discourse have been used against women. Second, she is also interested in resistance to power, specifically the ability of the body, as a discursive construction, to resist and reshape power relations. It is Marcus' contention
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that women should use their bodies to deny the sex roles that the language of violence, and the rape script, appoints them. Marcus points out that 'the grammar of violence defines rape as an act committed against a subject of fear and not against a subject of violence', thus 'by fighting back, we [women] cease to be grammatically correct feminine subjects and thus become much less legible as rape targets' (Marcus 1992:396). Marcus, subsequently, agrees with Foucault's argument that we should' desexualise' rape, that we should see rape as equal to other crimes against the body. For Marcus, the harm in rape is in the construction of specific sexualities that define women through their bodies. Clearly, however, there are different or more specific forms of sex, power and violence that Marcus wishes to subvert, using Foucault's principle of 'desexualisation'.
How does Marcus utilise Foucault's work for a Feminist theory of Rape Prevention? Marcus' analysis of rape moves beyond the impasse of current feminist thinking, to a position beyond the dualistic structure of the question 'Is rape about sex or violence?'. I argue that Marcus has renegotiated the manner in which the three terms- sex, violence, and power- are theorised in relation to each other in the context of rape, utilising aspects of both Foucault's work onrape,andtheworkoffeministtheoristsonrape.IarguethatwhatMarcus does, is modify or extend Foucault's theoretical principles, and uses them in relation to feminist concerns and objectives. How does this come together in terms of Marcus' theory of rape prevention? In theorising rape as a language, I argue, Marcus clearly accepts Foucault's general theory of power and the ability of discourse to shape subjectivity. Marcus argues that in the instance of rape, the language of violence is scripted according to cultural codes of who is the correct and legitimate object and subject of violence and, in turn, the victim and perpetrator of the rape are ascribed specific roles in society. Marcus contends that the deployment of such a discourse of violence and rape has worked against the interests and protection of women, thus, she wishes to subvert or avoid power as it is enacted in the rape scenario. Marcus desires to manipulate language in order that women may represent themselves in more positive ways. This can still be achieved in the strategy Foucaultsetout-'desexualising' rape. However, I assert that it is the specifically sexed nature of violence that Marcus seeks to redress and which Foucault fails to address in their respective analyses of rape. Thus, Marcus' use of the strategy of 'desexualisation' differs in two ways from the manner in which Foucault intended it be used. First, Marcus applies the politics of desexualisation to the specific unequal relation between the sexes that is reinforced by the construction of specific sexualities in rape, whereas Foucault applies the politics of desexualisation strictly in terms of anatomy and the naming of specific parts of the body as special. Second, Marcus asserts that women should utilise the politics of'desexualisation' themselves, in the very instance of an attempted rape, rather than in the context of after-the-event activities, such as legal recourse. I contend that within this suggestion lies Marcus' modification to
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Foucault's theory of power, and that is the ability of discursively constructed bodies to resist and shape their own subjectivity. Marcus is suggesting that women break the rape script and hence the power of discourse to control subjectivity by assertively using their bodies to subvert the gendering and gendered violence that is rape. By acting in ways that go against their ascribed role in the rape script, women no longer fulfil the characteristics that define a subject of fear. Rape is' desexualised' in this instant, in that one of the key actors in the rape scenario - the victim - resists the particular deployment of sexuality that they consider oppressive. Marcus argues that applying the politics of 'desexualisation' in the rape script as opposed to after, is more useful in preventing rape in that it serves women's immediate interest, and that is to avoid being raped. In Foucault's call to desexualise rape in the context of rape law, the rape has already literally occurred, thus the very act which is to be avoided has already taken place. Finally, the manner in which Marcus advocates women utilise their bodies to subvert the rape script and the deployment of sexuality would appear to be in concert with Foucault's assertion that violence be used as a discursive solution to rape. In a sense this is correct. Marcus advocates that a feminist discourse on rape can be developed when male violence against women is displaced in the rape script, and women's capacity for agency and violence is put in place (Marcus 1992:395). What differs about Marcus' use of violence as physical force, is that she utilises it with the objective of avoiding not only the violence of language but also the language of violence. If women engage in forms of physical violence against their aggressors, they can prevent the harm of rape which is the violence of discourse to shape sexuality. Women's use of physical violence can also redefine what constitutes violence, or at least who are the legitimate perpetrators of violence. Marcus does not use physical violence as a discursive solution in the sense that Foucault envisaged- as an end to the problem, replacing one word 'sex' in the rape text with another word 'violence', - but rather as a means by which discourse that shapes physical violence and sexuality can be reformulated. Marcus uses Foucault's theory of power and discourse and his politics of 'desexualisation' to contradict the deployment of sexuality that takes place in the context of rape and make room for new cultural constructions that acknowledge women's agency. In doing so, Marcus applies Foucault's 'desexualisation politics' to modified notions of'sex', 'violence' and 'power' which recognise the specificity of unequal social and sexual relations between men and women, and the power of individual bodies to resist power and shape their own subjectivity.
Conclusion I have attempted to show that Foucault's politics of 'desexualisation' is not beyond feminist appropriation in relation to rape. Where his notions of sex, violence and power have been illustrated to be insufficient for feminist purposes, modifications have been made that render his thoughts applicable for feminist discourse on rape. A significant critique of Foucault's thoughts on rape indicated three major problems. First, his notion of sex-as-
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anatomy was seen to be limited in thatitfailed to appreciate thenonegalitarian sexual and social relations that exist between men and omen in society, and that therefore make rape sexual. Second, Foucault's notion of violence was found to be problematic in that, like sex, it is a discursively constructed concept. Thus, Foucault failed to appreciate that the violence of rape is fundamentally derived from the asymmetrical construction of sexual relations. Third, Foucault's notion of power left undeveloped the nature of bodies to resist and, thus, the ability of women to fight against, or manipulate, the deployment of sexuality in the rape context. Consequently, from this critique, a pathway through the impasse of rape analyses emerged. Through the work of Sharon Marcus, I illustrated that it was possible to apply Foucault's principle for subverting power, his 'desexualisation politics', to the specific problem of power as it relates to rape, that of the nonegalitarian sexual relations between men and women. Using feminist theory, a conception of the body as a point of resistance to power came into being, and a means of subverting the deployment of sexuality became available to the subject through their very lived existence and in the context of the rape scenario. Using the framework proposed by Bell, a deeper understanding of the various perspectives on the rape debate was achieved. From this analysis, a space opened up from which change to rape discourse, which incorporates both Foucauldian and feminist conceptions, can occur. As previously stated, we are able to recognise the problem of rape as a discursive conflict and, thus, develop new discursive ways of understanding and theorising it further. Significantly, it can be argued that all is not lost for feminism, in Foucault's theory of 'desexualising' rape and a pathway through the impasse of dichotomous thinking can be theorised.
Bibliography Balbus, Isaac D. (1988). 'Disciplining women: Michel Foucault and the power of feminist discourse', in J. Arac (ed.) After Foucault: Humanistic Knowledge, Postmodern Challenges, London: Rutgers University Press, pp.138-160. Bell, Vicki (1991). 'Beyond the "thorny question": Feminism, Foucault and the desexualisation of rape', International Journal of the Sociology of Law, 19, pp.83100. Benhabib, Seyla (1992). Situating the Self Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics, Cambridge: Polity Press. Best, Steven and Douglas Kellner (1991). Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations, London: Macmillan. Braidotti, Rosi (1986). 'The ethics of sexual difference: The case of Foucault and Irigaray', Australian Feminist Studies, 3, pp.1-13. Cousins, Mark and Athar Hussain. (1984). Michel Foucault, London: Macmillan, Chapters 8 and 9. de Lauretis, Teresa. (1987). 'The violence of rhetoric: Considerations on representation and gender', Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film and Fiction, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, pp.31-50. Diamond, Irene and Lee Quinby. (1988). 'American feminism and the language of control', in Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance, Boston: Northeastern Uni Press, pp.193-206.
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Dumaresq, Delia. (1981 ). 'Rape- Sexuality in the law',M/F: A Feminist Journal, pp.4159. Edwards, Anne. (1989). 'The sex/ gender distinction: Has it outlived its usefulness?'. Australian Feminist Studies, 10, pp.1-12. Foucault, Michel. (1977). Discipline and Punish: The Birth ofthe Prison, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. __ _, (1980). Power/Knowledge. Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, Colin Gordon (ed.) Brighton: The Harvester Press. __ _, (1981). 'The order of discourse',in Robert Young (ed.) Untying the Text: A Post Structuralist Reader, Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, pp.48-78. __ _, (1986a). The History of Sexuality. Volume One: An Introduction, (translated from the French by Robert Hurley) New York: Vintage Books. __ _, (1986b). The Use of Pleasure. Volume Two of the History of Sexuality, (translated from the French by Robert Hurley). New York: Vintage Books. __ _, (1988). 'Technologies of the self', in Luther Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick Hutton (eds) Technologies of the Self A Seminar with Michel Foucault, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, pp.16-49. Fraser, Nancy (1989). Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory, Cambridge: Polity Press, pp.SS-66. Gatens, Moira (1983). 'A critique of the sex/ gender distinction', in Judith Allen and Paul Patton (eds) Beyond Marxism? Interventions After Marx, NSW: Intervention Publication Collective, pp.143-160 Gatens,Moira (1989). 'Womanandherdouble(s): Sex, gender and ethics',Australian Feminist Studies, 10, pp.33-48. __ _,Moira (1992). 'Power, bodies and difference', in Michele Barrett and Anne Phillips (eds) Destabilising Theory: Contemporary Feminist Debates, Cambridge: Polity Press, pp.120-137. Grosz, Elizabeth (1987). 'Notes towards a corporeal feminism', Australian Feminist Studies,5, pp.1-16. __ _, (1990). 'Inscriptions and body-maps: Representations and the corporeal', in Terry Threadgold and Anne Cranny Francis (eds) Feminine, Masculine and Representation, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, pp.62-74. Kirby, Vicki (1991). 'Corpus delicti: The body at the scene of writing', in Rosalyn Diprose and Robyn Ferrell (eds) Cartographies: Poststructuralism and the Mapping of Bodies and Spaces, NSW: Allen and Unwin, pp.88-100. MacKinnon, C. (1989). Towards a Feminist Theory of the State, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. Marcus, Sharon. (1992). 'Fighting bodies, fighting words: A theory and politics of rape prevention', in Judith Butler and Joan W Scott (eds) Feminists Theorise the Political, New York: Routledge, pp 385-403. McNay, Lois (1992). Foucault and Feminism: Power, Gender and the Self, Cambridge: Polity Press. Outram, Dorinda (1989). The Body and the French Revolution: Sex, Class and Political Culture, New Haven: Yale University Press. Patton, Paul (1994). 'Foucault's subject of power', Political Theory Newsletter,6, pp.6071.
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Plaza, Monique (1980). 'Our costs and their benefits', M/F: A Feminist Journal, 4, pp.28-39. Plaza, Monique (1981). 'Our damages and their compensation. Rape: The will not to know of Michel Foucault', Feminist Issues, Summer, pp.25-35. Ryan, Alan (1993). 'Foucault's life and hard times- Book Review', The New York Review, AprilS, pp.12-17. Sawicki, Jana (1988a ). 'Identity politics and sexual freedom: Foucault and feminism', in Diamond and Quinby (eds). Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance, Boston: Northeastern University Press, pp.177-191. Sawicki, Jana (1988b ). 'Feminism and the power of Foucauldian discourse', in J. Arac (ed.) After Foucault: Humanistic Knowledge, Postmodern Challenges, London: Rutgers University Press, pp.161-78. Sawicki, Jana (1991). 'Foucault and feminism: Toward a politics of difference', in Mary Lyndon Shanley and Carole Pateman (eds) Feminist Interpretations and Political Theory, Cambridge: Polity Press, pp.217-31. Stem, Lesley (1980). 'Introduction to Plaza', M/F: A Feminist Journal, 4, pp.21-7. Tong, Rosemarie (1992). Feminist Thought: A Comprehensive Introduction, London: Routledge. Turkel, Gerald (1990). 'Michel Foucault: Law, power and knowledge', Journal of Law and Society, 17, pp.170-193. Woodhull, Winifred (1988). 'Sexuality, power, and the question of rape', in Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby (eds). Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance, Boston: Northeastern University Press, pp.167-76.
Brand News: Using Foucault to Theorise Rape, the Media and Feminist Strategies Cliris .91.tmore Introduction This paper is part of a broader project on the stories that are told about sexual violences, particularly in relation to public controversies; and on how these stories are articulated in 'grass roots' politics, the media and popular culture, academic theory and research, and all of their overlaps.l I am especially concerned with what interests might be at stake in the various contests for meaning that go on, and with the always interested stories that we tell in turn about these investments (Atmore 1993b 1994b, 1995). My focus is also on the potential in trying to explain and oppose sexual violences using some kind of critical combination of radical feminist and post-structuralist theories (Atmore 1992a, 1994a, 1995). Foucault did not have much to say directly concerning sexual violences as part of technologies of sex, let alone, as feminist critics like Teresa de Lauretis (1987) and Judith Butler (1990) have emphasised, as aspects of technologies of gender. ButasmuchofFoucault'sworksuggests,silencesarealsopartofthepower/ knowledge complex, and his own texts can be utilised against their more phallogocentric aspects. 2 Part of my larger project is therefore concerned with the productive possibilities as well as the tensions and impasses of drawing on the conceptual approaches of a masculinist thinker who was at the same time definitely not, to use Meaghan Morris' (1988) phrase, a 'ladies man'. There are a number of major Foucauldian concepts which seem extremely pertinent to a feminist analysis of rape, as well as highly problematic. For instance, Foucault's argument that a desexualisation strategy be applied to rape and the law (see for example Plaza 1980). The kind of radical feminist view of rape I support both agrees and disagrees with the logic of the desexualisation strategy. On the one hand I think that radical feminists like Catharine MacKinnon (1982, 1983, 1989:171-83) are in agreementwithFoucault (1980a) that prohibition also functions as incitement. Similarly criminologists like Carol Smart (1989, 1990) take seriously Foucault's critique of the confessional as playing into dominant relations of power. But where feminists part company with Foucault is in viewing all of this as much more of a double bind than he seems to; mainly because we see women's relationship to power as also a kind of double bind, and we therefore want a theory of power as both decentred and still in important ways 'king'-based (where 'the king' symbolises far-reaching masculine and Enlightenment-legitimated authority - or to put it more succinctly, phallogocentrism). So if sex is endlessly spoken, it is equally true that in feminist terms, not all has been said. 3
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I want to focus mainly on how cases of sexual violence, specifically rape, are represented through the media. So I'll start by giving an outline of the broader framework we might use, and then I'll move on to a rather unusual case in New Zealand, which I think is relevant in all sorts of ways to Foucault's work.
Rape as brand news In Power/Knowledge, Foucault (1980e:131-2) describes the media as one of 'a
few great political and economic apparatuses' which tend to control the production and transmission of 'truth'. Media representations of rape cases can therefore be thought of as products and strategies of technologies of both sex and gender, summed up in my phrase 'brand news'. This phrase has several interpretations. Rape news can first be thought of as news about various processes of branding. Rape is a particularly oppressive practice in which gender is (re-)marked on the body, as part of a broader system of social processes in which 'being' a woman or a man is, rather, continuously performed (MacKinnon 1989:171-83; Butler 1990). Here aspects of Foucauldian and radical feminist approaches can be usefully combined. Judith Butler (1990) argues that what radical feminists call'compulsory heterosexuality' (eg. Rich 1980) can also be thought of as' a complex strategical situation' resulting from the continuous play of the entangled technologies of sex and gender; or in other words, heterosexuality operates as a regime of truth. 4 The epistemic regime of heterosexuality produces and draws on a discursive network which Butler calls 'the heterosexual matrix'. The heterosexual matrix is phallogocentric, naturalising oppositional and hierarchical constructions of sex, gender and desire. Rape exemplifies the workings of the heterosexual regime. If power is exercised through discourses, which constitute truth, Foucault also reminds us that 'nothing is more material, physical, corporal than the exercise of power' (Foucault 1980b:57-8). And as Teresa de Lauretis (1987:31-50) argues about rape, rhetoric and violence are imbricated in one another. Rape is a material practice in which the mutually exclusive and exhaustive twogender system of the heterosexual matrix is made into dominant reality (1987; Jay 1981; Wittig 1982, 1985; Plaza 1980); rape is 'the violent enforcement of a category violently constructed' (Butler 1990: 166), not only scripted, but scripting (Marcus 1992:391). Sorapein the media is 'brand news' directly because it is about rape itself as a socio-political process of branding- 'social sexing' in Plaza's words, or 'the disciplining of docile bodies' in Foucault's. But 'brand news' is also news about branding in other ways. Most media reports of rape are concerned with court cases, or at least their possibility via rape complaints made to the police (Soothill et al. 1990). The struggle between accuser and accused in court in rape cases is often a classic illustration, according to radical feminist analyses, of conflicting realities (MacKinnon 1983, 1989:171-83), and a demonstration of Foucault's (1980e) argument about the radical contingency of truth claims. Whose truth wins and becomes reality is the outcome of a battle among differentially weighted discourses, generally in the rapist's favour. These contests are adjudicated via legal, medical and psychological searches for 'telling' marks on and in
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the bodies of accuser and accused (eg. '[T]he girl...bore signs of a sexual attack' ['Police Investigate Alleged Rape', The Dominion, 9 May 1991:3]; Smart 1990). According to the presence or absence of these signs, alleged rapist and victim are further branded; classified, disciplined and normalised as cases for appropriate treatment (cf. Foucault 1977). Secondly then, there is branding in news itself. The press may also produce its own judgements about rape cases, whether or not a court case is resolved (eg. Soothill and Walby 1991 ). A rapist may be branded as guilty before a trial has taken place, or a woman branded a liar despite an official guilty verdict. The branding by and in news can also be categorised in a third sense: 'brand news' as formulaic, as a genre of rape reporting. Media rape stories are shaped by the heterosexual matrix. This is partly because of the close relationship between rape news and court proceedings, rape law being notoriouslyphallogocentric (see for example MacKinnon 1982,1983,1989:17183; Smart 1989:26-49, 1990). So rape stories tend to reproduce mutually exclusive and hierarchical conceptual categories according to which 'real rape' is defined as aberrant rather than normal, rare rather than typical, and violence rather than sex. This disqualifies women's more complex experiences (Atmore 1994a, 1995). The media also engage in further strategies in their own right. For example, the tendency has actually increased recently for the press to represent rapists as 'sex beasts' or monsters (Soothill and Walby 1991). As part of this 'real rape' narrative, innocence of the woman must be shown to have been violated. But as Foucauldians and radical feminists would again agree, the problem for women is that the legal trial tends to become a spectacle which requires the 'victim' to confess sex, and this initselfbecomes a source and site of sexual pleasure, thereby disqualifying or at least trivialising aclaimofrape (MacKinnon 1989:171-83;Smart 1990; cf. Foucault 1980a). The media is directly implicated in this confessional: newspaper reports of rape have a long tradition as a source of soft pornography (Soothill and Walby 1991), and more recently United States television trial coverage has involved detailed reporting of sexual assault charges and evidence. 5 The media's rules for rape news therefore somewhat paradoxically help to reproduce what Carol Smart (1990:206) describes as 'the same story... like the Original Story being re-enacted on a daily basis'. The success of a formula is that it is both unique and repeatable: not brand new but 'brand news'. These interpretations of 'brand news' show up the double bind for raped women. A woman who alleges rape must subject herself to further branding through supplying proof of having been branded. Branding as criminal evidence, as media reporting according to the formulaic logic of 'brand news', and as rape itself, are powerfully shaped by the heterosexual matrix. If the branding in rape is sexual for the rapist, it is also sexual in the entertainment elements of rape stories. The hierarchically ordered binary oppositions of phallogocentrism in law and media are produced by and in turn reproduce the sexual hierarchy of man/woman central to the process of rape itself; or to use Butler's language, the heterosexual matrix and the regime of heterosexuality are mutually constitutive. While there is much more that could be said at this more general level, it is also helpful to take
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another leaf or two from Foucault's book(s) and use the odd or 'abnormal' to highlight practices at work in the more usual and everyday. So I want now to consider a media-ted controversy over rape with an unusual twist, in the light of these various dynamics of 'brand news'.
The case of Mervyn Thompson In 1984 in Auckland, New Zealand, a university lecturer and playwright
named Mervyn Thompson was chained to a tree by a group of women. The word 'rapist' was spraypainted on his car, and posters around Auckland University also denounced him for rape. The group of women was never identified, and no legal charges were laid. Whether Thompson was guilty and deserving of the attack was hotly debated in university and theatre circles, and became a broader cultural controversy via the media. Two main stories vied with each other in a battle for 'the truth', not just about Thompson, but about rape and sexual politics. In the first, basically radical feminist version, which gave at least some support to the attack, Thompson used his university position to sexually harass women students, including committing several rapes. A group of women decided action was necessary. Lacking confidence in the official channels' likely response, they instead chose direct action, and subsequently alerted the media. The second version was the dominant media stance, and took a mainly liberal, 'proThompson' perspective. From this view, Thompson was an active supporter of feminist and other 'progressive' causes. Hence he was not a rapist, but was scapegoated by radical and lesbian feminists who believe all heterosexuality to be rape. The Thompson controversy is a particularly rich source of material(Atmore1992b, 1993a, 1994a, 1995);Icanonlypointtoafewthemes here.
The attack on Thompson as feminist news-making Commentators generally agree that those who seek to oppose the primary interpretive framework of the media are still forced to debate within its terms (Atmore 1994a). Thompson's position, according to many feminists, was that of a white, professional man who had raped a woman known to him, probably without the use of overt force. In an officially reported statistical sense, such a rape (and rapist) is rare. Hence to assert Thompson's normality as rapist and the typicality of this kind of rape, the feminists who attacked him had to produce his situation as newsworthy for media which tend to only select as 'brand news' the statistically 'typical' real rape storythat is, rape and rapist as aberrant. So the group opted for a sensational 'angle', and a violence which would be news because it was both illegitimate and carried out by women. The style of the attack also fulfilled the demand of news, like that of the legal system, for tangible evidence of branding. The women left public signs via the chaining of Thompson, the spraypainting of 'rapist' and the tip-off to the media. These strategies were successful to some extent; for example, photographs of feminist anti-rape graffiti were presented as visual proof of the women's crime in several media stories (Thompson 1984a; Wall 1984; Women Against Sexual Harassment 1984). Some accounts actually described the action against Thompson as 'branding' him a rapist (eg. Reid
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1984). Foucault's descriptions of criminal branding are also relevant: Thompson, chained to a tree, was set up as 'the herald of his own condemnation ... in him, on him, the sentence had to be legible for all' (Foucault 1977:43)."
Thompson's media trial The action was a good story in media terms, being, like a rape case, both news and spectacle. As I have suggested, rape stories require confession of the details of an ordeal. Thompson filled the slot left vacant by the lack of a victim coming forward to make direct allegations against him. So the attack received a considerable amount of detailed publicity which was sympathetic to Thompson as victim, encapsulated by headlines like 'The Man Branded "Rapist" Speaks Out'.7 Thompson's role in the media coverage suggests a strong parallel to his stage career in which he frequently performed one-man shows from his own scripts. Despite the potent newsworthiness of personal testimony, it is rare for the mainstream media to allow the chief protagonist in a topical news case to simply narrate his or her own story. This sympathetic coverage was shaped by Thompson's position as a male victim of violence. The media response to his testimony contrasts with the situation for women, whose experiences, even when not represented as 'alleged', are frequently constructed as 'not serious', and as I have outlined, reduced to 'sex'. Social science studies (eg. Russell1984) therefore show that women's response to rape is generally not that of Thompson, whose 'instinct, right from the start, was to tell my story'.s But accounts sympathetic to Thompson also drew on fragments of the radical feminist critique of rape, to produce their own reverse discourse (Foucault 1980a:101-2). In these stories it was the women who attacked Thompson and the feminists who supported it who were like rapists. For example, A.K. Grant's (1984) satirical column in The Listener argued: Talking of rape, why have the women who assaulted Mr Thompson not been caught and put on trial? That, after all, is what happens to ... Similarly, an editorial in the Evening Post newspaper was titled 'Vigilantes Rape Natural Justice' (13 April1984).
Thompson also explicitly compared himself to a rape victim: My present symptoms are those of one who has been raped. My perception of the outside world has changed utterly. From being a person who smiled at dogs, small children and adults in the street, I have found myself exploring every face with suspicion, sweating with fear if I am left alone at night, and quite frankly frightened whenever a member of the opposite sex comes within sight. Only the support of colleagues, former students and those closest to me has pulled me through (Thompson 1984a:23).
So Thompson could not be a perpetrator because he was a fellow sufferer. To invert the theme of the Jodie Foster film, it was 'the accused' who was raped. Thompson also compared himself to the female rape survivor in court, claiming that he had been prevented from telling his own story. Yet in contrast to her experience, Thompson spoke verbosely of his own silencing
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(cf. Foucault 1980a:8). As one reviewer said in response to Thompson's oneman retrospective of his life in the theatre, which included a dramatisation of the attack, 'playing yourself as an innocent crucified victim is difficult to bring off' (Riley 1991). Nevertheless, Thompson largely achieved this. His death from cancer in 1992 has even been represented in reviews of his life and work as a kind of murder by feminists. 9
Thorn pson' s attackers Accounts of the attack had other elements of the classic media rape story. It was not only Thompson who was branded, but also the group who attacked him. Thompson claimed to have been abducted at night, by strangers. As in 'serious rape' accounts, the assailants were represented as monstrous: they were described as 'all claws and fangs' and their actions as 'brutish' (Thompson 1984a:21). Feminists 'turned on [Thompson] like a pack of blood-thirsty wolves' (Riley 1991:55). The vigilantes 'had bit and run ... Blood lust was running hot' (Wall1984:98). This 'sex beast' branding was assisted by the portrayal of the women as lesbian feminists. Thompson claimed that although none of his attackers were known to him and he had not seen any of them clearly, he knew at least some of them were lesbians by how they looked, and by the voice of one of them on the telephone (eg. Thompson 1984b). In other words, they were identifiable by the marked body of the invert. This was a theme brought out more explicitly in subsequent references to the case; in particular in an investigative journalism article by Carroll Wall (1984), which claimed to give the background to the attack via an exploration of lesbian feminist culture in New Zealand. In this fieldwork narrative, the fearless investigator boldly goes where few have dared, and records her impressions of 'them and their kind' (Wall1984:98) in some detail for the enlightenment of the uninformed audience (Atmore 1992b, 1993a). Wall's voyage and subsequent observation and classification of the alien species evokes the function of Foucault's geographer, who combines in the form of an inventory or catalogue, 'the triple register of inquiry, measure and examination',lO For instance: There are lesbians of all sorts, the kind who wear men's trousers and hats, the threatening, glowering variety in their studded leather and boots, the dressedup dykes with their punk hair and black lips and amazing clothes and those who wear what I've begun to realise is the political dykes uniform of baggy trousers and sweatshirts. (Wall1984:107)
Some implications The women's action can be thought of as an insurrection of subjugated knowledges.1 1 For example, the tactics used challenged law's privileged claim to truth and fed into ongoing controversy about vigilante justice.12 This is an especially charged issue for women: while 'everything is dangerous', at least the more standard 'victim' discourse was contested in the Thompson case (cf. Smart 1990), and the attackers were represented as folk heroes in some unlikely quarters.13 But the case also shows how discourses on all sides, by virtue of their mercenary and unstable qualities, can be annexed to what they set out to
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oppose. As I have pointed out, both the feminist attack and the resulting media stories were shaped by the demands of brand news. However, at the same time Thompson and his supporters found strategic utility in a radical feminist account of rape victims. In reaction, feminists galled by this ended up tying themselves in knots trying to argue that Thompson was not really hurt, thereby buying into phallogocentric definitions of violence and injury which they otherwise opposed (Atmore 1992a, 1995). I do think though that the tables were turned in a way which disrupted taken-for-granted assumptions far more effectively than having a woman try to speak out. The sources of fear in the case were the unknown women 'at large', and consequently the possibility of it happening again. Not notably radical academics quietly observed that the controversy had 'shaken up things around here'; male staff complained that they were now forced to meet with female students with their office doors open, and there was the more explicit paranoia of Wall's article. Although the women's anonymity also rebounded on lesbian feminists, it was Thompson who became the main object ofknowledge. 14 There is some truth to his claim that like other victims he was put on trial; he was certainly far more subject to scrutiny than if an official charge had been laid. For example, his interview on television provoked various speculations about whether he looked guilty or not, and that he protested too much. So Thompson's victimhood shows up how gender matters, but that it is also a social, ongoing, and to some extent unpredictable performance. These tensions must return us to Foucault's desexualisation strategy and the ambivalent feminist response of my introduction. It is helpful here to consider local context in trying to come up with any conclusions about how certain ideas and practices might play (or not) straight into a regime of power /knowledge. The controversy became a turning point for increased discussion about sexual harassment in New Zealand universities, in an era when official complaints procedures did not yet exist. It is also significant that the Thompson case is now indexed in academic referencing systems under the heading of' sexual harassment'. From a 'pure' Foucauldian stance, whatever that is, this sounds like anathema. But if we take the perspective that we cannot discuss sexuality without considering the interconnections to technologies of gender in rape, it could be argued that the attack and the account of sexual violence informing it embodied, at least in part, a kind of desexualisation strategy similar to those gay and feminist practices selectively endorsed by Foucault (Cohen 1988; Foucault 1989). Certainly as I have suggested, the attack and its aftermath denaturalised at least some of the binary oppositions of the heterosexual matrix.15 ProThompson media stories which resisted this did so via conspicuous silences and contradictions about both the case and rape more generally, making them vulnerable to a radical feminist-informed deconstructive critique (Atmore 1992a, 1995). Hence as Foucault's later work on the self emphasises more,1 6 if subversion must always take place from within, that does not mean that everything is simply recuperated and that no change is possible or positive. Foucault (1984:41) describes an ethics of the self as an exercise in
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which extreme attention to what is real is confronted with the practice of a liberty that simultaneously respects this reality and violates it. Echoing my earlier outline of the productive combination of Foucauldian approaches with radical feminism in analysing rape as a phallogocentric practice, here Foucault's critical and political strategies appear in a more potentially 'take-home' form for feminism. Hence for example, Teresa de Lauretis' (1987:26) notion of 'space-off', which describes a movement from the space represented by /in a representation, by /in a discourse, by /in a sex-gender system, to the space not represented yet implied (unseen) in them. The 'space-off' metaphor seems appropriate to represent both aspects of the Thompson case, and more broadly a feminist version of the desexualisation strategy. 17 De Lauretis' postmodernist feminist position therefore also involves its own meta theoretical shuttling between Foucault's 'official' texts and theradicalfeminism of theorists like Catharine MacKinnon and Adrienne Rich. 18 And as Foucault put it, '[A]s soon as one can no longer think things as one formerly thought them, transformation becomes both very urgent, very difficult and quite possible'. 19 1
I use 'sexual violences' as a shorthand for a range of diverse practices of sexual coercion; notably for my project: rape, sexual harassment, and child sexual abuse.
2
As an illustration, following Monique Plaza's (1980) call for Foucault to specify his own enunciative modality, we are offered by some contemporary feminist critics (eg. de Lauretis 1984:94, 1987:49(3); Butler 1990:96-7) a somewhat different reading of aspects of The History of Sexuality Volume One. For instance, Foucault gives the example of a simple-minded farmhand who in 1867 was arrested and medicalised for obtaining 'a few caresses from a little girl' (Foucault 1980a:31), and goes on: 'What is significant about this story? The pettiness of it all; the fact that this everyday occurrence in the life of village sexuality, these inconsequential bucolic pleasures, could become, from a certain time, the object not only of a collective intolerance but of a judicial action, a medical intervention, a careful clinical examination, and an entire theoretical elaboration... So it was that our society - and it was doubtless the first in history to take such measures assembled around these timeless gestures, these barely furtive pleasures between simple-minded adults and alert children, a whole machinery for speechifying, analyzing, and investigating' (1980a:32). Despite his own critique elsewhere, Foucault here produces a reverse theme ofinnocence corrupted, in which he sympathises with 'this village halfwit who would give a few pennies to the little girls for favors the older ones refused him' (1980a:32). If context is profoundlyinfluential, Foucault's comments must resonate differently in the present Western social climate where it is not uncommon for both conservatives and the 'falsely accused' to lament the end of an 'innocent' era when adult men could supposedly relate to children without the cultural loadings foisted on them by radical feminist analyses of sexual coercion.
3
See for example Plaza (1980); Bland (1981); Martin (1982); Butler (1987, 1990); de Lauretis (1987); Diamond and Quinby (1988); Woodhull (1988); Singer (1989); Smart (1990); Bell (1991); Sawicki (1991); McNay (1992).
4
Compare for example Butler's description of sex as 'both discursive and perceptual, [which] denotes an historically contingent epistemic regime, a language that forms perception by forcibly shaping the interrelationships through which physical bodies are perceived' (Butler 1990:114, Butler's emphasis), with
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MacKinnon's argument that male power 'extends beneath the representation of reality to its construction' and so confirms 'its way of being and its vision of truth, as it creates the social reality that supports both' (MacKinnon 1989:122). In MacKinnon's radical feminism, male power is' a myth that makes itself true', and '[o]nce incarnated, male superiority tends to be reaffirmed and reinforced in what can be seen as well as in what can be done. So male power both is and is not illusory. As it justifies itself, namely as natural, universal, unchangeable, given, and morally correct, it is illusory; but the fact that it is powerful is no illusion. Power is a social relation ... Living each day reconvinces everyone, women and men alike, of male hegemony, which is hardly a myth, and of women's innate inferiority and men's innate superiority, a myth that each day's reliving makes difficult to distinguish meaningfully from reality... Viewed as object reality, the more inequality is pervasive, the more it is simply 'there'. And the more real it looks, the more it looks like the truth' MacKinnon (1989:99-101). See also MacKinnon (1982, 1983), and Monique Wittig's (1989:245) conception of heterosexuality: 'we are dealing with an object both imaginary and real'. 5
Significantly, a New Zealand newspaper item about this trend was not featured under the court news, but rather in the entertainment section ('Nonstop TV Court Coverage Begins', The Dominion, 4 July 1991:22).
6
Yet the attack in other ways had elements of a more modern era of crime and punishment: '[p]osters, placards, signs, symbols must be distributed, so that everyone may learn their significations' (Foucault 1977:111).
7 Table of contents heading for Thompson (1984a). 8
Thompson, interviewed by Genevieve Westcott on Eyewitness News, Television New Zealand, 12 April1984, quoted in WASH (1984:23).
9
See for example, Comer (1991); 'Playwright Loses Fight with Cancer' (1992). In line with Foucault's argument (Foucault 1980£), resonances between the case and various fictional accounts have also kept the controversy circulating (Atmore 1992b).
10 Interviewers in Foucault (1980c:75). The geographer 'collects information in an inventory which in its raw state does not have much interest and is not in fact usable except by power. What power needs is not science but a mass of information which its strategic position can enable it to exploit'. Foucault responds by citing an anecdote about travellers' tales in seventeenth century France as forrns of coded reports (ibid). 11 See for example Foucault's (1980d:81-5) advocacy of the use of subjugated knowledges as a basis for 'a multiplicity of genealogical researches, a painstaking rediscovery of struggles together with the rude memory of their conflicts' (1980d:83). 12 See Atmore (1992a). The complexities of considering the case within a context of genealogies of popular justice and Foucault's own stance(s) are another paper in themselves. For instance,how is one to classify the attack in the light of Foucault's argument for viewing each resistance as a special case, and hence for taking into account 'resistances that are possible, necessary, improbable; others that are spontaneous, savage, solitary, concerted, which brook no reconciliation' (Foucault 1980a quoted in Plaza 1980:37)? If the case is conceptualised as branding in the senseofpunishment,howrnightitsitwithFoucault'sworkonpenality?Thecase seems to have elements of more than one era of punishment (see note 6), and this might have a lot to do with the phallocentric focus of Foucault's analysis and hence a difficulty with fitting official and unofficial responses to rape solely within this framework.
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13 If rape can be read as bodily inscription, it could be argued that the attack was a form of women's writing (d. Singer 1989 esp. 145-7). More generally, the attackers and feminists who supported the action 'fought dirty', including urging censorship of Thompson's plays, and frequently depicting or responding to the controversy with the subversive force oflaughter (d. Singer 1989:152-4). In contrast, the moral outrage 'traditionally' reserved for feminist response to sexual violence issues was largely confined to liberal, pro-Thompson accounts. 14 Despite the attempts of journalists like Wall, even getting a feminist 'representative' to comment posed challenges. 15 It could be argued that Thompson was produced as a kind of Herculine Barbin figure. This would seem to follow Butler's (1987:138) suggestion that Foucault's strategy of proliferation is to diffuse binary relations with 'the force of internal ambiguity', so that 'oppressors themselves are oppressed, and the oppressed develop alternative forms of power'. 16 See Foucault (1988), Sawicki (1991); McNay (1992:45-7, 194-5); Probyn (1993). 17 De Lauretis (1987:26) describes the subject of feminism as characterised by a movement between the (represented) discursive space of the positions made available by hegemonic discourses and the space-off, the elsewhere, of those discourses: those other spaces both discursive and social that exist, since feminist practices have (re)constructed them, in the margins (or 'between the lines,' or 'against the grain') of hegemonic discourses and in the interstices of institutions, in counter-practices and new forms of community... The movement between [these two kinds of spaces] ... is the tension of contradiction, multiplicity, and heteronomy ... to inhabit both kinds of spaces at once is to live the contradiction which ... is the condition of feminism here and now: the tension of a twofold pull in contrary directions- the critical negativity of its theory, and the affirmative positivity of its politics- is both the historical condition of existence of feminism and its theoretical condition of possibility. 18 For further argument about this overlap as productive, see Atmore (1992a, 1994a, 1995). In The Final Foucault (1988) there is also a tantalising hint, or at least a potentially productive incongruity, for reading the Thompson case. Foucault makes specific reference to teacher-student relations as potentially problematic, needing to be posed in terms of rules of law, political struggle and ethics of the self, directly after he has argued, using the example of sexual relationships, that in contrast to states of domination, power over another is not evil if it can be reversed(Foucault1988:18-19).Howmightwereadthesetwotopicsagainsteach other and feminist critiques? 19 From Michel Foucault Politics, Philosophy and Culture- Interviews and Other Writings, 1977-1984, Lawrence D. Kritzman (ed.), quoted in Sawicki (1991:123-4).
References Atmore, Chris (1992a). Other halves: Lesbian-feminist post-structuralist readings of some recent New Zealand print media representations of lesbians. PhD thesis, Victoria University of Wellington. __ _,(1992b).'Strangeobliquewaysofgettingat"reality"?' Afeministdeconstructive reading ofthe truth/ fiction divide in cultural representations of a New Zealand controversy. Paper presented at Australian Women's Studies Conference, University of Sydney, 11 October. __ _, (1993a). "'Branded": Lesbian representation and a New Zealand cultural controversy', in Cultural studies: Pluralism and theory, David Bennett (ed.) pp.281-292. University of Melbourne: Department of English.
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__ _, (1993b ). 'Dirty laundry: Cultural positions in some contemporary constructions of child sexual abuse'. Paper presented at Cultural Studies Association of Australia Third Annual Conference, Victoria University of Technology, Melbourne, 6 December. __ _, (1994a). 'Brand news: Rape and the mass media'. Media Information Australia 72:20-31. __ _, (1994b ). 'Witch hunts, icebergs and the light of reason: Constructions of child sexual abuse in recent cultural controversies', in Helen Borland (ed.) Communi-
cation and Identity: Local, Regional, Global: Selected Papers from the 1993 National Conference of the Australian Communication Association, pp.85-96. Canberra ACT, Australian and New Zealand Communication Association. __ _, (1995). 'The Mervyn Thompson controversy: A feminist deconstructive reading'. New Zealand Sociology 10(1), May. __ _, (1993) 'Feminism's restless undead: The essential(ist) activist'. Selected Proceedings of 'Bring a Plate': The Feminist Cultural Studies Conference, University of Melbourne, December. Bell, Vikki (1991). 'Beyond the "thorny question": Feminism, Foucault and the desexualisation of rape'. International Journal of the Sociology of Law 19:83-100. Bland, Lucy (1981). 'The domain of the sexual: A response'. Screen Education 39 (Summer): 56-67. Butler, Judith (1987). 'Variations on sex and gender: Beauvoir, Wittig and Foucault', in Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell (eds) Feminism as critique. London: Basil Blackwelt pp.128-142. __ _, (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge. Cohen, (ed.) (1988). 'Foucauldian necrologies: "gay"' "politics"? politically gay?' Textual Practice, 2(1):87-101. Comer, Peter (1991). 'Mervyn writes his own farewell'. NZ Women's Weekly, 18 March, p.24. de Lauretis, Teresa (1984). Alice doesn't. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. __ _, (1987). Technologies ofgender: Essays on theory, film, and fiction. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Diamond, Irene, and Lee Quinby, (eds) (1988). Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on resistance. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Foucault, Michel (1977). Discipline and punish, trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon. __ _, (1980a). The history ofsexuality. Volume 1: An introduction, trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage. __ _, (1980b ). 'Body /power', in Colin Gordon (ed.) Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings 1972-1977, pp.55-62. Trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, and Kate Soper. Brighton: Harvester. __ _, (1980c). 'Questions on geography'. Interview by editors of Herodote. In Power/ knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings 1972-1977, Colin Gordon (ed.) pp.63-77. Trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, and Kate Soper. Brighton: Harvester. __ _, (1980d). 'Two lectures', in Colin Gordon (ed.) Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings 1972-1977, pp.78-108. Trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshalt John Mepham, and Kate Soper. Brighton: Harvester.
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__ _, (1980e). 'Truth and power', in Colin Gordon (ed.) Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings 1972-1977, pp.109-33. Trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, and Kate Soper. Brighton: Harvester. __ _, (1980f). 'The history of sexuality', in Colin Gordon (ed.) Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings 1972-1977, pp.183-93. Trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, and Kate Soper. Brighton: Harvester. __ _, (1984). 'What is Enlightenment?', in Paul Rabinow (ed.) The Foucault Reader, Harmondsworth: Penguin. __ _, (1988). 'The ethic of care for the self as a practice of freedom', in James Bernhauer and David Rasmussen (eds) The Final Foucault. Massachusetts: MIT Press. __ _, (1989). 'Sexual choice, sexual act'. lnterv. and trans. James O'Higgins, in Sylvere Lotringer (ed.) Foucault live (interviews, 1966-84), pp.211-31. New York: Semiotext(e). Grant, A.K. (1984). 'The silencing of Uncle Scrim'. NZ Listene,r 28 April, p.29. Jay, Nancy (1981). 'Gender and dichotomy'. Feminist Studies 7(1):38-56. MacKinnon, Catharine (1982). 'Feminism, marxism, method and the state: An agenda for theory'. Signs 7(3):515-44. __ _, (1983) 'Feminism, marxism, method and the state: Toward feminist jurisprudence'. Signs 8(4):635-58. __ _, (1989) Toward afeminist theory ofthe state. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Marcus, Sharon (1992). 'Fighting bodies, fighting words: A theory and politics of rape prevention', in Judith Butler and Joan Scott, Feminists theorize the political, pp.385-403. New York and London: Routledge. Martin, Biddy (1982). 'Feminism, criticism, and Foucault'. New German Critique 27 (Fall):3-30. McNay, Lois (1992). Foucault and feminism: Power, gender, and the self Cambridge: Polity Press. Morris, Meaghan (1988). 'The pirate's fiancee: Feminists and philosophers, or maybe tonight it'll happen', in Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby (eds), Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on resistance, pp.21-42. Boston: Northeastern University Press. 'Playwright loses fight with cancer' (1992). The Dominion, 13 July: 16. Plaza, Monique (1980). 'Our costs and their benefits'. m/f4:28-39. Probyn, Elspeth (1993). Sexing the self Gendered positions in cultural studies. London and New York: Routledge. Reid, Bronwen.(1984). 'Convicted by malicious rumour'. NZ Times, 8 April, p.3. Rich, Adrienne (1980). 'Compulsory heterosexuality and lesbian existence'. Signs 5(4):631-60. Riley, Brett (1991). 'Review of Passing through'. Listener and TV Times, 18 March, pp.54-5. Russell, Diana (1984). Sexual exploitation: Rape, child sexual abuse, and workplace harassment. Beverly Hills: Sage. Sawicki, Jana (1991). Disciplining Foucault: Feminism, power and the body. New York: Routledge.
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Singer, Linda (1989). 'True confessions: Cixous and Foucault on sexuality and power', in Jeffner Allen and Iris Marion Young (eds), The thinking muse: Feminism and modern French philosophy, pp.136-55. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Smart, Carol (1989). Feminism and the power of law. London: Routledge. __ _, (1990). 'Law's power, the sexed body, and feminist discourse'. Journal ofLaw and Society 17(2):194-210. Soothill, Keith, and Sylvia Walby (1991). Sex crime in the news. London and New York: Routledge. Soothill, Keith, Sylvia Walby, and Paul Bagguley (1990). 'Judges, the media, and rape'. Journal of Law and Society 17(2):211-33. Thompson, Mervyn (1984a). 'Victims and vengeance'. NZ Listener 14 April, pp.21-3. __ _, (1984b ). 'Letter to the editor'. NZ Times, 6 May, p.8. Wall, Carroll (1984). 'From feminism to fascism'. Metro July: 96-110. Women Against Sexual Harassment (WASH) (1984). 'Women reply'. NZ Listener,2 June, pp.22-3. Wittig, Monique (1982). 'The category of sex'. Feminist Issues 2(2):63-8. __ _, (1985). 'The mark of gender'. Feminist Issues 5(2):3-12. __ _, (1989). 'On the social contract', in Dennis Altman, Carole Vance, Martha Vicinus, Jeffrey Weeks, and others (eds) Homosexuality, which homosexuality? International conference on gay and lesbian studies, pp.239-49, London: GMP. Woodhull, Winifred (1988). 'Sexuality, power, and the question of rape', in Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby (eds), Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance, pp.167-76, Boston: Northeastern University Press.
Normalising Equality: Surveillance and the 'Equitable' Public Servant tJJ. !Jl. Jones But what is philosophy today, I mean philosophical activity, if it is not work which is critical of thought itself? And what is it if, instead oflegitirnising that which we already know, it does not consist in finding out how and how far it might be possible to think differently? (Foucault in Morey 1992:118)
Introduction: Foucault and feminism What can Foucauldian analysis offer to feminist activists struggling to bring gender equity into the practices of government organisations? In this paper I argue that Foucault's 'history of the present', his challenge for us to see ourselves as objects/subjects of specific, historically-located discursive formations, pushes us to be reflexive about political activity in new ways. 1 'Finding out how and how far it might be possible to think differently' is an extremely ambitious project, but necessary, I think, for feminists who want to do more than simply criticise the projects of modernist feminism something that is very easy to do. In my current research my focus is on how discourses of Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) constitute gender in New Zealand government organisations. I have chosen this research field as one in which the issues of difference are highly salient and explicitly articulated. Foucault's emphasis on the inevitably strategic nature of all discourse means that our own political discourses- including those of feminism- can themselves be the object of critical scrutiny. This type of reflexiveness is appealing to activists who are already interested in the strategic outcomes of our practices. In this paper I am taking feminism to be a modernist project: this does not necessarily mean that I see feminism as essentially modernist. In fact this very question of the modernism of feminism is at the core of feminist debates about Foucault (eg. Diamond and Quinby 1988; Game 1991; Sawicki 1991; McHoul and Grace 1993; McNay 1992). Rather, I am seeking to problematise the modernism of feminism, in order to argue that Foucault's post-modernism provides a point of interrogation that is useful for us as feminists. This paper then is located in the tensions between feminism as modernism and Foucault as post-modern. Foucault's conception of power presents a radical break from feminism conceived as a modern emancipatory project. Framed as modernism, the characteristics of feminism include a teleological approach to social progress in history; a model of freedom and oppression based on a structural model of power; the concept of a unified and rational subject who can make choices and act as a free agent; and a description of gender as social structure. Foucault's conception of power contests liberatory models whereby the
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oppressed are freed from the effects of power. Foucault claims to show instead that power is always in play, always productive of new discourses, new regimes of truth and so new types of subjects. In the history of the present,ourattentionisonthemeansbywhichpowerproduces-ratherthan liberates - changing subjectivities. In this paper, I draw on Foucault's work to interrogate the feminist and bureaucratic project of EEO. While Foucault may have nothing to say directly about feminism- or even really about gender- he has a great deal to say about the processes of bureaucracy, about what he calls 'governmentality' and its processes. First I introduce the EEO project. I will then discuss Foucault's ideas of governmentality, normalisation and surveillance and consider how they describe some of the effects of this project.
EEO as bureaucracy I agree with what! take to be Foucault's major preoccupation; his belief that the increasing organisation of everything is the central issue of our time. I wish to avoid 'overusing' Foucault. Most people who have read Discipline and punish, no matter how convinced they are of the pervasiveness of the disciplines in modern society, are likely to come away preferring prison to public disembowelling (Ferguson 1984:xii-xiii). EEO is the 'increasing organisation of everything' constituted as a feminist and also as a bureaucratic discourse. Just as we are likely to prefer prison to public disembowelling, feminists are likely to prefer a bureaucratised feminism to an uncontested bureaucratic sexism. In putting 'the feminist case against bureaucracy', Kathy Ferguson (1984:7) cites Foucault in defining bureaucracy as 'the scientific organization of inequality'. Feminist bureaucrats seek to replace the 'organisation of inequality' with 'the organisation of equality'. The project of EEO is to introduce 'equitable' practices into organisations. It is an aspect of a much broader feminist equality project, taking place both within and outside the state apparatus. In this discussion I will focus on EEO in New Zealand government departments. I will also use examples dealing solely with gender equity, although EEO programs characteristically cover other 'target' groups defined by ethnicity, disability, and soon. The strategy ofEEOprograms is currently located within the discourse of strategic human resource management. In fact, the EEO unit in the State Services Commission, the central employment consultancy and policymaking body for New Zealand government organisations, is literally located in the Strategic Human Resource Management section of the Commission. Discourses of strategic human resource management contain a number of assumptions characteristic of modernist bureaucracies. A key one is the assumption of strategic action as functionalist and instrumental, as intentional action carried out by rational modern subjects acting in the interests of efficiency and effectiveness. To this, many government departments would add the goal of equity. By contrast, a Foucauldian approach would see public servants, not as rational free agents implementing strategic policy goals, but rather as objects/subjects produced by bureaucratic discourses of rationality. A
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history of the present represents subjectivity as an effect, not the author or origin, of a given discursive formation. While Foucault's idea of discourse inevitably assumes that discourse is strategic, his concept of the strategic effects of discourse is not a teleological one. It is not the kind of strategy by which an agent controls a cause and effect process, but rather is a strategy which can be read from the effects of the workings of discursive formations in the production of certain types of power relations and certain types of subjects. Political theorist Michael Shapiro has developed an analysis of international political strategy from a Foucauldian perspective, and I will show how it can be applied to other policy areas such as EEO. Shapiro (1992:109) argues that there are two main ways in which the discourse of international relations is strategic in Foucault's sense. First, 'at an explicit or recognized level in that it maps the world into warring camps and strategic alliances'. In the discourse ofEEO, difference between members of the organisation are strategically organised in terms of advantage and disadvantage in terms of the goal of equality. The 'disadvantaged' are then framed as 'target groups' in terms of a strategic 'EEO plan'. In her analysis of American welfare policies Nancy Fraser has pointed out that both the identities and needs of welfare 'target groups' are 'interpreted identities and needs. Moreover, they are highly political interpretations and as such are in principle subject to dispute' (Fraser 1989:153). Similarly, the identities and needs of EEO 'target groups' are created in the competing discourses of EEO. These include the different discourses of the 'target groups' themselves, which both overlap and come into conflict at different times and sites; and what Fraser calls the "'expert" needs discourses' of groups such as policy analysts and human resources consultants. These discourses 'compete with one another in addressing the fractured social identities of potential adherents'. In the centre of this struggle are the members of EEO target groups, dealing with questions of identity, difference and power, on the most personal level of subjectivity and on the broad level of the social, defined by Fraser as 'a terrain of contestation... a space in which conflicts among rival interpretations of peoples' needs are played out' (Fraser 1989:153). On the level of the social, key questions of strategy are formulated in terms of categories of difference. In defining 'EEO groups', a highly diverse range of social categories is yoked together on the premise that the groups are those to whom 'equal opportunity' has been denied. EEO discourse creates and regulates categories of difference which are reduced to a kind of equivalence. The paradox is that although recognising a type of difference- unequal access to certain 'opportunities' available to dominant social groups- EEO erases others. Each EEO group has its own discourses, which may be more less compatible with the discourse of EEO as a regulating concept. So at Shapiro's first level of strategic discourse, the discourse of EEO divides populations into the more and less equal, the advantaged and the disadvantaged. While the boundaries and 'needs discourses' of groups may be contested, the process of mapping itself is not. This kind of mapping is essential to modernist social projects of both bureaucracy and feminism. As Kathy Ferguson (1988:67)
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puts it, 'it is very difficult to speak of liberation without some notion of a subject whose life will be improved in some way, or to envisage political change at all without some idea of who will bring it about and why'. As an overtlypoliticised discourse, feminism is much more likely to think of different population groups as 'warring camps and strategic alliances', in Shapiro's terms, than are bureaucrats. There is a tension here between a bureaucratic regime in which inequalities and therefore differences are to be transformed to equivalences, and a feminist regime in which differences are not eradicated along with inequalities. This tension underlies the 'mapping' process, and I will return to it later. Shapiro (1992:109) goes on to describe a second level at which discourse acts strategically 'in the sense that it participates in a linguistic or discursive economy of power and authority by holding sway over other possible representations of the world'. Shapiro emphasises 'a view that places discourse within a metaphor of political economy', and cites Foucault's description of discourse as an 'asset'. This 'economic' view of discourses draws attention to their value not as truth, but, in Foucault's words, to 'their possibility for transformation... in the administration of scarce resources'. Of course EEO practitioners see their interventions as strategic, but they see strategy operating on a different level from that of the discursive in a Foucauldian sense. EEO practitioners intervene to insert statements about equality, framed in terms of the bureaucratic ethos of rationality, efficiency and economy, into the discourses of human resource management. These interventions are reflected in policy documents such as departmental strategic plans and EEO plans. A Foucauldian perspective suggests however that such interventions do not work at a simple functional level, in terms of a kind of transparent and rational planning process in which equality is put on the agenda and rational implementation programs are produced in order to eliminate inequality. They work rather by setting up 'an economy of linguistic practices, a circulation of silences versus volubilities and of dominant versus subjugated modes of statements and knowledge practices',asShapiroputsit(1992:109).AFoucauldiananalysisofEEOwouldask then: what are its silences and its volubilities? Which knowledges are dominant and which subjugated? I have argued that Foucault's idea of discourse inevitably assumes that discourse is strategic, in terms of a kind of a strategy which can be read from the effects of the workings of discursive formations in the production of certain types of power relations and certain types of subjects. I am reading the discourse of EEO then in terms of one of its key effects: that of producing a certain kind of object/ subject: the equitable public servant. Shapiro (1992:2) has pointed out the 'violence' of the imagery in which Foucault describes the way that discourses produce subjects as their objects. In describing the 'person' as a body on the surface of which events are inscribed, Foucault' defamiliarises' our interpretation of the person. Instead of rendering the person as a cognitive agent - for instance, the familiar subject of managerialist discourses of human resource management, a subject who can be 'trained' or persuaded to adopt equitable attitudes and practices-Foucaultgivesusa'passivereceptorofmeanings',andanewway
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to think of how a certain type of 'person' is produced. It is interesting that something of the violence of Foucault's concept of objects produced by discourses is echoed in the attitudes of EEO practitioners towards male public servants who are seen to resist EEO policies: 'I don't care what they think any more, I just want them to have to behave a certain way'. A split is made here between the bodies and the minds of public servants. As long as their bodies are disciplined by corporate EEO strategies, as long as they promote the right number of women; carry out interviews based on merit principles, monitor training targets, and so on, they are' good enough' equitable public servants. From a Foucauldian perspective, it is not managers acting as free agents who produce certain strategic effects, but rather discourses which produce managerial subjects. From this perspective, strategic managerialism is an effect of certain discourses, and bureaucrats are the subjects/ objects, not the agents, of managerial discourse. EEO practitioners, in this way, are subjects too of the discourses of bureaucracy and managerialism, of regulation and of strategy. At the same time, they see themselves as free agents, producing emancipatory social change through strategic action. What they share with bureaucracy and managerialism is this belief in strategic action.
Govemmentality Foucault's concept of 'governmentality' is closely associated with a certain kind of professional subject. Terry Johnson has developed an analysis of the production of certain kinds of professional'expertise' as a key effect of the form of government- governmentality- that Foucault sees as characterising modernity. This 'governmentality' is not that of the state as a 'coherent, calculating subject' but of the state as 'the residue or outcome of governing' (Johnson 1993:140). This form of governing involves both state and nonstate institutions. In the case of EEO practitioners, it could be said that their positioning in the discourses of 'human resource management' is as much an aspect of their 'fusion' -as Johnson puts it- with the strategies and technologies of governmentality, as is their positioning as bureaucrats in a government department. In his Foucauldian analysis of the discourses of Human Resource Management (HRM), Nikolas Rose (1988:185). has identified the importance of the authority it derives from the discourses of the psychological sciences, which made possible 'a form of rational regulation of individuality' He follows here Foucault's emphasis on the importance of the discourses of the 'human sciences' in analysing governmentality. As Rose puts it, the psychological sciences made possible 'new practices of regulation', and meant that 'the management of the human factor in the institutions of modern social life could now operate in terms of a norm of truth; that is to say, in terms of a knowledge of subjectivity which had the authority of science'. As an aspect of HRM practice, EEO is located among the personal-service professions that are both 'the progenitors and beneficiaries' of the 'complex network of governmentality', in Johnson's words. As 'experts' they have a particular role in 'the reproduction of the self-regulating subject' (Johnson 1993:143), while they themselves are also certain kinds of self-regulating subjects. There is a kind of triple positioning here: first, as professional
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public servants, EEO practitioners are 'experts' who produce a certain kind of self-regulating subject in the population. For instance, in the Department of Social Welfare, experts produce a certain kind of subject as social welfare beneficiary through an 'expert needs discourse. Secondly, as human resource management practitioners, their 'expertise' produces a certain kind of public servant. AB EEO practitioners, they are focussed on producing an 'equitable' public servant. And thirdly, they are themselves produced as subjects of their professional discourses, as well as other discourses which may be relevant- for instance, the discourses of feminism. My attention is this paper is on the second kind of positioning, on the production of the 'equitable' public servant in the discourses of Equal Employment Opportunity. Foucault's ideas of normalisation and surveillance are basic to my analysis of how the equitable public servant is produced. Nina Sawicki (1991:85) has argued that the' emphasis on normalisation' is'a major advantage of the disciplinary model of power'. Normalisation is the process by which norms are discursively produced, and is necessary for the government of life processes. It operates, in Sawicki's words, 'by inciting desire, attaching individuals to specific identities, and addressing real needs' Disciplinary power is effective when physical violence is not required. Surveillance, or panopticism, aligns the object/ subject with the norm. This alignment does not occur through 'forcing' an individual to act a certain way, regardless of his or her 'private beliefs'. From that point of view, which is the one traditional in the public service ethos, monitoring processes are essential to continue to maintain the external force and ensure ongoing compliance. However Foucault's idea of panopticism does not make this distinction between 'inside' and 'outside', and its key effect is that the individual disciplines him or her self. Panopticism makes certain aspects of life visible, that is, open to surveillance. In order to make surveillance function permanently and independently, the technologies of surveillance must be able to create and sustain 'a power relation independent of the person who exercises it'. The objects of power then become 'caught up in a power situation of which they themselves are the bearers' (Foucault 1977:201). The concept of normalisation draws our attention to the 'strategies and technologies' whereby subjects are created. Johnson develops Foucault's work by asking questions about the kind of professional'expertise' involved in this production: 'how and where does this expertise get stored, produced and embodied?'. In particular, Johnson is interested in the production of 'individuals, highly trained and socialised in accordance with an agreed ethical and disciplinary code' (Johnson 1993:144).2 EEO represents a major intervention in the 'agreed ethical and disciplinary code' of public service bureaucracy. If governmentality, or'government rationality', makes certain forms of governing activity 'thinkable and practicable both to its practitioners and to those upon whom it [is] practiced' (Gordon 1991:3), then it is interesting to consider how EEO has become both 'thinkable and practicable' in bureaucratic discourse. It is particularly interesting in that EEO derives at least in part from the oppositional discourses of feminism. I will consider below how EEO meshes with the discourses of bureauc-
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racy in terms of practices of normalisation and surveillance. I will also consider how the outcomes of these processes can be viewed. But first I want to briefly consider gender as a product of bureaucratic discourses.
The gendered subject of the public servant Clearly gender differences are produced across a range of discursive positions: in fact I would argue that all modern subjects are gendered. My interest is in how this gendered and racialised positioning works in government organisations, and, in particular, in the kind of difference that is produced in discourses of EEO. The kind of public servant produced by traditional public service discourses was masculine. The discourses of EEO serve to make visible the previously invisible mechanisms by which this subject was produced, the processes of normalisation and surveillance by which this exclusionary process was both 'thinkable and practicable'. The discourses of EEO named such processes in terms of 'discrimination', of sexism. One of the effects of the discourse of EEO is to continue to make visible the processes by which the male public servant continues to be produced and privileged in the discourses of the public service. Sites that are identified by EEO programs include, for instance, recruitment, training and promotion processes, exclusionary language, harassment, and leave policies. Foucault (1977) has described how medical discourses of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries produced the subject of the sexual deviant, and, as a corollary, an increasing subjection of that subject to the technologies of normalisation and surveillance. Just as there was an 'enormous explosion of discourse and concern' about sexuality and the body, as Dreyfus and Rabinow (1983:140) put it there has been an 'enormous explosion of discourse and concern' about gender over the last twenty years. In New Zealand government organisations, the discourse ofEEO has proliferated at an official level over the last ten years. In identified sites such as that of the recruitment interview, the gendered nature of both interviewer and interviewee are rendered highly visible by EEO discourses. The gender of the interview panel, the candidates and the eventual appointee have become highly visible and open to surveillance in terms of statistical aggregation and possible interrogation through review processes. Paradoxically, this process of making difference highly visible is linked with a bureaucratic rhetoric of 'merit' by which difference is made visible in order to be erased as a factor in appointments. Two types of surveillance or panopticism in Foucault's terms are going on in such an interview. First the interview process itself is surveyed for traces of gender difference which must be somehow cleansed so that 'merit' applies without the traces of sexism. Statistical technologies are deployed to measure the relationship between candidate and appointee gender, to ensure the absence of sexist discrimination. Secondly, the interview subject is surveyed in a kind of confessional process to ensure that they are the type of 'equitable' public servant that can be or aligned with the corporate discourses of equality. Subjects are required for instance to 'demonstrate a commitment' to 'equal employment opportunity principles' or 'the Treaty of Waitangi'.
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The relationship between the technology of the confessional and the production of the subject of the equitable public servant is a critical one. As Dreyfus and Rabinow (1983:175) put it, Foucault's thesis is that 'the key to the technology of the self is the belief that one can, with the help of experts, tell the truth about oneself'. Foucault contests this belief by arguing that the self is not revealed but is produced by the technologies of the confessional. Public service discourse has a characteristic framing of the relationship between the professional 'truth' and the personal 'truth' of the public servant. It is traditional in public service discourse that the public servant administers government policy regardless of his or her own political beliefs. This separation of public and private renders what may be seen as the interiority of the subject as nondiscursive. Thus EEO practitioners can say of resistant public servants 'I don't care what they think any more, I just want them to have to behave a certain way'. This position follows and responds to an emancipatory approach to anti-sexism practices, which assumes a kind of consciousness-raising model drawn from community work and feminist discourses. It addresses the problem of changing hearts and minds on equality issues. This approach is that it is intended to empower the disempowered, and is not seen as appropriate for the already powerful. Feminists tend to be sceptical of the value of 'rational' appeals to already empowered male public servants, and so, although maintaining in some ways a model of rationality, turn instead to 'carrot and stick' approaches to implement EEO programs. Foucault's approach to the constitution of the self in discursive formations is not an emancipatory one, nor is it based on any intrinsic or cognitive rationality. Because there is no subject prior to discourse, there is no truth of the self to be either revealed or concealed, and there is no truth about the self which can be revealed to the self. Foucault argued that medical discourses produced a highly visible and voluble sexuality, inevitably implicated in the production of a highly visible and voluble deviant sexuality. Similarly we could argue that EEO discourse produces a highly visible gendering of public servants, and a deviant gendering characterised as sexism. This discourse of gender seeks to replace the prior and still active discourse of sexism, in terms of which femaleness was deviant. This replacement involves making sexist discourse visible and then deviant. This is not then an emancipatory process, but in Foucault's terms, an attempt to replace one regime of truth by another, to produce a new kind of subject. Having pointed out that a Foucauldian perspective subverts the project of emancipation, it is also important to highlight the oppositional nature of the feminist discourses of EEO, to distinguish them from traditional sexist discourses while at the same time remarking on the similarities in the ways that they work to produce subjects within regimes of truth. Foucault's idea of resistance was that it takes place always and only within a certain existing discursive context: that 'a strategic manoeuvre must be countered by an opposing manoeuvre; a set of tactics must be consciously invented in opposition to the setting in place of another', as McHoul and Grace put it (1993:84).
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This counter-manoeuvring can be seen in the processes of surveillance through EEO produces the equitable public servant. McHoul and Grace point out that all disciplinary instruments and procedures 'involve some form or unequal intercourse between two agents or parties' (1993:71). Surveillance means one-way observation: 'the subject of surveillance does not have the reciprocal power to 'observe' the observer'. Applied to an interview situation, we can see that in an examination 'it is only the subject of power who undergoes this trial; it is set by someone already possessing the skills or knowledge the other is seeking'. The success of feminists in turning the lens of the Panopticon upon bureaucratic procedures and subjects is, on reflection, quite extraordinary. Gordon (1991:27) sees liberal government as typically 'focussing... the state's immediate interest in disciplinary technique largely on the organisation of its own staffs and apparatuses'. Public servants are as inspectable as the populations they administer, and both groups are subject to the disciplinary techniques of public policy flowing from feminist oppositional discourses.
Some questions and problems in thinking EEO differently In the 'final' analysis, proof of the value of using Foucault for feminism will
be in the puddings, that is, in the practical implications that adopting his methods and insights will have. Attending to the exigencies of feminist practice will sometimes require that we either ignore Foucault or move beyond him (Sawicki 1991:109). EEO does not 'liberate' women but produces another kind of public servant. Could there be a relationship between the productive technologies of EEO and the persistence of 'inequality', even viewed from within the framework of the knowledges of EEO, the EEO plans and outcomes? I will conclude by suggesting not some answers but some questions raised for activists by my attempt to think EEO differently. I have argued against the modernist model of liberation, and instead have drawn on the work of Foucault to think EEO differently as a discourse which produces a certain kind of public servant. I have given examples of how the modernist assumptions of bureaucratic discourses are shared by feminists working within bureaucracies- people who are themselves the subjects of the discourses of bureaucracy. These assumptions frame the context in which feminists have developed a counter-discourse of anti-sexism, framed as a discourse of 'equality'. EEO practitioners see themselves as working within an emancipatory mode as well as within the discourses of bureaucracy. While they are frequently aware of the contradictions between these discursive positions in terms of gender issues, they are perhaps less aware of the ways they reinforce each other. For instance, do they see themselves as 'the directors of conscience', in Foucault's words, (in Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983:140), extending administrative control through a counter discourse which works through the state apparatus? A major current concern among feminists is with the ways that feminism itself can operate as a discourse of power that tends to both fix and universalise gender, and exclude both women and men from its universe. AsJudithButlerputsit,anyattempttouniversalisetheexperienceofwomen
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'inevitably generates multiple refusals to accept the category' (1990:4). A regulatory approach to deal with issues of gender inevitably fixes what gender is and means, inevitably speaks and is silent about some experiences of gender and not others. This regulatory approach creates effects that are paradoxical in terms of an emancipatory agenda. Another key question is whether or not the equitable public servant is produced as gendered? Is the public servant to be the traditional neutral instrument of the state, whose approach to gender has no reference to his or her own gender positioning? This seems totally impossible in the context of the multiple effects of gender in all social sites. On the other hand, the gender differentiated public servant with 'different' needs- in the case of women, usually framed in terms of a deficit- may simply be reinscription of gender difference. There also seems to me to be a problem in terms of how to address the resistance of many public servants to EEO discourses. Where does sexism 'go'? Is it 'cleansed'; or does it become masked/invisible? Is sexism 'in' men but not 'in' women? These questions are not unlike some of those being asked within a modernist framework by practitioners themselves, but I argue that a Foucauldian approach stresses the productiveness of EEO discourse, as against an instrumental approach to implementation which sidesteps issues of subjectivity, language, difference, and focuses instead on what I believe is a spurious pragmatism of organisational change. 1
Thanks to Lynda Davies for suggestions on this paper at an early stage.
2
I note that both the terms 'socialisation' and 'training' are terms derived from a different context from that in which Foucault's analysis takes place.
References Dreyfus, H and Rabinow, P. (1983). Michel Foucault: beyond structuralism and hermeneutics, 2nd edn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ferguson, K. (1984). The feminist case against bureaucracy. Philadelphia, P.A.: Temple University Press. __ _, (1988). 'Subject-centredness in feminist discourse', in Jones, K. and Jonasdottir, A. (eds), The political interests of gender: developing theory and research with a feminist face, pp.66-78. London: Sage. Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: the birth of the prison. London: Allen Lane. Fraser, N. (1989). Unruly practices: power, discourse and gender in contemporary society. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Game, A. (1991 ). Undoing the social: towards a deconstructive sociology. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Gordon, C. (1991). 'Government rationality: an introduction', in G. Burchell et al. (eds), The Foucault effect: studies in governmentality, pp.1-51. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Johnson, T. (1993). 'Expertise and the state', in Game, M. and Johnson, T. (eds), Foucault's new domains, pp.139-152. London: Routledge.
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McHoul, A and Grace, W. (1993). The Foucault primer: discourse, power, and the subject. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. McNay, L. (1992). Foucault and feminism: power, gender, and the self Cambridge: Polity Press. Morey,M.(1992).'0nMichelFoucault'sphilosophicalstyle:towardsacritiqueofthe normal', in Armstrong, T. (ed.), Michel Foucault: philosopher, pp.117-127. New York: Harvester /Wheatsheaf. Rose, N. (1988). 'Calculable minds and manageable individuals', History of the Human Sciences, 1(2):179-200. Sawicki, J. (1991). Disciplining Foucault: feminism, power and the body. New York: Routledge. Shapiro, M. (1992). Reading the postmodern polity: political theory as textual practice . Minneapolis, MINN.: University of Minnesota Press. Weedon, C. (1987). Feminist practice and poststructuralist theory. London: Basil Blackwell.
Part Seven Truth, Law and Medicine
The Production of Truth: Body and Soul Part 1: 'Telling Truths': Truth Telling in the Judicial Process
There is a story told in Jewish mythology that relates that in a time of yore, men made the figure of a man of clay. The miraculous name of God was pronounced and the clay figure came to life. On his forehead was written 'emeth' the word to represent truth. They called him 'golem' and used him as a servant. Soon he grew stronger than all other men. Out of fear they erased the first letter so that 'meth' 'he is dead' was now written on his forehead. The golem collapses and returns to clay again. The story of the golem serves as a narrative to introduce this paper about truth in its allegorical rather than its literal sense. The aim is not to re-define the dominant narratives around truth and the body, but by re-telling snatches of some of the stories already told, to nuance the contours of the some of the silences. Narratives in the dominant mode, are in a way already representations of power. What is presented here is by way of a broken narrative, intended only to make strange some of the more familiar and dominant narratives about truth and the body. It is not intended as a new dominant narrative. What is most striking about juridical truth practices for us is the hierarchical and hermeneutic nature of the narratives. In a sense, this same structure is to be found in most dominant narratives. The strategic relationship between truth and the body which juridical practice produces is of interest here as an aspect of the much broader practices of dominance and subordination in the context of the desired democratic practices of equality and difference. Indeed, desired practices of equality and difference will serve in this paper as an implied counter-narrative to dominant stories of domination, homogeneity and silence. The juridical stories retold here are selected around the themes of confessions, torture, slavery and truth. We note in passing that in the majority of criminal trials today there is no formal contest as such about the facts or the 'truth' of the allegations. Most verdicts of guilty are the result of admissions, pleas of guilty and confessions. We take as our focus the centrality of the confession either as such, or in the form of admissions and pleas of guilty in the practices of the criminal courts. Indeed both in the evidential and penitential sense, confession is vital to criminal and the related penal practices. The modest claim is that in these confessional/ penitential rituals, we witness again the strategic dramaturgy, if not liturgy, associated with the sin, sacrifice, submission, suffering and sadism of inquisitions of old in order to produce the contemporary 'truth' of our subjectivity and subjection. In this part of the paper, of course, it should be clear that I use 'truth' in its discursive sense, telling stories about truth and the uses to which truth can be put. It is part of a mode of becoming, obtained through experiences
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located in specific spaces, bodies and time. It obeys no immutable laws but follows from the free flow of events and specific social and public practices. In figurative terms 'truth' is here perhaps better regarded as a 'tum' or a 'conceit' (if not deceit). Truth here is tropical. We are concerned with what has been said by Barthes to be the 'lure of truth'. Central to any consideration of confession/penitential practice is the nature of the relationship that it demands to the self. Self-examination or examination/interrogation by teacher or master is one of the issues dealt with by Foucault in his Howison Lectures at Berkeley in October 1980. Under the title 'Truth and Subjectivity' or 'About the beginnings of the Hermeneutics of the Self', Foucault traces what he calls the genealogy of the subject to mark the point where techniques of domination and coercion meet with the practices/techniques of the self. He claims that for the Greek/ Roman and early Christian man, the practice of self examination was a sort of truth-game as opposed to a truth obligation. He gives the example of Seneca and notes that in his self-examination he uses the language of the administrator in relation to himself. He recalls his faults, not to punish himself. He remembers I memorises them to re-awaken fundamental philosophical principles. He does not do this to discover hidden secrets but to recall forgotten truths. Here we find an already constituted subject whose 'truth' was not in issue and hence not in need of interpretation. We find a male adult citizen for whom the practice of self-examination, the injunction to 'know yourself', was an ethical practice. A practice where one either alone or with the help of a mentor/master measured the distance between one's truth and one's will against an ideal unity of truth and will. The relationship between master and disciple was one that was instrumental and provisional. The teachings or pedagogical practices were the skills of memory and rhetoric. Contrast the monastic practices around the command/injunction/ obligation of 'tell your faults' to a spiritual director, who interpreted, judged and forgave in the name of God. Now the self-examination is interpretive and contradictory, and must be spoken to a superior auditor. The will and truth now are God's higher demands. The duty now is permanent obedience, and sacrifice of bodily self. This sinful self stands in the way of God's truth. It must be denied, policed, scrutinised, and renounced, All traces of the bodily self and its desires must be erased and announced as the errors they are. But not just erased in silence but a renunciation perpetually voiced to be heard and audited by another who stood in the stead of the highest and ultimate unity of will and truth. The agon with the self must be verbalised, disembodied and yet made flesh. These practices were aimed at the elimination of the 'other' tainted sinful evil self. Pain and torment, sacrifice and suffering were the signs: punishment/ repentance I atonement the remedy. These penitential practices harnessed three grand metaphors, the medical concern with cure and healing, the judicial repertoire of repentance, atonement, appeasement, and finally a martyrdom of the body and its passions to achieve a break with one's fallen, debased and impure self. Now one has only a truth obligation, a permanent relationship of obedience, and a perpetual penitential policing of the soul to produce the pure dis-embodied and absent ideal
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and true self. For Foucault this demand for sacrifice is critical to confessional practice and the interpretive or hermeneutic subject so produced. One renounces one's will either by obedience and or a symbolic staging of one's own death. Hence the impossibility of truth without pain or sacrifice. In the confessional utterances we have the speech of submission and the ritual language of subordination. Indeed we have an institutionalised truth practice that demands and constructs the sacrificial subject through the dynamics of subordinated self and a superior spiritual auditor. In the heyday of the Greek polis, two methods of arriving at juridical truth were practised, torture for the slave and testimony for the citizen. The verdict was given by the specially assembled jury of equals, other adult males fellow citizens. In the shadows of this magnificently self-conscious equality and homogeneity, roamed the shame of a truth extracted from screaming bodies, bodies otherwise deemed incapable of speaking truthfully - that is logically, mindfully, rationally and therefore persuasively. Truth in the slave was ontological, to be born in and through pain. Inherrecentstudyoftorture and truth, Page DuBois claims that, 'the very idea of truth we receive from the Greeks. Those ancestors whom Allan Bloom names for us, are inextricably linked with the practice of torture, which has almost always been the attempt to discover a secret 'always out of reach' (DuBois 1991:7). She tells us that the Greek word for torture is 'basanos' or touchstone. The touchstone was a dark coloured stone which when rubbed on pure gold leaves left a mark. Bankers and money-changers of the time used scales and touch-stones to test, to assess, to examine the multiplicity of coins circulating throughout Aegean world. Poetically 'basanos' was used as a metaphor for separating the good from the base. Sophocles for example uses 'basanos' as a method for testing or proving. DuBois quotes the scholar Jean Pierre Vernant in his study of Greek tragedy as noting the close analogy between the dramas that unfolded in the judicial arena and the stuff of tragic theatre: The tragic writers' use of a technical legal vocabulary underlies the affinities between the most favoured tragic themes and certain cases that fell within the competence of the courts. The tragic poet makes use of this vocabulary, deliberately exploiting its ambiguities, its fluctuations and its incompleteness. We find an imprecision in the terms used, shifts of meaning, incoherences and contradictions all of which reveal the disagreements within legal thought itself (DuBois 1991:20).
'Basanos', touchstone, became the figurative' to test', 'to torture', hence the testing of human bodies in the judicial procedures of Athenian courts. The torture of slaves figured as the guarantor of truth in the process of truthmaking. The testimony of the master had to be supplemented by that extracted from the tortured body of his slave. Ironically, as evidence, it was considered a superior truth to the 'feigned' testimony of the master. It was oracular in its impact, estranged, differently voiced, from another place, perhaps from a higher order. Its power to persuade was at least quasimystical. For the rationalist Aristotle, the slave was a part of the master, a part of his body, as it were, alive yet separate. So, rather conveniently, the master's truth lies buried in the body of his slave and may only be revealed
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through torture. The testimony of the slave was not admissible in judicial proceedings unless it had been obtained though torture. Again, the refusal of a master to have his slave put to torture weighed heavily as evidence against him. Torture then in the Athenian court played a double role, sociopolitical and veridical, it marked out the slave from the citizen, and guarantied the truth claims of the master I citizen. Of course everyone was aware of the fragility and danger and certainly the logical limitations of such a truth pain relationship. But this did not matter and certainly did not stand in the way of the practice. In sum, there were two ways that evidence was presented in the courts of Athens, the testimony of the citizen/ contestants, and his witnesses as to the facts and credit-worthiness of the disputants. This was conducted in the form of a contest between equals. Then there was the truth of the slave as a necessary corroboration. Now it was up to the assembled citizen/jury of equals to put an end to dispute and ambiguity and come to a verdict... to at last speak the final'truth'. DuBois claims: In the Athenian legal system truth is considered to reside elsewhere, in the body of the slave. It cannot be arrived at through the process of debate and
exchange; the scene in the courtroom, in which defendant and prosecutor speak on their own behalf, cannot be relied upon to provide the truth required for the court's decision. The truth, this a-letheia, this unforgetting, must be obtained in another scene. That scene is the scene of another exchange, the scene of torture, where the torturer employs not the logos, not speech, but his implements of iron. Here the tortured slave receives the attentions of the court, mediated by the body of the torturer, and here he or she is thought to deliver up from the space of forgetting the sought-after prize. The agon, the contestofthe plaintiff and defendant in the court, is replaced by another agon, that enacted between the city's torturer and the slave implicated in the events of a lawsuit. The metaphysical representation of truth as residing beyond, within, somewhere else, is replicated, produced, reproduced, mimed, in the scene of torture. And it is this ancient, traditional, religious view of truth contested by democratic process, by selection according to lot, by mass debate in the agora and assembly- that anchors philosophical practice, that of many of the pre-Socratics, that of Plato, that of his modem critic Martin Heidegger (DuBois 1991:137).
From the juridical practice of torture, it does not take too much imagination to see the birth of a philosophic notion truth, a notion associated with Socrates, Plato and Aristotle and their battle against the Sophists. This is the view of a truth that is Other, hidden, secret, immutable, divine, eternal and universal. It is a truth that only the philosopher or enlightened citizen can interpret and evaluate. Plato thought that the sophist, like the slave may apprehend (in the sense of see) truth, but could not 'possess' or 'know' it. Sophists then like slaves could only mimic truth. Their speech accordingly was empty, feigned and false. By contrast, the speech of the philosopher was full, true and full in the possession of knowledge arrived at after due dialectical disputation, cross-examination, refutation and testing. For Plato, logic and dialectic are police arts, to discipline and arrest the otherwise freechatter of dangerous words. So Sophist and slave alike could be forced to deliver up truth's secrets so that philosophers could interpret and evaluate them. Witness the birth of the sovereignty of rational discourse, a dialectics
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of truth, superior and required to police the duplicitous, error prone character of mere feelings. In this view, truth can only be summoned up or achieve articulate form through interpretative procedures applied by a rational male philosopher. Witness the birth of the hermeneutic subject/ object of knowledge. The hierarchy of knowers of truth arrived at by the mastery, monopoly and power of philosophers/interpreters and other bodies to be known. Bartlett in his study of the medieval judicial ordeal describes it as more powerful that any clash of words. The ordeal was only used when other means of establishing truth were not available. These other means were, oath-swearing, oath compurgation, witnesses, written evidence, and inquests. The most common cases where the ordeal by fire or water was used, were heresy, adultery and other sexual misconduct by wives, dishonesty, murder and theft by night. Apart from the type of offence in question, the other variable in the decision to use the ordeal was the social status of the accused, for example, the free-man as opposed to the bondsman, the noble as opposed to the peasant, the wife as opposed to the husband, the monk as opposed to the bishop. The first task of the medieval court was to decide the oath-worthiness of the accused and hence the most appropriate way of putting him or her to the proof. Bartlett tells us that a large body of legal material makes it clear that compurgation and sometimes, the duel, was the proof of the free, the ordeal that of the unfree, although legally all could be put to the ordeal. In its sociopolitical context the judicial ordeal served both a veridical and punitive (that is deterrent) function as well as of course aiding the Church in its struggle for power. For the Church authorities the ordeal became problematic as a means of signifying truth. Bartlett is interested in the way that the 'rationality' of the ordeal gave way to its decline and characterisation as 'irrational'. He cites Aquinas as teaching that the ordeal by the hot iron or water is illicit because a miraculous effect is required of God. Unlike those historians who would see the decline of the ordeal as a veridical practice in the rise of a new naturalism or rationalism, he claims that the scholastic criticism of the ordeal reflected a new and more rigorous metaphysics or ontology: natural, miraculous, and sacramental (Bartlett 1986:87). He speculates that perhaps the only way to save the ordeal would have been to make it a sacrament. However the ordeal fell between all three orders ofreality.Itwasnotnatural,itwasblasphemoustospeakofitasmiraculous, as if miracles could be invoked at the whim of the human. The only alternative was that the Church made it a sacrament, that is a divine intervention invoked by the power of the Church. The only guaranteed supernatural events were the sacraments, and these had to be canonical. The objections of people like Aquinas that the ordeal was uncanonical and in effect demanded a miracle effectively won the day and the ordeal was robbed of its licit status as a supernatural process. The debate about the ordeal was not one as to its truth, it was a crisis of power and authority. It died when its charter was removed by the authority of the Church and replaced by the sacrament of penance. What is more interesting from this period is that the swimming of witches survived right to the nineteenth
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century. This practice as well as the trial by combat survived, as they were never officially sanctioned or their truth guaranteed by the Church. With the decline of the ordeal there emerged three main changes in the area of proof, an extension of existing proofs, moves towards trial by jury, especially in England, and perhaps, most importantly, the rise of torture to extract a confession, now regarded as the ultimate proof of the truth of any allegation. In a detailed and long term history of torture, Edward Peters warns us to be mindful of the judicial aspect of torture. Whether used as a part of the juridical veridical practice or as an instrument of state, torture was always a judicial/ public use of pain. It was in essence a public use of torment to enquire after truth. We note with him 'tormentum', 'torquens mentum', the twisting and turning of the mind by the suffering body. Peters claims that from the twelfth to the eighteenth century, confession was the 'queen of proofs' in judicial proceedings. He claims that, it may be said that the value associated with the confession offered a kind of protection to the new procedures that evolved. Confession ascended to the top of the hierarchy of proofs and remained there long after the Romano I Canonicalinquisitorial procedure and the procedure oftrial by jury had come to be firmly in place themselves. For jurists and lay-people alike, confession was the 'regina probationum' the queen of proofs ... lt is the importance of confession upon which hinges, if not, the revival then surely the spread and integration of torture into the legal system of the thirteenth century (Peters 1985:45).
We should also note that, of course, the experts of the day were well aware of the dangers and paradoxes of confessions gained under torture. So with Peters, we note the caution and circumspection that surrounded the official discourse and academic writing around torture and the practice manuals for judges and torturers. Strict protocols and caution were the watchwords. The admonitions were that torture only be used as a last resort, and not to cause death or serious injury, that a notary had to be present to make an official record of the proceedings and finally of course there had to be a medical official to 'monitor' proceedings. However, the ultimate safeguard of the confessions 'truth' was that only if the confession extracted under torture was repeated in a place away from the torture chamber could it be admitted against the accused. Of course if he/ she failed to so repeat, the torture would start again! So while all concerned were well aware that torture was a practice 'res fragilis et periculosa' nevertheless the judge at the end of the day, after hearing the circumstantial evidence and the supervising of the torture and consequent confession, was able to announce the verdict to say I speak the truth of the matter and order the appropriate punishment. Peters tells us that: From its origins as a practical police tactic to its position as a recognised part of Romano/Canonicallegal procedure- torture was consistently employed by the courts whose personnel were not always academically trained experts and it is doubtful that the carefully guarded 'consilia' and academic treatises ever had much influence except in offering a judicial ideal for actual magistrates and torturers (Peters 1985:62).
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Langbein in his influential study of torture and the law of proof divides his story into judicial torture in England and contrasts that to its practice in continental Europe. In Europe, judicial torture was governed by the Romancanon law of evidence. Judicial torture involved the use of pain by officials of state in order to gather evidence for judicial proceedings. Langbein's approach is remarkable for its clinical, if not sanitised description of these legal practices. He claims that torture as part of the judicial investigation should not be confused with punishment. He vehemently argues that the reasons for the disappearance of torture from the judicial repertoire of truth practices, were juristic and not the adverse publicity, the work of reformers or other political pressures. For convictions for serious crimes three modes of proof were operative. Complete proof was achieved on the eye-witness account of two witnesses. If there were not two eye-witnesses, the court could convict only upon the basis of a confession. Circumstantial evidence, no matter how compelling could never be used to secure a conviction. In the absence of two eyewitnesses or a voluntary confession, the court could call on the assistance of the torturer to help produce a confession. The accused could be said to be a slave to truth in these proceedings. But note that torture could only be used when there was at least a threshold of evidence, called half-proof against the suspect. Half-proof requirements could be met by one eye-witness, or circumstantial evidence of sufficient though cumulative weight determined by strict rules. Indeed Langbein is determined to make us see the logic and restraint that regulated these veridical inquisitions. 'To the extent that the explanation is to be found in logic, it is that the system did not allow indiscriminate coercion. The coercion was carefully limited (Langbein 1976:5). In explaining the shift from the ordeal or 'non-rational' proofs as he calls them, Langbein reminds us that God's truth was to be replaced by that of men in the shape of judges. The problem that this posed for the authority of the Church and the emerging city-states was to be solved by the judicial system of statutory proofs, strict rules requiring certainty and leaving no doubt as to the truth of its findings. In Langbein's off hand rationale for the introduction of torture we find: No society will tolerate a legal system in which there is no prospect of convicting unrepentant persons who commit clandestine crimes. Something had to be done to extend the system to those cases. The two-eye witness rule was hard to compromise or evade, but the confession rule invited 'subterfuge'. To go from accepting a voluntary confession to coercing a confession from someone against whom there was already strong suspicion was a relatively small step, indeed, one which was probably taken almost from the inception of the system (Langbein 1976:7).
Once again we note a re-inscription into the judicial process of pain and truth. The verdict of God, replaced by the confessional truth hidden in the body of the accused and to be drawn out in his or her screamed admissions. This is not the place for a detailed discussion of Langbein's work. We just pause to note his thesis that the Roman-canon law of proof lost its force not in the nineteenth century but in the seventeenth. Langbein claims that' a new system of proof, which was in fact free judicial evaluation of the evidence
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although not described as such, was developed in the legal science and the legal practice of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and confirmed in the legislation of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This new system of proof developed alongside the Roman-canon system' (Langbein 1976:11). Finally we quickly note with Langbein, the English use of jury trial to replace the ordeal. Though the veridical practice over time changed from being active witnesses of the issues in dispute, to passive listeners to be persuaded of the truth in the case as presented by amateur prosecutors and factgatherers. It was this amateurism which according to Langbein, prevented the centralised and institutionalised use of inquisitorial torture in English judicial proceedings. While torture was used for certain serious investigations by the monarch and the Privy Council, it never became entrenched. We must turn a blind eye to peine forte et dure to press the accused into pleading and accepting trial by peers. Again we must note Langbein's insistence on the distinction between torture as part of a punishment, part of the preliminaryplea, and used to extractinformationand confessions. In this light, peine forte 'can best be regarded as a special kind of guilty plea. The defendant underwent a different mode of capital punishment to save his estate for his kin' (Langbein 1976:76). To conclude the English did not develop a professional prosecutorial bureaucracy as did their continental neighbours, and so they did not develop inquisitorial methods. This does not mean that torture was not used around judicial proceedings, just that the jury standard of proof 'made it unnecessary to provide extensive and refined evidence gathering. An English jury could still convict on less evidence than was required as a precondition for investigation under torture on the Continent' (Langbein 1976:139). In stark contrast to Langbein's legal history of the use of torture in judicial truth practices is Foucault's work on discourse analysis in general and truth practices in particular. With Foucault we note that the same Lateran Council of 1215 that forbade the ordeal as a truth ritual also codified the sacrament of penance. All at once the Christian was obliged to annually at least, kneel down and to tell his or her truth. Truth of the soul is now to be found in the magical conjunction between thoughts and words, examination, interrogation, and most importantly ritualised and sacramental articulation. The edict of the Lateran Council gave birth to the penitential subject, born in the rituals of power/knowledge/truth. To confess was to be free of sin, of the promise of torment, to be forgiven, to be redeemed to be born anew as a penitent, and forgiven, if fallen subject. Note the shift from the importance of the testimony of others, witnesses as to character, integrity, service to the community, status, birth and so on. In his History of Sexuality, Voume 1: An Introduction, Foucault notes that after the Middle Ages the confession became one of the main rituals for the production of truth: In any case, next to the testing rituals, next to the testimony of witnesses, and
the learned methods of observation and demonstration, the confession became one ofthe West's most highly valued techniques for producing truth. We have since become a singularly confessing society. The confession has
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j'oucau{t: 'IFte Legacy spread its effects far and wide.lt plays a part in justice, medicine, education, family relationships, love relations, in the most ordinary affairs of everyday life, and in the most solemn rites, on confesses one's crimes, one's sins, one's thoughts, one's desires, one's illnesses and troubles; one goes about telling, with the greatest precision, whatever is most difficult to tell. One confesses in public and in private, to one's parents, one's educators, one's doctor, to those one loves, one admits to oneself, in pleasure and in pain things it would be impossible to tell anyone else, the things people write books about. One confesses - or is forced to confess. When it is not spontaneous or dictated by some internal imperative, the confession is wrung from a person by violence or threat; it is driven from its hiding place in the soul, or extracted from the body. Since the Middle Ages, torture has accompanied it like a shadow, and supported it when it could go no further; the dark twins. The most defenceless tenderness and the bloodiest of powers have a similar need of confession. Western man has become a confessing animal' (HS:59).
But more than this: in confession the soul, consciousness, self, call it what you will, is freed from the power that prohibits, represses, oppresses, silences. In the confessional voice, one finds oneself, frees oneself. Foucault argues that 'traditional themes in philosophy, which a "political history of truth" would have to overturn by showing that truth is not by nature freenor error servile - but that its production is thoroughly imbued with relations of power. The confession is an example of this' (HS:59-60). In the ritual of confession whether it be to a priest, doctor, teacher, policeman, judge, lover, or even to oneself, there is always present the figure of an authority that demands this articulation in 'order to judge, punish, forgive, console and reconcile, a ritual in which the truth is corroborated by the obstacles and resistances it has had to surmount in order to be formulated, and finally a ritual in which the expression alone, independently of its external consequences, produces intrinsic modifications in the person who articulates it' (HS:62). Discipline and Punish is Foucault's detailed study of the history of 'the modern soul' and what he terms the present' scientifico-legal complex' from which the power to punish derives its justification. He claims that in the eighteenth century the techniques of discipline and examination were invented: The investigation was the sovereign power arrogating to itself the right to establish the truth by a number of regulated techniques. Now, although the investigation has since then been an integral part of Western justice (even up to our own day), one must not forget either its political origins, its links with the birth of the states and of monarchical sovereignty, or its later extension and its role in the formation of knowledge. In fact, the investigation has been the no doubt crude, but fundamental element in the constitution of the empirical sciences; it has been the juridico-political matrix of this experimental knowledge, which as we know was very rapidly released at the end of the Middle Ages (DP:225).
Foucault attributes the great developments in the empirical sciences to inquisitorial techniques. 'But what this politico-juridical, administrative and criminal, religious and lay, investigation was to the sciences of nature, disciplinary analysis has been to the sciences of man' For Foucault, the birth of the human sciences such as psychology, criminology, and pedagogy had
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their origin in the borrowing of the judicial techniques and rituals of truth, the disciplines in the form of the confession/ examination the philosopher I expert knower appro-priating translating interpreting and hence through the power I knowledge so created constructing the normal and the true self as well as of course the deviant/ criminal self truth. He argues that the disciplines have invaded penal justice that is still in principle inquisitorial. He notes the concern with corrections, rehabilitation, therapy, and the concern with normalisation and the dangerousness of the criminal, the measurement, prediction, a multiplication of judgements and little trials, all these betray 'the penetration of the disciplinary examination into the judicial inquisition' (DP:227). Foucault claims that: What is now imposed on penal justice at its point of application its 'useful' object, will no longer be the body of the guilty man set up against the body of the king; nor will it be the juridical subject of an ideal contract; it will be the disciplinary individual. The extreme point of penal justice under the Ancient Regime was the infinite segmentation of the body of the regicide: a manifestation of the strongest power over the body of the greatest criminal, whose total destruction made the crime explode into its truth. The ideal point of penality today would be an indefinite discipline: an interrogation without end, an investigation that would be extended without limit to a meticulous and ever more analytical observation, a judgment that at the same time be the constitution of a file that was never closed, the calculated leniency of a penalty that would be interlaced with the ruthless curiosity of an examination, a procedure that would be at the same time a permanent measure of a gap in relation to an inaccessible norm and the asymptomatic movement that strives to meet infinity. The public execution was the logical culmination of a procedure governed by the Inquisition. The practice of placing individuals under 'observation' is a natural extension of a justice imbued with the disciplinary methods and examination procedures. Is it surprising that the cellular prison, with its regular chronologies, forced labour, its authorities of surveillance and registration, its experts in normality, who continue and multiply the functions of the judge, should have become the modem instrument of penality. Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons? (DP:228).
We should read Foucault perhaps as striving towards another narrative of truth and subjectivity, not another dominant narrative of sacrifice and subjection, but a proliferation and polyphony of voices, voices always about to break the silence ....
Bibliography Bartlett, R. (1986). Trial by Fire and Water, The Medieval Judicial Ordeal, Clarendon Press. DuBois, Page (1991). Torture and Truth, Routledge. Foucault, Michel (1984). 'Truth and Subjectivity'. Berkeley: The Howison Lectures (unpublished Centre Michel Foucault. Paris). __ _, (1977). Discipline and Punish, Penguin (abbreviated as DP). __ _,(1978). The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, Penguin (abbreviated asHS). Langbein, J. (1976). Torture and the Law of Proof University of Chicago Press. Peters, E. (1985). Torture, Blackwells.
The Production of Truth: Body and Soul Part 2: Displaying the Truth of the Body
The truth of the human body was inseparable, in Graeco-Roman antiquity, from the truth about the natural world as a whole - the former was the microcosm which faithfully reflected the macrocosm of the latter. Where these two orders of being were understood in teleological terms, they communicated their meaning to the intellect of the observer through their normal functioning. Like the testimony of the free man in the Greek court, given without constraint, the testimony of nature unconstrained was a privileged source of truth. Thus it was rare to find an interest in the dissection of the human body or in the regular use of experimentation in the study of nature. From the teleological point of view, experimentation in the natural world was the equivalent of the judicial torture of slaves in the social world. Plato, for example, ridiculed the Pythagoreans who conducted experiments relating string lengths to musical tones, by describing them as men 'who persecute and torture [basanizontas 1the strings, racking them upon the pegs' while making accusations against them and dealing them blows with the plectrum (Plato 1965:531B). To this study of audible harmonies produced in the material world Plato contrasted the philosopher's understanding of the intelligible harmonies of pure numerical relationships (Plato 1965:531 C). As in Aristotle's more explicit comparison of matter and form with slave and master, here the material strings are slave-like and thus able to be subjected to torture. But if the intelligible world is the teleological expression of reason which matter only imperfectly reflects or embodies, then it is ludicrous to torture slavish matter for information when the intelligible forms themselves speak directly to human reason. In the courts, where rational men can sometimes use their reason to deceive, the corroborating evidence given by slaves under torture may be seen as a necessary corrective; but in nature, where cosmic reason operates without deception, the evidence of tortured matter is a hindrance to the attainment of truth. In the microcosm of the human body anatomical dissection was associated, in the first instance, with the anti-teleological views of the founders of Alexandrian medicine, the philosophical sceptic Herophilus and the Epicurean atomist Erasistratus. These two physicians were believed, in antiquity, not only to have dissected cadavers but also to have vivisected criminals sentenced to death (Celsus 1971:23). Here the torture of criminals in the interest of medical truth provides a literal parallel with the torture of slaves in the interest of juridical truth. And just as in the courts the evidence produced under torture was sometimes criticised as being an artefact of the torture itself rather than the expression of a hidden truth (DuBois 1991:56), so too in thecaseofhuman vivisection it was argued that'when the body had
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been laid open, colour, smoothness, softness, hardness and all similars would not be such as they were when the body was untouched' (Celsus 1971:41). This objection rested on a teleological view of the human body which may be summed up in the Hippocratic phrase, the healing power of nature. On this view the body mobilises its defences in response to illness and injury, and in doing so enters a qualitatively different state from the normal until health is restored. In the event of death it is transformed even further, for when the body 'is no longer a living creature ... none of its parts remains the same, except only in shape' (Aristotle 1961:641A). A rational grasp of the truth of the body must, on this account, come from observation of the living human's natural functioning, combined with limited therapeutic interventions to assist the healing tendencies already present within the body itself. The physician would learn the truth of the body by apprenticing himself to it rather than by inquiring into it- the human body was thus not the slave who needed to be tortured for information, but the free citizen who ideally spoke the truth without constraint. And yet even for the teleological view, the pure utterance of the human body might need corroboration after all, not because of deficiencies in the rational order of nature but because of the difficulty which human reason has in comprehending the unseen. '[T]he inner parts of man are to a very great extent unknown' (Aristotle 1910:494B). The remedy for this difficulty is to subject animals to dissection and vivisection, so that the truth of the human body can be discovered by'an examination of the inner parts of other animals whosenatureinanywayresembles that of man' (Aristotle 1910:494B). Thus, paradoxically, the information drawn from this violence wrought upon animals, although in principle inferior like the testimony of slaves under torture, in practice is often more trustworthy than the free expression of the unconstrained human body. With the revival of interest in anatomical study in the Renaissance, the tension between the desire to see into the living body and the caution against producing an artefact of torture or death was resolved in fantasy. A substantial number of early anatomical illustrations depict ambiguous human figures that appear to be both alive and dissected- and often they are not just dissected but seem to be dissecting themselves (for example, Laqueur, 1990:77-9). These figures suggest, in the first place, that there is no difference between life and death, so far as the data of anatomy are concerned; and secondly, that the exposure of the hidden truth of their viscera comes from a willing act of self revelation rather than an assault by the anatomist. There is no torture in these pictures and no death, only a series of voluntary confessions. That this confession entails pain and sacrifice is demonstrated by the ripped flesh of the anatomical figures; but their calm demeanour indicates that, just as in the ideal of penitential practice, the voluntary sacrifice of confession is followed by a sense of peace. These kinds of illustration provide a counterpoint to the more conventional pictures of the dissection scene, with the supine cadaver surrounded by the anatomist and a crowd of onlookers. In doing so they proclaim a confessional view of anatomical truth which sets it beyond the possibility of artefactual distortion
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(cf. Laqueur 1990:75). But they do not replace the other more 'realistic' illustrations which valorise both the work of science and the agency of the individual scientist in the production of truth. There is a similarly-opposed pair of representations which depict incompatible views of the relationship between experimental science and nature. In all these illustrations nature is portrayed as a nude but partially veiled female figure. In some cases another female figure, variously identified as Science or Reason, is removing the veil of nature (for example, on the obverse of the Nobel Prize medal); but in other cases nature is removing her own veil -not in isolation but in order to display herself to science (for example, Merchant 1980:191). Inthefirstsetofrepresentations,wherescienceremovestheveilofnature, we have an attenuated version of a much more forceful relationship described by experimentalists from the time of Galileo to the end of the nineteenth century. These scientists speak of nature being placed on triat interrogated and forced to answer. 'Nature exhibits herself more clearly under the trials and vexations of art than when left to herself' (Bacon 1863, De Dignitate: Bk. 2, Ch. 2); there must be an 'inquisition of things' to discover nature's secrets (Bacon 1863, The New Organon:Preface); 'matters of fact ought to be brought to trial' and the 'testimony of nature' obtained (Boyle1965:744, 724); 'In experimenting we place her [Nature] in the witness-box, cross-examine her, and extract from her the knowledge in excess of that which would, or could, be spontaneously given' (Tyndal11898:213). Nature, like the strings in Plato's story of the Pythagorean musical experimenters, is to be persecuted and tortured by experimental science. Galileo, another one who speaks of placing nature under compulsion, is the first to introduce systematic experimentation into physics; and he does so, appropriately enough, using as his model the musical experiments of his father, Vincenzo Galilei, on the sounds of plucked strings (Drake 1970). But these 'vexations of art' are transformed in the visual images into a gentle disrobing of nature, either by the hand of a solicitous female companion or by nature herself. As in the case of the equivalent anatomical illustrations, the active self-disclosure of nature, with science as a passive witness, attests to the non-artefactual authenticity of the revelation- especially given the longstanding convention in Western iconography equating female nudity with truth. On the other hand, depictions of the active removal of nature's veil by science, with nature as a passive recipient of attention, reinforce the value of scientists' work while placing science in the position of servant or handmaiden of nature. In neither version of this unveiling, this disclosure, is there any suggestion of compulsion. The truths of nature must be willingly confessed if they are to have the warrant of authenticity. Toward the end of the eighteenth century the epistemic status of the cadaver began to undergo a fundamental change in medicine. Before this time the corpse was a denatured object which could express only a limited and distorted version of the body's truth. Death compromised knowledge of the body to such an extent that one genre of anatomical illustration tended, as we have seen, to negate the death of the dissected specimen. But
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with the development of pathological anatomy around the time of the French Revolution the focus of investigation changed so that death, rather than being an obstacle to knowledge about the body, became its most informative feature (Foucault 1972:Chs 8-9.). Expansion of the hospital system and routine autopsy of every patient who died, made it possible to keep an enormous number of diseased bodies under continual surveillance, both before and after death. The aim of the post-mortem examination was to correlate the course of the patient's fatal illness with the anatomical lesions found after death. Pathological changes in the body's tissues were identified with specific diseases and thus replaced symptoms as the organising principle of medicine - the symptom complex of coughing, fever and wasting, for example, was no longer the disease 'consumption'; it was merely an outward manifestation of an inner truth which could only be read deep in the body's tissues, and which might be tuberculosis, or pneumonia, or even a heart disease, according to the nature of the lesion found there. This conceptual reorganisation of medicine made the dead body a more truthful spokesperson for disease than the living patient. For it was now possible not only to have symptoms without diseases (ie. malingering) but also diseases without symptoms: 'In the cadaver one frequently finds traces of inflammation, of which one had not perceived any trace and which had not in fact presented any sign during life' (Corvisart 1929:CCCIV). The subjective consciousness of the patient must therefore be supplanted by the search for objective signs of disease in the patient's body- signs which would allow the physician to detect lesions 'by means of the subtlest perception of the slightest derangement of the injured organ's functions' (Corvisart 1818:367). From this time forward medicine will substitute the active diagnostic examination for its older reliance on the patient's reported experience of well-being or illness. Previously, the standard of health was something unique for each person, because no two bodily constitutions were identical: 'there does not exist a state of health which can be appropriate for everyone; each person has their own manner of well-being, because this state ... is specific to each individual' (d' Aumont 1765). Now, however, medicine will regard health as a normative ideal which is virtually unattainable. Lesions are so universally found at autopsy that every constitution must be defective, and it becomes the task of scientific medicine to specify for each human body precisely how it falls short of the ideal of health and thus bears death within itself. 'It is when death is epistemologically integrated into medical experience that disease could ... become embodied in the living bodies of individuals .... [F]rom the positioning of death within medical thought is born a medicine which presents itself as a science of the individual' (Foucault 1972:200-1). The autopsy table shows that every constitution tends toward disease and thus requires constant medical surveillance. Active diagnostic examination of the apparently healthy body must discover those formative diseases of which the patient is unaware. The pain and sacrifice characteristic of the penitential confession are present in the 'cries of the suffering organs' (Broussais 1816:Preface), whether the patient hears them or not. So the body must be subjected to a medical examination which will allow it to
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confess its pathological secrets to the physician, even while concealing them from the patient. The unlimited self-revelation of the body that was merely a fantasy in earlier anatomical illustrations, is now a permanent feature of the clinical examination. As the confessional subject has arisen in the modern era, so too has the confessional body- both to a great extent the products of similar techniques of surveillance, examination and normalisation.
Bibliography Aristotle (1910). History of Animals, translated by D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, in Works of Aristotle, J.A. Smith and W.D. Ross, (eds), vol. IV. Clarendon Press. __ _, (1961 ). On the Parts ofAnimals, Loeb Classical Library, Greek text with an English translation by A.L. Peck, Heinemann. Bacon, Francis (1863). De Dignitate et Augmentis Scientiarum and The New Organon, in James Spedding et al. (eds), The Works of Francis Bacon, Vol. VIII, Riverside. Boyle, Robert (1965). 'Hydrostatical Paradoxes', in Thomas Birch (ed.), The Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle, Vol. II, Georg Olms. Broussais, Fran<;ois-Joseph-Victor (1816). Examen de la doctrine medicale generalement adoptee, et des systemes modernes de nosologie. Mequignon-Marvis. Celsus, Aulus Cornelius (1971). De Medicina, Loeb Classical Library, Latin text with an English translation by W.G. Spencer, Heinemann. Corvisart, Jean-Noel (1929). Aphorismes de medecine clinique, Masson. __ _, (1818). Essai sur les maladies et les lesions organiques du coeur et des gros vaisseaux, Mequignon-Marvis. D' Aumont, Arnulfe (1765). 'Sante,' in Denis Diderot and Jean LeRond d'Alembert (eds), Encyclopedic, ou dictionnaire raisonee des sciences, des arts et des metiers, tome XIV, Faulche. Drake, Stillman (1970). 'Renaissance Music and Experimental Science'. Journal of the History of Ideas, 31:483-500. DuBois, Page (1991). Torture and Truth, Routledge. Foucault, Michel (1972). Naissance de la clinique, Presses Universitaires de France. Laqueur, Thomas (1990). Making Sex, Harvard University Press. Merchant, Carolyn (1980). The Death of Nature, Harper and Row. Plato (1965). The Republic of Plato, Greek text edited by James Adam, with translation of selected passages in the editor's critical notes, Cambridge. Tyndall, John (1898). New Fragments, Appleton.
Legal Language As Discursive Formation Cliristine !J6eains Foucault's work has focussed to a considerable degree on the functioning of power- on the strategies and practices through which power is exercised at micro and macro levels in society. Examination of the juridical, disciplinary operations of power has been given particular emphasis in his work as have more specifically, 'the techniques and tactics of domination' (Foucault 1980:102). My paper, situated within critical legal theory which focuses on what Foucault calls 'the conditions of possibility of legal texts', will analyse one type of legal text- spoken utterances in court hearings. As the vast body of legal texts exists in written not oral form, the study of spoken legal discourse has received less critical attention than it warrants. Legal documents and utterances, in common with other texts, may have their textual and discursive features mapped or deconstructed using a variety of methodologies and procedures. I intend to employ critical linguistic modes of analysis to demonstrate that such spoken discourse forms are instruments of social regulation and discipline. Legal discourse, I will argue, is a language of power exercised through control over meaning as a strategy of domination at both the micro level (in specific legal situations), and the macro level, as an order of discourse. As Sandra Harris argues:' concepts such as "justice", "equality before the law", "impartiality of judgement", "legal rights and obligations" are fundamental not only to the effective working of the legal system but to the perception and maintenance of Western political democracy as we know and experience it' (1990:2). These are highly sensitive ideological concepts whose validity can be put to the test by an examination of the linguistic interactions that occur in court hearings. Power and discipline become 'visible' in these interactions. I thus begin with the proposition that power is increasingly exercised through the ideological operations of language. Social theorists such as Foucault, Bourdieu, Habermas and Pecheux have constantly stressed the importance of language as a form of social practice, as discourse, and have illustrated some of the ways in which language operates as an instrument of power in the domination of some groups by others. As Bourdieu states, 'one seeks not only to be understood but also to be believed, obeyed, respected, distinguished' (1977:184). Foucault (1980) usefully reminds us that power is omnipresent, not just because it is intimately involved in all human action but because it is constantly being produced. Power informs not only the act of speaking, since speaking is a form of action, but also the meaning of what is said, and, in any society, some groups or individuals, usually representatives of powerful institutions such as the law, the Church or government, have more ability to have their meanings accepted, adopted or acted upon than do others less powerful. This is clearly evident even from the fact that
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certain linguistic registers exist to represent and preserve the special status and knowledge of particular groups or institutions -legal, medical, legislative and so on - and, as a consequence, devalue and exclude non-participants. AB Thompson suggests, 'it is the infusion of meaning with power that lends language so fully to the operations of ideology' (1984:132). One could argue at length about the various definitions of ideology and their applicability to social practice or language study. I intend to use the term to mean a systematically organised presentation of reality, which includes political philosophies, science, metaphysics and other bodies of knowledge which are organised from a particular standpoint. In addition to ensuring the cohesion of the social order, ideology serves to maintain the relationships of power and domination within the social order. Ideology operates, as Thompson points out: Not so much as a coherent system of statements imposed on a population from above, but rather through a complex series of mechanisms whereby meaning is mobilised, in the discursive practices of everyday life; for the maintenance of relations of domination (1984:63).
Thus, to study ideology at work, one cannot avoid examining the ways meaning or signification works to sustain unequal relationships of power. There is a close affinity between institutional or social practices and their characteristic forms of discourse. PE:kheux, in fact, defines the discursive formation in terms of its institutional form as that which determines 'what can and should be said - in the form of a speech, a sermon, a pamphlet, a programme' (1982:65) and to this, of course, one might add a claim, a plea or a judgement. This focuses attention on the social origins and authority of a discourse. Foucault speaks of 'enunciative modalities' in this context and asks: Who is speaking? Who, among the totality of speaking individuals, is accorded the right to use this sort oflanguage? Who is qualified to do so? Who derives from it his own special quality, his prestige, and from whom, in return, does he receive if not the assurance, at least the presumption that what he says is true? What is the status of the individuals who- alone- have the right, sanctioned by law or tradition, juridically defined or spontaneously accepted, to proffer such a discourse? (1980:241).
He suggests here that the site from which the authorised subject speaks is the site from which the discourse derives its 'legitimate source' and 'point of application'. The institution from which the discourse derives also points to the situation of its reception- courts of law, school rooms, pulpits and so on. The exclusivity, distance and reification that characterise legal discourse could be seen as covert strategies to discourage opposition to the authority of legal meaning. Not only does legal language employ an authoritative specialist register 'whose lexicon and syntax reflect the historical influence of two alien and one obsolete specifically legal dialects' (Goodrich 1990: 185), but in the instances I am examining, it employs it in formally arranged, hierarchically ordered, alienating institutional spaces- courtrooms. Any intradiscourse defines the limits of its operations and establishes rules and procedures for its conduct. It also appropriates and privileges selected
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terminologies, lexical and semantic forms, which result in a relatively selfcontained exclusive system of meaning. Nevertheless, and paradoxically, meanings emanating from such institutional discourses are never totally self-contained or self-referential. They always contain other broader social meanings and inter-relationships with other discursive formations in the hierarchy. Language, as Bahktin reminds us, predates any specific usage and is always overlaid with earlier usages or utterances. Legal language is in every sense, that of the 'already written'; the product of convention, its usages regulated and defined by custom and precedent, dependent upon a complex network of citation and reference. As Lenoble and Ost point out:'legality would be nothing if it were not supported by a network of institutions, a tradition of ideas which always encloses and delineates the domain within which legal discourse can exercise its textual powers' (in Goodrich 1984:530). Goodrich sums it up thus: 'the legal tradition has thus instituted an order of lawful discourse and prohibits those heterodoxies of speech or writing that are deemed to threaten the security oflegal meaning or the order oflegal and political reason' (Goodrich 1990:7). ThissupportsFoucault'scontention that institutions over a long period of time develop and sanction a series of rules for discourse control- rules of exclusion, of limitation and rules governing the conditions of use of specific discourse forms. The intradiscursive forms I have chosen are samples of court room interaction drawn from civil and criminal cases in Queensland. The court room like the school room is an unusual discursive site, because so much of its verbal interaction is restricted to two speech acts- question and answer. In both these sites, the active role, that of questioner is assigned to the institutional representative, and the normal rules of conversational turn taking do not apply as witnesses soon find out if they try to appropriate the role themselves: Witness: Can I just say one thing? Counsel: By all means. Witness: Right. Why, when I came back to the jail, why did I go back to the boys' yard and then back in the main-stream? Answer me that. Counsel: Mr Curtis, unfortunately, in the law the rules are that I ask the questions here.
One of the conventions of courtroom discourse is the strictly controlled order and tone of speech, where respondents cannot speak unless called upon to do so and cannot interject or interrupt without risking disciplinary action. This example well illustrates Foucault's rules of exclusion- of what is not permissible to be said. The rules of evidence set out the various participant roles in court room interactions, as well as the forms of address and reply that are appropriate. It is through the selection of various question types that counsel can not only direct the flow of evidence, but also carry out meta-evaluations of it, and finally shape it into a plausible, thematically coherent story for the benefit of the jury. Much of the spoken language of the court is designed to impact upon the non-speaking participants in the case, the members of the jury.
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While they do not verbally interact with the other participants, their very presence and role significantly influence the function and direction of the interactions that do take place. Foucault's disciplinary rule of limitation applies here particularly because a proposition is not admissible as evidence unless it falls 'within the true'. Indeed, as Bernard Jackson points out, the Law of Evidence is based on the presupposition that 'truth' is simply waiting to be discovered; that it is accessible (but mediated) by the competing narratives of advocates. This suggests that in law, 'truth' is an unproblematic concept, while linguists (and proponents of critical legal studies) argue that 'truth' in the courtroom is but a construction (or reconstruction) developed from witness testimony which is elicited according to certain fixed conventions and predetermined goals, and validated as 'truth' within this particular social context - the court-room. Questions are speech acts, and mean both as actions and semantically as propositions encoded in the interrogative form. Broadly, questions fall into two main groups- YES/NO questions and 'WH' questions (that is, 'what', 'why', 'which', 'who' type questions). YES/NO questions are obviously very restrictive and are regarded as closed questions. In such questions the truth of the proposition embedded in them is dependent upon the reply. Thus YES /NO answers from respondents transform such questions into evidence. From my investigation, they appear to be much used in cross examination as the following extract indicates:
Cross Examination of Plaintiff by Defence Counsel DC
I put it to you that Mr Smith never came up to you and escorted you to the shower cubicle?
P.
Hedid.
DC
And that nothing happened in the shower cubicle?
P.
It did.
DC
You say you are frightened?
P.
Yes,Iam.
DC
You are 6 foot 2?
P.
That's right.
DC
And the reason that you have a previous criminal conviction in relation to assault is that someone spread a rumour about; is that right?
P.
That's right.
DC
Who did that?
P.
A school student.
DC
He spread a rumour about you?
P.
Yes.
DC
And you assaulted him, did you?
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P.
Yes.
DC
When did that occur?
P.
April.
DC
On the 2 July of last year, 1990, you were involved in an incident at school, were you?
P.
Beg pardon?
DC
Were you involved in an incident at the school grounds?
P.
That's correct.
DC
You were charged with assault occasioning bodily harm?
P.
That's correct.
DC
Being unlawfully on school premises?
P.
That's correct.
DC
And insulting and abusing a teacher at an education institution?
P.
That's correct.
DC
Did you plead guilty or were you found guilty?
P.
I pleaded guilty.
DC
And you got six months probation, is that right?
P.
Six months imprisonment.
DC
And it was a situation of assault. Was it a heated situation?
P.
Yes.
DC
Is that the matter concerning your girlfriend?
P.
Yes.
DC
Then in October of this year you were convicted of two unlawful assaults?
P.
That's correct.
DC
And you were sentenced to imprisonment?
P.
That's correct.
DC
Then in June of this year, you were convicted of being unlawfully found in an enclosed yard?
P.
That's correct.
DC
And yet you say that you were too scared to do anything in relation to these two people?
P.
Well, like I told you before, its unfair for six or seven against one.
DC
But not six or seven are charged. You haven't made any complaints against six or seven.
P.
I know, because they didn't do anything.
DC
You have only made a complaint against two?
P.
That's right.
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Now, Mr. Smith, you said did all these things to you.
P.
That's right.
DC
I put to you he didn't. You say- just so that I understand your evidence fully - that you are too scared to have done anything, even to have fought or to manoeuvre yourself out of the situation that may have developed, is that right?
P.
That's correct.
DC
And yet society has given you a number of chances in relation to controlling your temper outside, just in general society, hasn't it?
P.
Yes.
Here is a lengthy series of virtually all YES /NO questions which forms part of a much longer series in the cross-examination of the plaintiff in a jail rape case that effectively illustrate my contention that considerable power lies in the hands of the questioner. Their aim is to challenge the plaintiff's claim that he was forced by two inmates to carry out various homosexual acts in a jail shower cubicle, and that he was too intimidated to attempt to ward off his attackers by physical means. They are very specific, closed questions, that the witness must answer in a very specific way. They all point to his size, '6 foot 2', and his existing (and recent) record for assault causing bodily harm. These are nicely juxtaposed against the thrice repeated question 'you say you are frightened?' (or 'too scared ... ') which clearly aims to cast doubt on the story. Even the choice of words 'you say you are too scared' could be a checking or confirmatory question, or, depending upon the pattern of emphasis, could also be a further way of casting doubt on the story. The questioner also has the right (always denied the respondent) to summarise responses and evaluate them for his /her own purposes. This can be seen when the cross-examiner says, 'And yet society has given you a number of chances in relation to controlling your temper outside, just in general society, hasn't it?' Here an interpretation or meta-evaluation is assigned to what the plaintiff has said which goes well beyond what he actually has said. Such reformulations are often quite tangential to or in virtual contradiction of what has actually been said by a witness, but once made by the questioner are then accepted as ratified. Declarative questions such as 'you were involved in an incident at school, were you?' contain a proposition (or presupposition from the questioner) embedded in the interrogative structure, and the tag, 'were you?' invites confirmation of it. These are often used, I find, for accusations which are framed as questions for information which thus makes it difficult for a witness to challenge them. A direct accusation would perhaps be met with a straight negative. Negative YES/NO questions indicate doubt or surprise about a response as occurs in the following: Cross Examiner:
You didn't mention a kangaroo at all?
Witness:
Not at all.
CE.
I put it to you that you did?
w.
I deny that.
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CE.
You didn't give him a history as to how the accident happened?
w.
Yesldid.
While new information according to evidentiary rules must come from witnesses, YES /NO questions are frequently used by barristers to introduce a new topic, as occurs below.
Theft of car parts case E.
Gail Stead had three children at that time and a fourth on the way?
W.
Yes.
E.
She was not working?
W.
No.
E.
She was in need of money?
W.
Yes.
E.
She spoke to you about her money worries?
W.
Yes.
E.
You were doing bar work yourself?
W.
Yes.
E.
It doesn't pay very well?
W.
No, not really.
E.
And when you have got a young child, they tend to eat up the money, don't they?
W.
Yes, it does.
E.
Clothes, food, child sitting ...
W.
That's right.
E.
And there are nice things you'd like to buy your child as well?
W.
Well, we just did without.
E.
So you had money worries at that time, didn't you?
W.
Yes, that's right.
E.
And even when you're not working, the Supporting Parents' Benefit is not very much either, is it?
W.
No, it's not.
E.
So it would be fair to say in that period of time both you and Gail were in a fairly desperate financial situation?
W.
Not desperate, but it was always very tight.
E.
It is very hard to enjoy those little luxuries, isn't it?
W.
Yes, it is.
E.
And the thing with mothers, they tend to go without themselves, but they hate to see their children go without, don't they?
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w.
Yes, that's right.
E.
It often gives parents a great deal of pleasure just to buy those little
things to put a smile on a child's face?
w.
Yes.
E.
Gail Stead, did she ever talk to you about her husband's business?
w.
No, not really; it was not something- Gail and I were really close friends. Her husband - I didn't particularly like him. He was somebody that I sort of put up with. I wasn't really close to him at all.
E.
But did Gail talk to you about her husband's business?
w.
No, not really, not in great detail. We talked about it maybe generally, but I couldn't pinpoint a conversation.
E.
Did Gail ever say to you that she was really short of money and she was going to sell some of those parts in the shed?
w.
Yes, she did.
E.
Because there were quite a lot of parts in the shed, wasn't there?
W.
Yeah, there were quite a few.
Earlier questioning in the cross-examination of this witness has concentrated on her knowledge of the existence of a large quantity of spare motor parts in a shed belonging to the husband of a friend of hers. At this point, the focus of the questions changes dramatically to the new issue of money and financial concerns. Having established at the outside by means of the YES I NO questions that both the women are in fairly straightened financial circumstances, the direction of questions seems to change again. The witness would find it hard not to agree with the latter propositions put to her which are cast in the form of broad generalisations about parents' desires to do as much as they can for their children. These questions are part of a funnelling action where a series of general questions are followed by more specific one(s) and finally by even more specific ones as occurs at the end of this extract where the cross-examiner moves from the series of tag questions dealing generally with parents and children to the twice repeated question 'Did Gail Stead talk to you about her husband's business?' and then the final crucial question: 'Did Gail every say to you that she was really short of money and she was going to sell some of those parts in the shed?' This may be a way of shaping and focussing the evidence upon an incriminating point. It is also a means of presenting a plausible scenario to the jury which provides motivation for the removal of the spare parts before an accusation is made. 'WH' questions, while less constraining than the YES /NO variety, still require an answer specific in respect of that question. Broader 'WH' questions such as 'What happened then?' allow a further narrative explanation and are used to develop a story, to provide the authenticity of an 'own words' account. They are used in direct examination when trying to elicit new information from witnesses, especially in the introductory sections of an examination, as the extract below illustrates.
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Examination of witness in attempted murder case. E.
Do you recall Wednesday, 6 March, Mr. Johns coming to your house?
W.
Yes.
E.
What occurred on that day?
W.
Well, he came, and my husband ordered him off, because Dawn had come home to us.
E.
Over the next few weeks, did you see him again?
W.
On and off up the street.
E.
Going to the weekend of 20-21 April, who was staying at your house?
W.
My granddaughter, Leanne.
E.
And who else?
E.
The entire family.
E.
Leanne is a student at college in Toowoomba, isn't she?
W.
Yes.
E.
And she left for Toowoomba on the Sunday morning- about what time was that, do you recall?
W.
About half past eight.
E.
What happened then?
W.
Leanne spoke to her father in the street for a few minutes and then left.
E.
Where was he exactly at that time?
W.
Standing adjacent to the property at the back.
E.
What did you do for the balance of the day?
Tag questions (which have occurred quite frequently in the extract already discussed) are really declarative questions followed by the tag- 'doesn't it', 'isn't it', 'am I right', 'do you agree' and so on. They contain a proposition that the tag invites acceptance or denial of, and are much used to confirm the speaker's belief and to emphasise it for the jury. This is evident in the following short extract from the cross-examination of a witness in a damages case.
Cross-Examination in a Damages case. E.
His accidentwouldnothave happened if he had not left the power turned on to that machine, would it?
W.
No.
E.
So really the clutch is a minor consideration in things, is it not, Mr.Towson?
W.
It depends if you are going to clean the machine as Mr. McCarthy
did it.
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370 E.
Yes, well, the real danger came about in his case because of his choice to clean the machine in the way he chose to clean it, did it not?
While this could not really be termed a coercive exchange, this is a key point in the defence case (namely, that the plaintiff's accident was caused by his own negligence); thus there is considerable pressure on the witness to assent to the truth of the propositions asserted by the questioner. While the witness is clearly constrained to answer in the way that he does, it is clear that he is reluctant to provide unqualified responses. He makes several attempts to provide further mitigating information which is apparently ignored by the questioner. To be dominant in a communicative exchange requires the control of a large part of the interaction space- the territory which is to be canvassed. The quantitative side - who has most words - is usually not the best guide to determine this. More significant is the issue of topic dominance - which topics are validated and introduced for discussion (and by whom) and who controls the methods and direction of their development. As Foucault reminds us discourse is 'a space of positions and of differentiated functions for subjects' (1978:13). It is the prerogative of the more powerful participants in a discourse to choose the linguistic strategies most appropriate to their purposes. However, this choice also positions all other participants in this specific discourse, and also in the order of discourse associated with the institutional site from which the discourse emanates. The instances I have examined indicate quite clearly, that the questioner is in control of the topic. He/she initiates the questions, comments on, paraphrases, reformulates, evaluates or interprets the responses at will, even though the respondent denies the propositions upon which these operations are based. The questioner is also the only one who can (or does) interrupt or back-track. He/ she also uses questions or directives to control the respondent's behaviour such as 'speak up', 'answer the question', 'you may stand down'. This person also defines when and if the witness is to speak, and when directed to do so, the witness must answer. Yet almost always the respondents tacitly acknowledge the power and status of the questioner and the court room context. There are few violations of turn taking, interruptions or challenges to the questioner from the respondents. Rarely are they allowed to speak at any length or tell their stories in their own words without direction or interruption from the questioner. Questions of relevance or admissibility are also decided for respondents and they play no part in the discursive pre-construction of the questions asked. There is also the commitment to telling the truth which is placed upon the respondent who faces possible perjury charges if he I she does not. These conventions of speech and action are further policed to make certain they are upheld, and penalties such as contempt of court exist if they are broken (here illustrating the disciplinary character of court discourse). Additional features such as lexical substitution and choice of register are also in the questioner's power. The court room is thus a very asymmetrical site linguistically, in terms of power, as I have indicated. The time honoured, routinised conventions of the court room hearing impose this particular interactional style upon
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witnesses which compels them to occupy the subordinate position in the discourse and to behave in certain constrained ways. Consciously or unconsciously then, legal discourse of this kind excludes genuine participation by members of the public in the legal process, which further casts doubt upon those concepts of 'justice' and 'equality before the law' that are enshrined in our political and legal systems. Court room speech as Goodrich notes is 'underpinned by many of the more general and manifest inequalities of relationship that exist as between legal discourse and non-legal discourses' (1990:194). Language is not only crucial to the exercise and maintenance of power and domination in institutional contexts such as this, but, as I noted earlier, all operations of power are ultimately based in broader social practices which are also primarily linguistic. Indeed, social control as Foucault acknowledges, increasingly functions through the ideological operation of language. Pecheux, in commenting on the hierarchy of discursive formations argues that: 'every discourse formation is dependent on "the complex whole in dominance" of discursive formations and is an, illustration of the ideological order of a society at an historical moment (1982:113). As an illustration of the 'ideological order' in our society, then, legal discourse of the kind I have been examining highlights this order's manifest inequalities and disciplinary character.
References Bourdieu P. (1985). Language and Symbolic Power, Cambridge: Polity Press. Bahktin, M. (1981). The Dialogic Imagination, Austin: Texas. Foucault, M. (1970). The Order of Things, London: Tavistock. __ _, (1972). The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. Sheridan Smith, London: Tavistock. __ _, (1978). 'The Politics and the Study of Discourse'. Ideology and Consciousness, 3:726. __ _, (1980). Power/Knowledge, C. Gordon, (ed.), Brighton: Harvester Press. Goodrich, P. (1984). 'The role of linguistics in legal analysis', Modern Law Review, 47:523-34. __ _, (1990). Languages of Law from Logics of Memory to Nomadic Masks, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Harris, S. (1989). 'Defendant resistance to power and control in court', in H. Coleman (ed. ), Working with Language. A Multidisciplinary Consideration ofLanguage Use in Work Contexts, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. __ _, (1990). 'Ideological Exchanges in British Magistrates Courts', in John Gibbons (ed.), Language and the Law, London: Longmans. Jackson, B. (1991). 'Narrative Models in Legal Proof', in D. Papke (ed. ), Narrative and Legal Discourse. A Reader in Story Telling and the Law, Liverpool: Deborah Charles Publications. Pecheux, M. (1982). Language, Semantics and Ideology: Stating the Obvious, trans. H. Nagpal, London: Macmillan. Thompson, J.B. (1984). Studies in the Theory of Ideology, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Part Eight The Art of Government
'Liberalism' and Government: Political Philosophy and the Liberal Art of Rule
Michel Foucault's legacy is often rather carelessly assimilated to the loose composite picture of'contemporary French theory' which circulates throughout the Anglophone academy. In this conception Foucault's originality is still commonly seen as lying in the novelty of his intellectual interests and enthusiasms, and his oeuvre is depicted as the legacy of a kind of perpetual avant-gardism, forever 'subverting' the conventions of received intellectual opinion, disciplinary habitus and political fixity. Less well understood until recentlyhasbeenFoucault'spersistentengagementinarangeofoftenrather unfashionable departments on Western thought: the emergence of specific modern discourses of politics and government, and their relationship to the quite mundane practices and techniques of administrative and bureaucratic institutions quite alien to the totalitarian glamour of the Panopticon in his Discipline and Punish. At the core of the set of arguments which he assembled around the rubric of 'governmentality', for instance, is to be found Foucault's sketch of an understanding of Western liberalism since the eighteenth century, depicted as the defining art of rule of the modern representative-democratic West. It is now recognised that Foucault's work in the 'governmental' register is amongst the most fertile and important of his corpus, and that it has important implications for our understanding of the political present, as well as our political heritage. Yet the importance and plausibility of his work on liberalism has received only limited attention from scholars, primarily in the form of the now well-known set of essays published as The Foucault Effect (Burchell et al. 1991). Here I want to make some sympathetic but critical observations on Foucault's account of the genealogy of Western liberalism, paying particular attention to its relations both to recent empirical research in early modern political thought, and to the contemporary architecture of liberal political philosophy, particularly in its Rawlsian guise. I argue that Foucault's account is both a salutary rebuke to some of the preoccupations of contemporary liberal theory, and at the same time a seriously inadequate account of the contours of what could be described for simplicity's sake (if not entirely accurately) as 'early modern liberalism'. In his Resume des Cours for 1979, Foucault summarised the broad picture of liberalism which animated his speculations. He saw liberal thought and reflection 'neither as a theory nor as an ideology', but'as a practice ... as a way of doing which is directed towards goals and which regulates itself by the means of a continuing reflection' (Foucault 1981:354). Elsewhere he noted his broader methodological ambition as 'an historian of thought' to forge a 'narrow pathway' between 'social history and formal analyses of thought':
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to view human subjects in history as both 'thinking and acting', at the same time (Martinet al. 1988:10,14). Within this general framework he proposed that the classical liberalism of the eighteenth century be analysed as a principle and method of rationalising the exercise of government - a rationalisation which obeys...the guiding principle of the maximal economy... Here, government is not to be understood as an institution but, rather, as the activity which consists in directing human conduct within the setting and with the instruments of the state (Foucault 1981:355). In Foucault's account, this places classical liberalism at the end of a lengthy process of governmental thinking which has its origins both in the 'reason of state' (ragione di stato) literature of the later Italian Renaissance, and in the emergence of the 'science of police' (polizeiwissenschaft) in seventeenth century Germany. It is here, argues Foucault, that the modern art of governmental reasoning emerges, out of a series of doctrines which insist that the exercise of state authority has its own distinctive form of internal political reason (reason of state), and that this reason can be turned into a kind of science (police) (Gordon 1991:8-14; Foucault 1991). Liberalism stands in relation to this tradition of thinking at once as an heir and as an explicit critique- a dual relation which Foucault sees as constitutive of liberalism's decisively ambiguous governmental character as at once 'a schema for the regulation of governmental practice' and 'a theme for sometimes radical opposition to such practice' (Foucault 1981:356). The key to liberalism's criticism of police and the governmental architecture of absolutism is its notion of economy. Classical'economic liberalism', as has often been noted, is 'economic government' in two senses of the word: 'that of a government informed by the precepts of political economy, but also that of a government which economises on its own costs: a greater effort of technique aimed at accomplishing more through a lesser exertion of force and authority' (Gordon 1991:24). In this sense, Foucault saw the classical liberalism of Smith and the eighteenth century political economists as a foundation stone for a distinctively modern style of governmental rationality, one in which' government' itself is turned into a problem for analysis, and in which the limitations of the claims of government to be able to achieve its stated aims by means of policy are viewed as a datum (Gordon 1991: 15-27). However, as others have noted, this suggests that the 'ideas and doctrines' of liberalism are necessarily discontinuous with the 'real liberal art of government': one represents a 'form of problematization', while the other constitutes 'an assemblage of governmental techniques and practices' (Burchell1993:273). This is an important and rather controversial argument. What is perhaps most controversial about it is that it sidesteps altogether the dominant contemporary way of talking and writing about liberal thought and practice, a way which is dominated by the idea of political principles as the basis for political practice. According to this view, of whichJohn Rawls is the most famous exponent, liberal politics is the expression through paradigmatic institutional forms of the fundamental principles of liberal political philosophy, viewed aright: justice, equality and democracy (Rawls 1971). Foucault (and others following his lead) insist rather that liberalism seen as a body of reflection upon the art and practice of government, is in fact best understood
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as a set of operational categories and concepts which have no necessary ideal representation in political principles, and insists on the close connection between liberal reflection and the mundane work of political rule through the agency of bureaucratic expertise. At the same time, Foucault attempts to sidestep the dominant preoccupation in modern political philosophy with the figure of the state seen as the locus of the expression of a unitary and foundational sovereignty. Where Carl Schmitt saw in the Western obsession with sovereignty the legacy of a secularised political theology (Schmitt 1985), Foucault argues that Western political philosophy remains transfixed by the figure of the sovereignmonarch: 'we have still not yet cut off the king' s head' (Foucault 1978:88-89). Against the view in Western political philosophy which sees the state as a monstre froid forever threatening civil society- the 'etatisation of society'- he argues that the characteristic movement of Western political reflection in the governmental vein is rather towards the 'governmentalisation of the state' (Foucault 1991:103). Thus his account of liberalism in one sense represents an elaborate movement to displace the theory of sovereignty from its pride of place in Western political thinking. Foucault's account is however also controversial in another, more specific respect. Clearly, what is distinctive and unusual about Foucault's sketch is that it depicts the character of liberalism as deriving overwhelmingly from its identification and delineation of the sphere of 'the economic' as a principle both for critique and governmental action- if not necessarily from the precepts of political economy as an organised body of thought. In this respect, Foucault appears to dismiss a very great part of the received history of liberalism, and particularly its supposed origins in the social contractual traditions established in their different ways by Hobbes and Locke in the seventeenth century. And these two controversial aspects are undoubtedly related. It is not difficult to see why Foucault should want to avoid focussing his account on the supposed contractual or juridical'origins' of liberalism, since they are commonly taken to form the foundation stone for precisely those conceptions of contemporary liberal philosophy which he is concerned to sidestep in his depiction of 'liberalism' as an art of rule. Where he mentions the contractual and juridical face of 'early liberalism', he is careful to subordinate contractualism to the technical face of liberalism as an art of government: 'Liberalism... was not given birth by the idea of a political society founded on a contractual relationship. Rather, in the search for a liberal technology of government, regulation by means of a juridical form appeared to constitute a far more effective instrument than wisdom or the moderation of the governing' (Foucault 1981:357). However, this deliberate neglect of the contractual tradition within'early liberalism' has recently been questioned by other historians of thought themselves influenced by Foucault's governmental inflection (eg. Ivison 1993:27, 43-5). James Tully and others have insisted on the governmental application of the style of 'early liberalism' which emerged in the Lockean moment of the later seventeenth century (Tully 1993a; Tully 1993b). In this picture Locke's thought can be reconstructed as a series of 'practices of
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governing' aimed at regulating the conduct of individual Christians through a combination of internal and external restraint and direction, and at creating a specific and highly contingent type of Christian (or rather, Protestant) subject (cf. Hunter 1993:255ff). At the same time it stresses the role of the juridical apparatus of government in this mode of conduct:its product is 'a very specific form of subjectivity: a subject who is calculating and calculable ... and the sovereign bearer of rights and duties' (Tully 1993b:179). The affiliations of this accountofLockean 'liberalism' to Foucault's general picture of governmental reason are undoubted, but it sits very uneasily both with the general account of the genealogy of 'liberal government' provided by Foucault, and with his deliberate de-emphasis of the juridical element in historical liberal thought. To what extent are the two reconcilable within a general picture of 'liberalism' as a rationality of government? In one respect Foucault's version of the genealogy of early liberalism dovetails rather neatly with recent departures in the history of eighteenth century political thought. These have tended to emphasise the remarkable discontinuities between the body of writings - and particularly Locke constitutive of the 'early liberalism' of the seventeenth century- and the socalled'classicalliberalism' (or what has perhaps been better described as the 'sceptical whiggism') of Montesquieu and Smith in the eighteenth. It has been evident for quite some time that Lockean 'liberalism', while highly representative in certain particular respects of the political moment in which it was conceived, had little if any resonance among the eighteenth century 'liberal' thinkers such as Montesquieu and Smith (Pocock 1985:59-68; Winch 1978:ch.2). Even in the fledgling United States, which later commonly took itself to be in some sense the practical embodiment of the principles of Lockean 'liberalism', it is clear that the 'politics of Locke' in the eighteenth century were quite marginal in comparison to the much more resonant debates over civic virtue, standing armies and political representation (Pocock 1975:chs 14-15; Bailyn 1967:ch.1; Dunn 1980). Here I want to reflect briefly on the distinctive character of these two quite different bodies of political reflection, and the reasons for the discontinuity. Following Foucault's method, the discontinuity between them is perhaps best understood, not in terms of respective bodies of political principles, but rather in terms of the specific political and governmental problems which they strove to address. Locke's thought is a product of the period of high absolutism, in which the central problem of political life was widely recognised to be the question of political stability: how, and by what means, could a political order dominated by war, civil war and recurring political crisis be transformed without further even more damaging crises into a condition of relative civil accommodation and peace? As Pasquale Pasquino has recently argued, this was almost certainly the basis for Hobbes political thought (Pasquino 1993). The conventional response of seventeenth century absolutism to the problem of civil peace was to attack what was felt to be the central cause of civil strife: dissension over different interpretations of religious truth. Thus the prerequisite of political security was widely assumed to be religious unity and conformity.
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Hobbes rejected this conventional argument, insisting instead that religious authority in general was the cause of much civil dissension through the simultaneous spread and doctrinal fragmentation of ecclesiastical power. For Hobbes the solution to he problem of civil peace lay in the recognition of an absolute secular sovereignty which in the last analysis could ignore the claims of religious authenticity. The result of this doctrine was a certain limited measure of religious toleration within a regime of absolute political power. For if the sovereign was entitled to protect life and civil peace by any means, he was nevertheless forbidden to enforce upon his subjects any doctrines 'which he could not sincerely interpret as a means to their preservation' (Tuck 1993:333-5). For Locke the same problem expressed itself rather differently. Beginning in his Two Tracts ofGovernment of 1660 broadly speaking at Hobbes' position, he came around by his Letter on Toleration of 1689 to a quite different position which took toleration from the margins of political theory and placed it at the core. The problem of absolutism, he now argued, was that its 'solution' to the problem of civil strife - a secularly-imposed religious conformity - only accentuated the problem, by creating a division between the subject's religious beliefs and their secular loyalty (Dunn 1984). The fundamental problem with trying to solve the problem of civil peace by means of a secularised but omnipotent sovereign, he argued, was that it failed to understand the inevitable diversity of human subjectivity, and in particular the diverse ways in which humans will choose to worship their god (Tully 1993a:47-62). And he concluded that this inevitable diversity required that the state privilege no single religious conception of the good life over another. It is importantto recall that Locke at no point argues for toleration because he believes it to be 'right' for its own sake, to be a foundational political principle of early modern liberal politics. Rather, he presents it as simply a brute necessity of civil peace: toleration is necessary if the forces of religious diversity and dissension are to be compatible with a single unified polity (Tully 1993a). In this sense, in Charles Larmore's words, Locke's idea of toleration is a modus vivendi one: it sees toleration as a way of individuals with divergent and perhaps incompatible 'conceptions of the good life' (or perhaps the good afterlife) living together in relative peace, rather than a foundational political principle with its own justification in the self-evident aspirations of humankind (Larmore 1987). At the same time, Locke's picture of the religious and the political realms conforms to what Michael Walzer has called the picture of liberal rule as an 'art of separations' (Walzer 1983). Locke does not argue that political ideals should be thought more important than religious ideals, or that the two are necessarily reconcilable in some fashion. Rather than subordinate the religious to the political for the sake of civil peace, or the political to the religious for the sake of the triumph of religious 'truth', he argues that the two realms have to be kept apart for the sake of the security of any sort of political order, and thus also for the sake of the safety of the individual believer and the individual conscience (Dunn 1984:ch.2). For Locke, in Larmore's words, 'the supreme importance of religion is compatible with the fact that the state should aim at civil peace rather than salvation' (Larmore 1987:76).
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Thus the two great problems of this seventeenth century'early liberalism' are the conditions of civil peace, and the place of individual religious belief in that political settlement. In this sense, Locke's views on toleration are a kind of culmination and high point of an entire seventeenth century tradition of thinking about the foundations of civil peace as the central problem of government. What is striking about the eighteenth century 'liberalism' of Montesquieu and Smith, on the other hand, is how relatively unimportant these questions are compared with questions of the compatibility of individual and civic virtue and the social landscape of the emerging commercial society. In this sense, as Grahame Thompson has recently argued, it may be that eighteenth century liberalism was the unintended beneficiary of the political stability created by the 'enlightened' despotism of the previous period (Thompson 1994). In any event, eighteenth century 'liberalism' evidently takes relative civil peace, and some degree of toleration, as a datum in its sociology of (inHume's words) 'regular and orderly' systems of government (Forbes 1976b). What is more controversial, arising from this, is the amount of 'freedom' a 'free constitution' may be allowed to have before it descends into chaos (or democracy, or both). Most of the crucial problems of eighteenth century 'liberal' governmental reflection are in fact problems of civil (if not international) peace and relative prosperity, and relate to the compatibility of classical models of civic man and the commercial society which 'liberals' had come to believe synonymous with 'gentle' society. Indeed, the very problem of'economy' as Smith posed it was itself in a sense a problem of a time of civil peace, when a more subtle internal logic of governmental restraint was needed in lieu of the more brutal disciplines of famine and civil war. If this brief sketch of these distinct political moments is broadly correct, it suggests that Foucault may well have been right to insist on the essential discontinuity of the two, and on the quite different problem-spaces addressed by what Tully has called 'juridical government' on the one hand and what Foucault calls 'economic government' on the other. What this does not resolve, however, are the more basic questions of whether Foucault is right in stressing the body of thinking he calls 'economic government' as the crucial point of emergence of modern liberalism, and whether he is right to relegate the so-called 'juridical liberalism' to an incidental role in the same account. In this I think Foucault was quite clearly wrong, and I think the cause of his error is not difficult to disentangle. In sidestepping the modern picture in liberal political philosophy which sees liberalism as the expression of fundamental political principles, he also sidestepped the putative origins of this strand in the 'juridical government' of the seventeenth century. Yet, as I have noted above, there is in many respects only a superficial resemblance between the toleration theories of Locke and others in the seventeenth century and contemporary liberal philosophy of Rawls' Theory ofJustice and its many offshoots. In this sense, the common social contractual themes of Locke and Rawls may be something of a sideshow. One does not have to accept or reject Tully's arguments about a 'juridical' art of government locked away in
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Locke's Two Treatises to see that the body of early modem governmental reflection on the theme of toleration constitutes a kind of art of government in its own right - the art of government which Larmore describes as modus vivendi liberalism, and which Jeffrey Minson has recently termed the liberalism seen as an 'art of negotiation' (Minson 1993:171-5). In this picture liberalism is not so much a set of transcendent political principles vested in ideal Kantian political subjects as the recognition of 'the inescapable controversiality of ideals of the good life and the need to find political principles that abstract from them' (Larmore 1987:130) Ironically, it may well be that Foucault's problem here was precisely the teleological impulse which on other occasions he was so concerned to avoid. His picture of liberalism as an unfolding body of thinking emerging from classical political economy's critique of police and raison d'etat up to twentieth century neoliberal currents falls back into the trap of seeing liberalism as a unitary and essentially principled tradition in political philosophy. In fact, if one follows Foucault's picture of liberalism as a body of reflection aimed at the creation of an art of government rather than as a stream in political philosophy, it is entirely unsurprising that its should be composed of a number of discontinuous moments or elements, each a product of a distinct problem-space- or that these moments should be radically incommensurable in certain important respects. The result of these speculations is that we are confronted with two quite different bodies of thinking about government, both labelled 'liberalism', which emerge at different points in the early modem period, and which address quite distinct problem-areas of modem governance and its underpinnings. To what extent is it possible to connect the two under the label 'liberal', and to what extent can they be seen as respects of a wider 'liberal art of rule'? The first of these pictures I will call for want of a better word 'ethical government' - not because it constitutes a political ethics, but on the contrary, because its central concern is with the coexistence of individual ethical outlooks and a mode of government based on 'ethical neutrality'. This seems to me a more appropriate label than 'juridical' government, since, as I have argued, it seems to me that the juridical, contract-based element in this picture is perhaps far more marginal to it as an art of government than is often imagined. In this picture, as I noted above, the central problem-area is the creation of a governmental modus vivendi which can allow for the coexistence of incompatible systems of personal belief within a state of civil peace. Its picture of the political subject is of a 'civic person [who] is constituted by moral sovereignty over one's core beliefs and practice that cannot be alienated' (Tully 1993a:53). In this it is definitively and characteristically a post-Reformation art of government- in several senses. First, because it relies upon a conception of religious belief based in the notion of the individual conscience, rather than the figure of the Church corporate. Second, because precisely this conception is essential to the governmental management of religious belief: if religious belief is seen as necessarily a corporate state-religious combine, as it was in pre-Reformation Christianity, then religious conflicts are essentially unmanageable within the aegis of a separate, secular state. And third,
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it is post-Reformation in that it assumes that the religious controversies of the
sixteenth century and after are in their substantive sense irrelevant to the pursuance of good government: it is assumed that henceforward polities will be a collection of incompatible interpretations even of the same central religious beliefs, and gives up the idea of a unified religious polity of any denomination. The other picture I will label following Foucault 'economic government' -not so much by virtue of its attachment to political economy as a disciplinary formation as on account of its view of government as the subject of a certain specific type of 'economy'. Here, as I noted above, the central problem-area is that of the regulation of government itself as a form of activity: the means by which government is itself to be subjected to a process of regulation and restriction analogous to that which government directs towards the population as a whole. In this picture the subject is seen in essentially secularised terms as a social (rather than political) individual, a figure of proliferating social capacities refined by manners (Pocock 1985b:4850). At the same time there is in'economic government' an emerging protoRomantic sense of the subject as a divided social personality, riven between the classical image of the civic man and the 'modern' of the private individual of a professionalised society (Pocock 1985a:69). In both of these senses 'classical economic man' is indebted to the post-Reformation ethical individualism defined by 'ethical government', both in its humanistic and Protestant forms- for the typology of subjectivity on which it relies, and for the ethical and pastoral means by which that subjectivity is to be fostered and inculcated. Nevertheless, the general attitude of this economic governmental thinking towards the question of personal belief is both in a general sense agnostic and in a certain sense even 'pagan'. To the extent that the pattern of religious belief is relevant to 'economic government', it is relevant only as an anthropological fact with certain consequences for the political constitution of individual states. In Montesquieu's terms, it is an important component part -but no more than that- of the manieres and moeurs of an individual nation, the 'cultural' facts which dispose a people towards one particular blend of the various components of 'mixed' government. Again, in its relationship to the republican and civic humanist traditions stemming from Machiavelli and others, it is even positively pagan, in that it sees the idea of civic virtue and sociability as radically distinct from the Christian notion of the individual soul and its afterlife. Thus John Dunn sees the 'break' between Locke and Smith as the shift 'from applied theology to social analysis' (Dunn 1983). This is not to say that religious toleration has become an irrelevancy to 'economic government'- just that it no longer comprises a central governmental problem to be solved (cf Montesquieu 1990:238-9). Hence, while there is a common currency to the ethical subject of Locke's thinking on toleration and Smith's social subject in his' economic' thought, there is no obvious sense in which the two can be seen as part of a common strategy of governmental subject-formation. It is thus far from self-evident how these two pictures fit together as aspects of a broader 'liberal' art of government. However, there is also a
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sense in which the family resemblance between early modern 'ethical government' and 'economic government' is far more evident than that between either and the modern architecture of liberal political philosophy. It is by now a commonplace that the tidy possessive-individualist thesis created by C.B. Macpherson and others three decades ago pays little or no heed to the quite different problem-spaces within which early 'liberalism' actually flourished (Pocock 1985:60-71; Tully 1993:71-95). But it is less often noted how surprising 'illiberal' within the Rawlsian framework are the assumptions of Lockean 'applied theology' and Scottish Enlightenment 'sociology' alike. Locke's arguments were after all aimed at created a valid space for freedom of religious conscience as a matter of modus vivendi: not at creating a domain of 'free speech' as a self-evident political good. More striking still is the often brutally pragmatic, relativist character of the 'sceptical whiggism' of Montesquieu, Hume and Smith. As Hume suggested, political science considered aright should conceive of societies as arranged on a continuum from most to least 'liberal' (a 'gradation of despotism', as Smith called it). But there was no assumption in this schema that a greater degree of political freedom saw a more well-ordered polity. Indeed, the most important criterion of good governance inHume's view was not the available spheres of freedom (let alone equality) but a regular system of government, and Hume was critical of Locke in particular for excluding the 'civilised' absolute monarchies of France and elsewhere from this pantheon (Forbes 1976a; Forbes 1976b:191). Nevertheless, on one fundamental point both these different early modern 'liberalisms' were in agreement: for both the central question of'civilised society' was the creation of an art of governing which provided for certain minimal levels of civil peace, toleration, and good government. There was no conception of liberalism as the striving towards a series of absolute political principles, expressed in canonical institutions: indeed, that was preciselywhatHumemeantbytheterm'vulgarwhiggism' (Forbes 1976b:1802). Indeed, there is more broadly in these two otherwise diverse styles of early modern thinking a closer kinship in terms of their governmental lines of address than between either of them and the modern canon of liberal political philosophy as represented by Rawls and others. As Larmore notes, most liberal philosophies since Kant have focussed their picture of the good society on what Larmore calls one or other 'controversial' conception of the good life- precisely the assumption both Locke's toleration theory and Montesquieu and Smith's 'sceptical whiggism' were designed to avoid. However, whether this kinship between them suffices for them to be conjoined under the term 'liberal' is a question I don't propose to answer here. Finally, recovering the different inflections in the' economical' and modus vivendi emphases of early modern 'liberal' governmental thinking may be a useful antidote to the sterile and longwinded debate between liberals and communitarians which currently preoccupies Western thinking around citizenship. As Larmore notes, the communitarian case against modern liberal philosophy rests on the latter's preoccupation with the ideal Kantian
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ethical subject. Since neither 'ethical' nor 'economic' modes of government presuppose any such 'controversial' conceptions of the 'good life' they are less susceptible to the communitarian critique, and the endless polemic which inevitably accompanies it. And while neither may encompass a politics which satisfies the ambitions of the late twentieth-century socialdemocratic left, both the scepticism of toleration theory and the scepticism of'economic' government still circumscribe in important ways the imagination of any practicable arts of government in the political present.
Bibliography Bailyn, Bernard (1967). The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press. Burchell, Graham (1993). 'Liberal government and techniques of the self'. Economy and Society, 22(3), August. Burchell, Graham, Gordon, Colin and Miller, Peter (eds) (1991). The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, London, Harvester. Burrow, John (1988). Whigs and Liberals, Oxford University Press. Dunn, John (1969). The Political Thought of John Locke, Cambridge University Press. __ _, (1983). 'From applied theology to social analysis: The break between John Locke and the Scottish Enlightenment', in I Hont and M Ignatieff (eds), Wealth and Virtue, Cambridge University Press. __ _, (1984). Locke, Oxford University Press. __ _, (198?). 'Bright enough for all our purposes ... '. Forbes, Duncan (1976a). Hume's Philosophical Politics, Oxford University Press. __ _, (1976b). 'Sceptical whiggism, commerce and liberty', in A.S. Skinner and T. Wilson (eds) Essays on Adam Smith, Oxford University Press. Foucault, Michel (1978). The History ofSexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, New York: Random House. __ _, (1981 ). 'History of Systems of Thought 1979', trans. James Bernauer, Philosophy and Social Criticism, 8(3). __ _, (1991). 'Governmentality' in Burchell, G., Gordon, C. and Miller, P. (eds) The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, London: Harvester. Gordon, Colin (1991). 'Governmental rationality: an introduction', in Burchell, G., Gordon, C. and Miller, P. (eds) The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, London: Harvester. Hont, Istvan and Ignatieff, Michael (eds) (1983). Wealth and Virtue: Political Economy in the Shaping of the Scottish Enlightenment. Cambridge University Press. Ivison, Duncan (1993). 'Liberal conduct', History of the Human Sciences, 6(3). Larmore, Charles E. (1987). Patterns of Moral Complexity, Cambridge University Press. Martin, Luther H., Gutman, Huck and Hutton, Patrick H (eds) (1988). Technologies of the Self A Seminar with Michel Foucault, London: Tavistock. Minson, Jeffrey (1993). Questions of Conduct: Sexual Harassment, Citizenship, Government, London: Macmillan. Pasquino, Pasquale (1993). 'Political theory of war and peace: Foucault and the history of modem political theory'. Economy and Society, 22(1), February.
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Pocock, J.G.A. (1985). 'Authority and property: The question of liberal origins'. Virtue, Commerce and History, Cambridge University Press. Rawls, John (1971). A Theory of Justice, Harvard University Press. Schmitt, Carl (1985). Political Theology, Boston: MIT Press. Tuck, Richard (1988). 'Scepticism and toleration in the 17th century', in Stephen Mendus (ed.) Justifying Toleration: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives, Cambridge University Press. __ _, (1993). Philosophy and Government, 1572-1651, Cambridge University Press. Tully, James (1980). A Discourse of Property, Cambridge University Press. __ _, (1993a). 'An introduction to Locke's political philosophy'. An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts, Cambridge University Press. __ _, (1993b). 'Governing conduct'. An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts, Cambridge University Press. Walzer, Michael (1983). Spheres of Justice, New York, Basic Books __ _, (1984). 'Liberalism and the art of separation'. Political Theory, 12(3). Winch, Donald (1978). Adam Smith's Politics: An Essay in Historiographic Revision, Cambridge University Press.
A Political Ontology
Michel Foucault's later lectures, interviews, and books open up two distinct but related domains of reflection. The first is on' government' understood as a general term for the 'conduct of conduct' rather than a theory of the state. The second concerns'ethics', considered not as the arena of moral codes and commands but as a set of practices, exercises, or arts of existence, which entail an action of 'self on self'. Both these domains, taken separately or together, are extremely valuable resources for the analysis of a range of issues concerned with the relations between authority, truth and identitythat is, those issues usually addressed under such heads as the 'politics of identity', the 'postmodern fragmentation of self', a 'life politics', and so on. I leave these terms within quotation marks because I seek neither to defend nor criticise the way they are used. I want simply to note that they imply a fundamental relation between the axes on which we find issues of self, person, and identity, on the one hand, and those of politics, power, and government, on the other. Nor do I want to suggest that Foucault has provided us with a 'theory' that can be applied to all or even many of our present problems. What I do want to suggest is that Foucault initiated interesting, if not wholly novel, domains of reflection on ethics and government that can be used to help understand the problems we encounter today on this broad terrain. As such, Foucault's work is to be deployed rather than sacralised, turned into a monument, or consigned to posterity along with the man we recognise as its author. It is precisely this approach to Foucault's work on the rationality and arts of government, or what he termed governmentality, that has characterised much recent research. I am currently engaged in an attempt to draw upon and integrate aspects of his schemata for understanding ethical practices into a rethinking of the analytic of government. The present paper sketches the background to such a task by way of taking a position on the 'legacy of Foucault'. 1
Historical and political ontologies of ourselves and our present The work of Michel Foucault lends itself, like any other body of historical and philosophical study, to conventional scholarly practices of commentary, exegesis, interpretation, and criticism. We can bring our machines of truth, if one likes, to bear on his texts. I want to suggest, however, that there is a more fruitful and interesting way of approaching these texts, one captured by Deleuze' s view of theory as a 'toolbox',2 and Foucault's suggestion that his books be regarded as 'experience books' rather than 'truth books'. 3 If we take this second approach, the legacy of Foucault might lie less in the interpretation of the text than in the specific uses to which his concepts, themes and analyses, can be put, their wilful reformation and deformation, and their insertion into different arguments and intellectual assemblages. It
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is a legacy that might lie less in the production of true knowledge than in the practice of truth-saying,4 less in its epistemological probity and more in the quality of the individual and collective experience it renders possible. We should be concerned, then, not so much about the recuperation and integration of his work for philosophy, history, or the social sciences, than with undertaking a form of analysis concerned with the limits and possibilities of how we have come to think about who we are, what we do, and the present in which we find ourselves. We can use Foucault to form or reform ourselves as philosophers, historians, or sociologists, but we can also use Foucault to inaugurate a critical engagement with our present, its limits and its practical potential. To invoke the language Foucault provided in relation to Kant,5 I would say that while certain institutional conditions might favour those who undertake an analytic of truth concerning Foucault, his own work suggests that we engage in the rather different task of a historical and political ontology of ourselves and of our present. Such a task would study what I am tempted to call by a doubtless barbarous term,' govern-ontologies'. It would study the different ways we are governed and govern ourselves and others according to various ways of producing truths about our being. To pose the task in philosophical terms, however, is to risk being misunderstood. For the historico-political ontology of ourselves and our present does not first arise from the worthy trajectory of theoretical reflection on the subject but from a host of local, minor, and mundane concerns about how we should live, conduct ourselves and others, in our everyday lives, in our families, homes, workplaces, and schools, in our patterns of consumption and 'lifestyles'. The key to the intelligibility of these quotidian practices by which we seek to direct our own conduct and that of others is to be found first not in the abstract theoretical treatises of philosophy or the social and political sciences but in the sometimes interesting because unguarded, but often bland, dull, coarse or vulgar texts of those who make and execute policies in all types of contexts under the authority of various truths. This is not to say that we should ignore the abstracted, theoretical treatises of philosophers and political and social thinkers, but simply to say that this interest is of a particular type. If we are interested, for example, in Kant's moral and political subject, Adam Smith's exchanging subject, Gary Becker's notion of human capital, John Rawls' 'veil of ignorance', Weber's or Parsons' concept of social action, or Habermas' theory of communicative action, it is not because philosophy, economics or social science crystallises the spirit or social forces of an age or culture. We are interested in them insofar as they have acted as 'diagrams' that have become, to varying degrees, embedded within particular political, institutional, and administrative practices. Such diagrams have the capacities to codify and integrate existing practices of the direction of conduct and techniques of living, to establish and reorient the goals of such practices, and to provide models that can ramify through a range of settings and purposes. But we must be careful not to privilege such diagrams over the plans and programs of advertisers, counsellors, accountants, social workers, personnel officers, and policy makers and interpreters of all sorts. We are interested in the practical'know-how' (or savoir) and forms of calculation of such agents, as much as we are interested in these
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theories and their explicit, theoretical maps of the human soul. We are interested in forms of thought, then, to the extent that thought has become technical. To speak of a historical and political ontology of ourselves requires immediate qualification. First, what is at issue is a history of localised and heterogeneous ontologies that do not add up to either a single form of human being or a single present. 6 A 'history of the present' is not about the emergence of a 'modernity' that is a unity of discrete but interdependent elements. 7 There is rather a multiplicity of presents, a multiplicity of ways of experiencing those presents, and a multiplicity of the 'we' who are subjects of that experience. Secondly, these multiple ontologies are different ways of thinking about who we are, how we should act and how we should act upon ourselves. What is at issue here is not so much what human beings really are or have become but how they think about who they are, and the consequences of this. What we seek to establish, then, is not a theory or even a history of being, but a history of truth, or a history of thought, given that thought is not restricted to a philosophical or literary canon and that a part of such a history is to analyse its effectivity for individual and collective experience. If we wish to approach the terrain of these local ontologies, it is firstthrough epistemology, through what we can know about ourselves, the rationalities we apply to ourselves as human beings, the 'games of truth' in which we find ourselves, and the institutions in which these epistemologies are grounded. s Moreover, after Foucault this critical ontology of ourselves and our present cannot be understood in terms of a narrative of the triumphal or oppressive march of state building and citizen formation after social liberals like T.H. Marshall9 or Marxist historical sociologists like Corrigan and Sayer.1° Rather than appearing as the prerogative of the sovereign state, concerns about conduct are voiced and pursued by a multiplicity of authorities and agencies that seek to unify, divide, make whole and fragment, our selves and our lives in the name of specific forms of truth. To understand the relation between authority and identity, if one likes, we should look beyond the global trajectory of the relation between state formation and the moral regulation of individuals to the tactics, strategies, plans and minor attempts to make a difference to the way in which we live by a swarm of experts and specialists from police officers to advertising executives, from social, welfare, and health promotion workers to broadcasters and journalists, from policy analysts, planners, and architects to personnel officers and human resource managers. This is not a recommendation to ignore 'the state' but to undertake a particular analysis of it. These 'authorities of truth' operate within and outside local, regional, national and transnational states, demanding they take on or withdraw from their functions, act in new and different ways, form new relations with other authorities and other states, divide, compose and assemble themselves differently, and position themselves in certain networks and relays. They may pit one part of the state against another (the program of a local or state Women's Health Unit against those of the national Treasury) or enter into contestation with other authorities at other locale both within and outside the state. They may find ways of
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circumventing the network of state authority or simply ignore it by establishing direct links between different specialists, sites and actors (eg. the relation between AIDS activists and the laboratory). They may even seek to 'empower' their constituency and clients so that they may participate in governmental programs and even resist certain state authorities, such as the Community Action Programs initiated in the USA during the War on Poverty in the 1960s. 11 The second approach to the political ontology of ourselves and our present forms the 'Outside' of knowledge, the element of the relations of forces and powers and their combinations. From epistemology to strategy, to cite Deleuze again.12 These 'govern-ontologies' arise not simply from the diagrams, maps, plans, programs, mechanisms, techniques, technologies, strategies, tactics and other practical means by which we govern and are governed in the name of specific truths and authorities. They also encompass what has been called a 'politics of identity' or a 'life politics' for some time now. 13 This is a politics of the assertion of the autonomy and authenticity of various communities and movements, a politics of self-esteem and empowerment, of the creation of capacities of participation, assertiveness and resistance. It is also a questioning of the identities by which these groups have understood themselves to have been defined, typecast and victimised by authorities, dominant classes, and social and cultural forces and structures, by which voices have been made silent and problems invisible. Examined as a program of conduct, the theory of the new social movement14 is, indeed, about the rendering of the latent visible, the optimisation of expressive possibilities, and the collective fashioning of individual self-realisation. It thus thematises the 'submerged networks of everyday life' as the grounds for collective identity and action, the experiential and expressive components of organisation, and symbolic challenges to administrative logic and the production of knowledge. This opens us to the third ground from which an ontology of ourselves arises, the attempts by actors to fashion, shape, work on, and assert their own being, against or in accord with certain authorities of truth and the political and governmental mechanisms to which they are linked. From epistemology through strategy to ontology. As Deleuze's book demonstrates, this is the arc marking the entire trajectory of Foucault's thought. It should be said, however, that it would be mistaken for our studies of governmentality to take the claims of these movements at face value, as if they were somehow transparent unto themselves, and as if their true nature could be read off the values they invoke and the identities they seek to assume. The language of value and identity politics could be understood as a form of rhetoric that has particular effects on the organisational capacities of movements, on the type of arguments that can be mobilised, and they way they seek to fashion themselves. 15 It would be a mistake to imagine that we can draw an easy and unequivocal dividing line between those authorities that are on the side of power and those movements that act in the name of resistance, between the logics of domination and contestation and between dominant and oppositional discourses. Empowerment, participation, and the resistance it makes possible, are integral to contemporary technologies
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of citizenship, the history of community development programs, the nonexpert expertise of community organisers, and the 'expertisation' of the poor and the marginalised themselves in the knowledge of their own condition. The subject of resistance is as much constructed within the programs of conduct and under the authority of truth as are governable subjects in any other way of 'making up people', to use Ian Hacking's felicitous phrase.16 Whatever our particular commitments, our studies should seek to pose the same questions to all authorities and agencies that seek the direction offorms of life in the name of particular and variable goals, truths, and aspirations. At the level of the analysis of how we come to shape our conduct according to the various means by which we have come to know ourselves, it matters little if one is analysing a motor traffic authority, Greenpeace, an industrial corporation, a community development program, or a support network for victims of child abuse. Finally, the point of introducing this cast of barely defined characters is to remind us of some of what it is at stake when we use, reform or deform Foucault in posing this question of the historical and political ontology of ourselves. It seems that during a time when we might feel we are witnessing, both in the advanced liberal democracies and former socialist societies, a certain contraction of the span of political authority (with uncertain, polyvalent and sometimes tragic consequences) something quite different might be in operation. For the moment when we are enjoined (through various advanced liberal formulae of rule) to take care and responsibility for our own lives, health, happiness, sexuality, and financial security, when we are provided with choices that we are expected to exercise, and when there is a greater diversity in the forms of life we can live, and be safe and prosper within, is the same moment when a multiplicity of authorities, movements, and agencies comes into play, seeking to link up our exercise of freedom with various political goals and governmental aspirations and ends. Within this cacophony of plans, strategies, programs, and policies concerned with our values, identities, lifestyles, hopes, fears, desires and relationships, with our capacities for self-reflection, critique, personal fulfilment and selfactualisation, we might strain to discern the barely audible point first raised by Foucault, one that accounts for the novelty and for the great force of his work and is doubtless in some danger of being lost again. He asked, quite simply, not what is identity, but how we come to invest so much in all this talk about identity, self, and subjectivity, how we come to locate the truth of ourselves in the deepest structures of our souls. He claimed not that personal life was necessarily political, but simply to open up a field of study of the interweaving ways we seek to form ourselves and are formed through 'practices of the self' and 'practices of government'. His work asks us to be amazed at and seek to understand the conditions under which the soul of the citizen is both the basis of a new form of life-politics and the target of even the most mundane governmental practice. He asked how we have come to problematise both our politics and our being in such a way that identity, subjectivity, and self, become linked with questions of politics, authority, and government. There is, as he would no doubt point out, a cost involved in this, just as the early Christians discovered a deep truth within themselves
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that was available but only if they sacrificed their selves. 17 In support of this, we might want to consider the strange asceticism in militant politics since the 1960s. If liberation movements from that decade till today have never ceased to proclaim that the 'personal is political', the task for us is to fracture the self-evidence of the terms of this equation. It is to understand the conditions under which these complementary domains of the 'personal' and the 'political' could be formed, carved out, sculpted and stylised, and, above all, problematised in relation to one another.
Fragmentary selves in a fractured present? How might we go about exploring these concerns in a critical historical fashion? For in contemporary social and political thought there is no deficit not only of questions about identity but also of authoritative answers. I want simply to note one way of playing out these themes associated with the characterisation of the present as late modernity, postmodernity, or the risk society. 18 Here we find a chronology around a set of terms such as modernisation, detraditionalisation, globalisation and mediatisation. Our types of society, thisnarrativeruns,arecharacterisedbytheendofthemetanarratives of reason and progress, and a consequent loss of faith in the benefits of industrial efficiency, economic growth, and scientific expertise. It is one in which residual traditional, communal, or regional ties are undone by the relentless surge of globalisation, in which solidarities of class, family and nation give way to a multiplicity of forms and styles of life, and in which the face to face communication of the human lifeworld is colonised by the abstract systems of state bureaucracy, the capitalist market, and the culture and media industries. The resulting uncertainty leads to the calculation of risk and a proliferation of techniques for its minimisation as a way of understanding and controlling collective security and individual destiny. This uncertainty is, in turn, exacerbated and intensified by the mass media with their presentation of different and novel lifestyles and their elicitation of consumer desires not so much for material commodities but for the images attached and embodied in them, and for the 'lifestyles' which they offer. As a consequence, the stable class, ethnic, and gender identities characteristic of even early modernity have become fragmented, ephemeral, and continually subject to change. Such identities, the story goes, are revealed to be the uncertain consequence of our previous choices and plans. Rather than something fixed, unified and relatively stable, they have become something to be worked on and worked out, to be reflexively constructed and turned into coherent narrative and biography, and to be made into the subject of a political, personal, or spiritual journey, with or without the help of the multiplying numbers of therapists, counsellors, and other engineers of the soul. A politics of identity thus becomes available as we capitalise on the fact that our identities have become more fluid and reflexively constructed, and as a component of and form of resistance to existing conventional and traditional definitions of identity. I do not so much want to challenge such an account as point to several of its basic features that are problematic and suggestive of the strengths of both the later work of Foucault and the studies of government that have used that work as a point of departure.
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First, the concern for self-identity is neither as new nor as prolific as might be thought. Rather than an anxiety about self, identity or conduct being a general feature of a particular culture, society, or civilisation, it should be treated as something rare, as arising in particular circumstances at specific times and locations, always pertaining to a definite domain of existence and practice, asking a limited set of questions and having peculiar goals and aspirations. This is what I take Foucault to mean when he suggests that his concern is with neither behaviour, ideas, societies, nor ideologies, but 'problematisations'.1 9 Thus his analysis shows that the ethical problematisations posed by the ruling men of ancient Greece were about particular domains of practice- the management of the health and life of the body, matters of marriage and the management of the household, the concern about relations with boys who will be future citizens, and so onrather than from a general theory of the nature of human being or from a global and necessary process of the social shaping of selves. The work of Peter Brown20 clearly demonstrates that a particular and intense 'reflexive project of the self' was involved in late Judaism and early Christianity. Here, the material of this 'profound and sombre scrutiny' was the heart. These religious groups were concerned to root out the 'zones of negative privacy' that contained dangerous opacities to both God and community.21 Brown makes intelligible the effort to combat this 'double-heartedness' in early Christianity as one concerned to maintain group solidarity and mark the status of church leaders within pagan political and social structures. A sexual morality calling for celibacy for the church leadership and marital fidelity for all arose to combat double-heartedness at what was thought to be its most intimate and hidden source. Foucault's own work on the monastic confession as a 'permanent verbalisation and the discovery of the imperceptible movement of our self'22 confirms the impression gained from Brown of the existence of highly developed forms of 'self-reflexivity' and intensive self-examination in early Christian practices. This action on the self rivals anything undertaken by the present day therapeutic subject. Moreover, the ethical comportment of the desert monk is as radically different from alternative forms of ethical personality contemporary with it (for example that of Stoic philosopher or the civic aristocracy of Rome) as the self-actualising subject may be from the religious fundamentalist or patriarchal family head of today. Next, against a 'sociological' model in which there is the assumption of a general form of the relation between society, its institutions, and structures, and the self and its personality, we start from the assumption that there is no natural, necessary, or given, mode of determination of selves and identities. Studies of government and ethics are not concerned with a general figure of the self bound by a necessary social determination but with the more or less explicit attempts to problematise our lives, our forms of conduct, and our selves found in a variety of pronouncements and texts, employed in a diversity of locale, using particular techniques, and addressed to different social sectors and groups. Its raw material, then, includes books of manners and etiquette, catechisms, systems of military discipline, exercise and dietary regimens, treatises on erotic arts, 'lifestyle' television programs and
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magazine and newspaper columns, much popular psychological and sociological writing, and all types of 'how to' texts concerned with success in work, business, school, money matters, child-rearing, marriage, love and sex. If we are to talk of processes of socialisation as a general way in which 'society' affects 'individuals', then we must give an account of how this 'socialisation' isitselfconstructed, thehistoricalformsittakes, the rationalities it deploys, the techniques, mechanisms, practices and institutions by which and in which it is proposed that we work on, divide, make whole, sculpt, cultivate, pacify, contain and optimise not only our own lives, selves and conduct but the lives, selves, and conduct of those over whom we claim some authority. From this point of view, the problem with contemporary sociological accounts is that they are pitched at too general a level and propose a mysterious, even occult, relation between general social processes (for example globalisation, the emergence of postmodernity) and features of identity (fragmentation, fluidity, the desire for self-actualisation, etc.). Associated with this presupposition of a necessary and general relation between society and individual identity, is the assumption of a continuity and sedimentation of the subject-form that is supported, built upon, or even undermined by successive social processes. Here is a model of a continuous form of the subject, made up of layer upon layer of the historical sedimentation of affects, sensibilities, capacities, habits, manners, and morals. These layers, then, form a series of strata that become the raw material for new social processes. If, however, we are dealing with problematisations that are local and domain specific, that have singular times and spaces, and if we are dealing with the specific techniques and practices that give rise to such problematisations and are mobilised by them, then the question of continuity and discontinuity becomes, above all, an empirical one. Thus whether specific practices of the government of conduct and techniques of living continue to be of consequence, whether they continue to have the same effects, whether they continue to operate in tandem with the same rationality, or whether they have been emplaced within different strategies and oriented toward different ends, and whether certain capacities, affects, or habits are generalised among specific populations, all become questions for empirical inquiry and argument. A critical history of the self is necessary precisely because those spaces and relations we designate by the terms'self', 'individual', or 'person', can be assumed to be neither continuous nor discontinuous, but are subject to particular domains of governmental and ethical practice and to local problematisations that might foster the maintenance or undermining of various human attributes and capacities in the same or different forms for new purposes or for the same old reasons. Following from this, we can say there is no single figure that can capture the form of the subject for a particular society or culture or the historical trajectory of forms of self in a civilisation. The characterisation of a fragmented postmodern subject ceaselessly reconstructing itself into a coherent autobiography is an heir to a long historical and sociological heritage that has indeed tried to do just that. Notions of social and cultural types of individuals from the bourgeois individual and homo oeconomicus to onedimensional man, the administered subject, and fragmented self, are so
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many versions of this motif. In fact, this approach has one of its most recent ancestors in the writings of the Frankfurt School of the 1940s. Writers such as Max Horkheimer seek to provide a general history of the self in the West. 23 Here a narrative is charted of the ebb and flow of individualism from tribal societies to late capitalism. It moves from a primitive pre-individuality living in the gratification and frustrations of the moment, through the model of the Greek hero, the flowering of individuality in the Hellenic city states with Socratic conscience and Platonic objective reason, and its retreat into Stoic resignation with the subjugation of the cities by the Roman Empire. This is followed by the investment of the individual with a unique and immortalsoulinChristianity,anditssecularisationandhumanisationin the Renaissance, Reformation and Enlightenment. The 'era of free enterprise' leads to an open proclamation of bourgeois individuality that proves to be evanescent under administered capitalism and mass culture with the arrival of what would later be called 'one-dimensional man'. In such an account there is a curious simultaneous historicising and naturalising of the individual or self. The self is a historical product, transformed through different phases of the development of general features of society such as the division of labour and the forms of social domination. Yet it retains a general form throughoutthistrajectoryasanentitythatrepressesandinstrumentalisesits own inner being and external nature in the interest of self-preservation.24 There is a general form of subject underlying both the spurious unity of 'the West' and the distinct forms corresponding to each socio-cultural period. This positing of a general form of the subject, whether for a particular epoch or for an entire civilisation, is undermined, however, not only by its own implausibility but by the crucial work of recent cultural historians of private life and the work of other social thinkers such as Norbert Elias. The collective work of the historians of private life is exemplary in that, as Georges Duby notes,25 it remains conscious of the retrospective nature of reading over two millennia of European history through a concept of personal existence barely a century old and that it seeks to avoid using these histories as evidence for a general history of individualism. Here studies of education, marriage, slavery, religion, domestic architecture, of notions of the sacred and the secret, and of private belief,26 become so many occasions for an exploration of the myriad ways in different societies and at different times in which humans have carved out domains of private and public life, employing a vast array of techniques and means, to construct an existence for themselves and others made up of an extraordinary variety of reasons and purposes. At their best, the work of the historians of private life shows how specific aspects of conduct and person were problematised, by various agents and authorities, among distinct populations, employing certain techniques, and with particular aspirations, goals, and consequences. The work of Norbert Elias illustrates the very same point. 27 His history of manners demonstrates the specificity and diversity of aspects of conduct that are problematised by poems and treatises of manners (from table manners and nose-blowing to relations between the sexes), the diverse locale in which conduct is problematised (at the table, in the bedroom, in the street and market, at court), and the different groups and sectors (the
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knights, the court nobility, the bourgeoisie) that are addressed by diverse agencies (secular, municipal, ecclesiastical, military). However, Elias seeks to encapsulate this within a global thesis of the 'civilising process' in which there is an assumed fit between the rationalisation of conduct and the development of the state. Moreover, he proposes a psychoanalytic mode of the moulding of persons through the regulation of drives by the social implantation of habits that later become unconscious mechanisms of constraint. In both these moves, he suffers the same problem as afflicts the social and cultural theorists of the Frankfurt School. He assumes a general topography of the self that is shaped and moulded by a totalising civilising process to produce the general form of the modern individual. The aim of a critical ontology of our selves is not to provide an account of the genesis of the 'modern' subject, or of its fragmentation in postmodernity, or even to align processes of 'sociogenesis' with ones of 'psychogenesis', as Elias might have said. Its aim, rather, is to understand how human beings became thought ofand characterised as having a certain psychological interiority in which the determinations of culture could be inscribed, organised and shaped into a distinctive personality or character. 28 Its point is to make intelligible how we came to understand ourselves as an essential innerness from which flows our thoughts, our expressions, our conduct, and our emotions. Its objective is to show how this experience of personhood is given to us within the myriad ways we are made transparent to ourselves and others so that we might be rendered calculable and ultimately governable. The object of our governmental investigations is not the subject that is produced by specific governmental or ethical practices. It is the relation between the forms of truth by which we have come to know ourselves and the forms of practice by which we seek to shape the conduct of ourselves and others. Finally, rather than posing the question of the relationship between politics and identity at the level of a general historical trajectory of the state and of the individual, we should turn our attention to the very situations in which the regulation of personal conduct becomes linked to the regulation of political or civic conduct. Two very brief and extraordinarily different examples of the interleaving of a problematisation of personal existence and identity with political and governmental considerations shall suffice here. As a first example, simply note how today the unemployed are required not only to agree to perform certain tasks Gob search, retraining, counselling, etc.) in return for state allowances, but also to adopt a particular form of personal deportment and maintain a certain relationship to themselves encapsulated in the notion of active citizenship, a condition in which they seek to maintain their own self-esteem, networks of social obligation, lifeskills, enthusiasm and motivation and avoid the dependency characteristic of an underclass. 29 As a second example, we can cite Foucault's own analysis30 of how a minority of men who were free and equal citizens in antiquity came to problematise their capacities of self-government as a consequence of their government of others in both the polis and oikos, as citizens and heads of households. In contrast to the government of the unemployed, here the
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problematisation of one's own conduct is not a feature of being governed but of the exercise of authority over others. In short, to pose the question of politics and identity at the level of the state and the individual is both too general and empty. We must examine the specific problematisation of identities that occur at the intersection of the way we conduct ourselves and the way we expect others to conduct themselves. All this has been preliminary to a task to be recommenced elsewhere. The aim has been to create a clearing for a quite different form of research and object of study that comes into view when the customary ways of posing questions and giving answers in this area are scrutinised. The point to be emphasised is that this research is neither a general socio-cultural history of the self nor a theory of the subject. Its goal is not to create a new knowledge of the most recent form of the subject, however embodied or disembodied, fragmentary or whole, multiple or unitary, normative or non-normative, historicised or naturalised, transitory or stable, transgressive or obedient, metamorphic or continuous, it is assumed to be, but simply to sketch how we can understand past and present, local, domain specific, problematisations of conduct, lives, selves, persons, and identities, and the governmental and ethical practices that form the horizon of these problematisations. What is at issue is not the production of a new form of truth about personalities and selves but, to use a language I shall explicate elsewhere, to grasp how these practices seek to 'enfold' different forms of authority, to carve out discontinuous surfaces and spaces on which and in which we find evidence of our fundamental innerness, and our possession of a self, a character, or a personality. I am interested in neither anessentialinterioritynor an interiority that is the endpoint of different practices and discourses, but with the analysis of those practices in which, touseFoucault'sfamous phrase,human beings attempt to turn themselves into subjects. I am interested in the multiple, heterogeneous and local'govern-ontologies' of ourselves and our present that come into view once one has rid oneself forever of the dilemma of choosing between humanist and antihumanist accounts of the subject. 1
The present paper has been published as 'For a political ontology of ourselves' in Political Expressions, vol. 1, no. 1, 1995, pp. 17-30. I am extremely grateful to Michael Janover for his comments on it. For elaborations of the themes sketched here seeM. Dean, "A social structure of many souls': moral regulation, government and self-formation', Canadian JournalofSociologyvol.19,no.2,1994, pp.145168, M. Dean, 'Foucault, government and the enfolding of authority', in A. Barry, T. Osborne and N. Rose (eds), Foucault and Political Reason, UCL Press, London, 1996, and M. Dean, 'Foucault, constructionism, method', in R. Williams and I. Velody (eds) The Politics of Constructionism, Sage, London, 1996.
2
M. Foucault and G. Deleuze, 'Intellectuals and power', in M. Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. D. B. Bouchard, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1977, p. 208.
3
M. Foucault, Remarks on Marx, trans. R. J. Goldstein and J. Cascaito, Semiotext(e), New York, 1991, pp.30-l.
4
T. Flynn, 'Foucault as parrhesiast: his last course at the College de France', in J. Bernauer and D. Rasmussen (eds) The Final Foucault, MIT Press: Cambridge, Ma., 1988.
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5
M. Foucault, 'Kant on revolution and enlightenment', Economy and Society vol. 15, no. 1, 1986, 88-96.
6
N. Rose,' Authority and the genealogy of subjectivity', in P. Heelas, P. Morris and S. Lash (eds) De-traditionalization: Authority and Self in an Age of Cultural Uncertainty, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1994.
7
M. Dean, Critical and Effective Histories: Foucault's Methods and Historical Sociology, Routledge, London, 1994, pp. 51-52.
8
G. Deleuze,Foucault, trans,S. Hand, UniversityofMinnesottaPress,Minneapolis, 1988, pp. 108-114; M. Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, trans. R. Hurley, Pantheon, New York, p. 7.
9
T H Marshall, 'Citizenship and Social Class', in Sociology at the Crossroads and other Essays, Heinemann, London, 1963.
10 P. Corrigan and D. Sayer, The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1985. For a critical approach to this text, see M. Dean,'A social structure of many souls', pp. 145-154. 11 B. Cruikshank, 'The will to empower: technologies of citizenship and the war on poverty', Socialist Review, 23(4):29-55. 12 G. Deleuze, Foucault, p.l12. 13 See, for example, A. Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, Polity, Cambridge, 1991, pp. 209-231. 14 E. g. A. Melucci, Nomads of the Present: Social Movements and Individual Needs in Contemporary Society, Hutchinson Radius, London, 1989. 15 T. Tenbensel, 'Values in Green politics', unpublished PhD thesis, Australian National University, 1994. 16 I. Hacking, 'Making up people', in T. C. Heller et. al. (eds), Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1986, pp.222-36. 17 M. Foucault,' About the beginings of the hermeneutics ofthe self', Political Theory, vol. 21, no. 2, 1993, pp. 198-227. 18 I am drawing loosely on a body of sociological work of which the following is exemplary: U. Beck, Risk Society: toward a New Modernity, Sage, London, 1992; A. Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, Polity, Cambridge, 1991; S. Hall et. al., Modernity and its Futures, Polity, Cambridge, 1992; and J. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 2: Lifeworld and System: a Critique of Functionalist Reason, trans, T. McCarthy, Beacon Press, Boston, 1987. I am not suggesting, however, that the following paragraph is any more than a composite way of trying to make sense of these often quite disparate positions and insights. See also the far more detailed attempt to characterise the narrative of detraditionalisation in Rose, 'Authority and the genealogy of subjectivity'. For my own alternative characterisation of our present, seeM. Dean, 'Sociology after Society', in D. Owen (ed.) After Sociology, Sage, London, 1996. 19 Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, p.ll. 20 P. Brown, 'Late Antiquity', in P. Veyne (ed. ),A History of Private Life, vol. 1: From Pagan Rome to Byzantium, trans, A. Goldhammer, Belknap Press: Cambridge, Mass, 1987; P. Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, Columbia University Press, New York, 1989. See, also, M. Dean, 'The genealogy of the gift in Antiquity', The Australian Journal ofAnthropology, vol. 5, no. 3, 1994, pp. 320-329.
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21 Brown, 'Late Antiquity', p.254. 22 Foucault, 'About the beginnings of the hermeneutics', p.222. 23 M. Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason, Continuum, New York, 1974, pp.128-61. 24 This conception of the general form of the subject runs through M. Horkheimer and T. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. J. Cumming, Continuum, New York, 1972. 25 G. Duby, 'Foreword to a History of Private Life', in Veyne (ed. ), A History of Private Life, Vol. 1, p.viii. 26 To simply cite some of the contents of Veyne. This is the first volume of a magnificient series: P. Aries and G. Duby (eds) A History of Private Life, 5 vols, Belknap Press: Cambridge, Ma., 1987-1991. 27 N. Elias, The Civilising Process, vol. one: The History of Manners, trans E. Jephcott, Urizen, New York, 1978. 28 Cf. Rose, 'Authority and the genealogy of subjectivity'. 29 M. Dean, 'Governing the unemployed self in an active society', Economy and Society, 24(4), 1995. 30 Foucault, The Use of Pleasure.
Culture and Utility: Calculating Culture's Civilising Effect1 tz'ony tJJennett This paper derives from a larger project which draws on Foucault's account of liberal government to examine the programs ofnineteenth-centurypublic museums and art galleries, and especially the respects in which such programs were shaped by the expectation that culture might serve as an instrument for improving the morals and manners of the general population. This work is focused on the formation of museum and art-gallery policies and practices in Britain from the 1830s to the 1880s, mainly because the institutional and discursive interfaces that were established between the regions of culture and government during this period have exerted a widespread and continuing influence on the forms in which, in modern societies, culture has been enlisted for the purposes of governing. The importance of these new interfaces is comparable to that of the view of culture as an instrument for forming civic virtues that was associated with Enlightenment thought and given its most extended social implementation during the French Revolution. For they extended the governmental reach of culture in two ways. First, they carried that reach beyond the public surface of civic conduct and into the interior of the person in the expectation that culture would serve to fashion new forms of self-reflexiveness and reformed codes of personal conduct. Second, they developed new capillary systems for the distribution of culture that were calculated to extend its reach throughout the social body without any impediment or restriction. The rationality of this new program for culture- the discursive conditions that made it intelligible and practicable - was shaped by the intersections between Romanticism and Malthusianism. For it was Romantic aesthetics that, in warrening out an interior within the subject and fashioning the work of art as a vehicle for ethical formation, made the individual's encounter with art a process of self-inspection and so, also, a process of self-reform. If this view of art thus nourished the expectation that exposure to art's influence might help make individuals self-civilising, it was the new conceptions of the poor associated with Malthusianism that made it intelligible to view this capacity as one that might usefully be extended to the population at large. For, as Mitchell Dean's work has shown, it was only the stress that Malthusianism placed on the need for the poor to become prudential that opened up the inner life of the workingman as an object of governmental attention. However, the ground on which these two currents of thought intersected was that constituted by the utilitarian strand in liberal and reforming opinion. While this combination of Romanticism, Malthusianism and utilitarianism proved a fairly volatile 'discursive brew' with many contradictory tendencies, the issues I want to focus on here concern the new distributional
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logic for culture to which it gave rise and through which works of art came to be inscribed within quite new relations of culture and power. I can perhaps best introduce these concerns by citing a passage from William Stanley Jevons' 1883 text Methods of Social Reform. The main raison d'etre of Free Public Libraries, as indeed of public museums, art-galleries, parks, halls, public clocks, and many other kinds of public works, is the enormous increase of utility which is thereby acquired for the community at a trifling cost. If a beautiful picture be hung in the dining room of a private house, it may perhaps be gazed at by a few guests a score or two of times in the year.lts real utility is too often that of ministering to the selfish pride of its owner. If it be hung in the National Gallery, it will be enjoyed by hundreds of thousands of persons, whose glances, it need hardly be said, do not tend to wear out the canvas .... lt is a striking case of what I propose to call the Principle of the multiplication of utility ... Gevons 1965:28-29).
This view that the public ownership and distribution of cultural goods would maximise their utility was central to mid-century reforming opinion. It was the guiding principle of the work of Henry Cole, the most important cultural administrator of the mid-century period, and enjoyed a new lease of life toward the end of the century when Jevons' arguments were championed by George Brown Goode, the Director of the US National Museum at the Smithsonian Institution. Yet this stress on the multiplication of culture's utility raised questions as to how, precisely, its utility might best be calculated and measured. Let me go back to Jevons again. For while he wanted the circuits through which culture was distributed to be significantly expanded, he was also concerned that institutions provided with a view to maximising culture's utility might be misused. Perhaps even more worrying, however, was the difficulty of establishing whether or not this was so: At the South Kensington Art Museum they make a great point of setting up turnstiles to record the precise numbers of visitors, and they can tell you to a unit the exact amount of civilising effect produced in any day, week, month, oryear.Buttheseturnstileshardlytakeaccountofthefactthattheneighbouring wealthy residents are in the habit, on a wet day, of packing their children off in a cab to the so-called Brompton Boilers, in order that they may have a good run through the galleries Gevons:SS-6).
Concerns of this kind regarding how these new engines of public instruction might be used or abused were endemic. They were very much to the fore in debates regarding the ideal location for London's National Gallery. For its existing city-centre presented something of a dilemma. While that location was ideal for maximising the Gallery's public utility, it also maximised the risk that the Gallery might be abused by the passing urban throng. When, in 1857, a commission was appointed to consider whether the National Gallery should retain its Trafalgar Square site or be moved out to the suburbs at Kensington Gore, its deliberations were dominated by the attempt to discover a calculus through which the relative costs and benefits of these competing locations might be weighed against one another and be reconciled. Ruskin proposed one such calculus in suggesting that there should be two collections with different functions. Asked whether it was not advantageous
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for art, viewed in terms of the effect it might have on the public mind, to be located in central London in view of the ease and cheapness of access this would afford, Ruskin agreed and went on to note that, on the debit side, 'a central situation involves the crowding of the room with parties wholly uninterested in the matter'. The difficulty is that while art needs to reach the crowd in order to civilise it, that same crowd spoils the pleasure of art for 'the real student' for whom, Ruskin argues,' a situation more retired will generally be serviceable enough' (Report 1857:para 2456). Posed in this way, the issue is resolvable by disaggregating the unity of art, splitting it into two kinds of collection in such a manner that the crowd's access to art comes to be differentiated and hierarchically organised. Ruskin thus suggested: But it would seem to me that all that is necessary for a noble Museum of the best art should be more or less removed, and that a collection, solely for the purpose of education, and for the purpose of interesting people who do not care much about art, should be provided in the very heart of the population, if possible, that pictures not of great value, but of sufficient value to interest the public, and of merit enough to form the basis of early education, and to give examples of all art, should be collected in the popular Gallery, but that all the precious things should be removed and put into the great Gallery, where they would be safest, irrespectively altogether of accessibility (Report 1857:para 2458).
Here, then, we can see Ruskin inhabiting the same universe as Cole and Jevons in his concern to maximise the uses to which art might be put by breaking it down into its component parts and assigning each a different function within a pedagogic itinerary conceived as an ascent of art's hierarchical organisation. That the commission was interested in Ruskin's proposal is clear from the number of times it resurfaced during its deliberations. Yet there were many practical difficulties to be surmounted if the virtues of the proposal were to be properly assessed. For if art galleries were to be differentiated so as to serve different purposes for different publics, it was first necessary to know who used them so that some calculations might be made as to which sections of the population would be most likely to visit them if they were located in such-and-such a place or given such-and-such a character. Yet, these were matters on which it was difficult to arrive at any definite conclusions given the rudimentary nature of the available statistics. The 1857 commission was thus obliged to rely on anecdotal evidence in its pursuit of these questions. These were particularly to the fore in the evidence taken from James Fergusson, the general manager of Crystal Palace. Advising the commission that his visitor numbers were largest on Mondays at about 10,000 and declined progressively through the week to a low of 2,000 on Saturdays, Fergusson related these figures to his observations concerning different class practices. 'We go gradually down from the beginning of the week, which is the poor man's holiday, to the end of the week which is appropriated almost exclusively to the more wealthy ... ' (Report 1857:para 2692). However, although the number of visitors varied for each day of the week, Fergusson calculated that the educational benefit derived from the art on display was much the same. This involved a calculus
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for the measurement of culture's utility in which the low average amount of benefit derived from the mass of working-class visitors in the early parts of the week might be matched by the higher intensity of the benefit derived by the smaller numbers of better-class visitors later in the week. In Fergusson's words:' ... I should say there is about the same amount of information or education present on each of the days. Very much diluted in the earlier days, concentrated in the latter days of the week' (Report 1857:para 2692). What I am concerned with here, then, is the new logic of culture that motivated the commission's concerns, framing the direction of its inquiries and the kinds of answers it sought. In its relentless exploration of the possibility- indeed, desirability- of breaking the unity of culture down into its component parts; of distinguishing the first from the second rate and assigning them different spheres of distribution; of determining just how much culture to make available to different publics in view of estimates of how much and what kinds of benefit they might derive from it: it is clear, in all of these ways, that culture was thought of as something that might be parcelled into different quantities, broken down into units of different value, in such a way that the utility, the civilising effect, to be derived from making available large amounts of relatively low quality art to the masses might be weighed and balanced against the value to be derived from reserving the very best art for more exclusive forms of consumption by the educated classes. A similar orientation was evident in the line of questioning of the committee appointed to report on the Paris Exhibition of 1867. An interest in arriving at a graduated calculus for assessing art's utility was clear when the committee asked: Instead of spending very large sums upon very costly objects, would it not be better to distribute that large sum upon a number of objects, which are cheap in production, and at the same time of good taste, which might produce a really beneficial effect upon our own manufacture? (Report 1867:minute 173)
Some of the expert testimony refused to accept that there might be such a calculus. For J.C. Robinson, expenditure on second-rate art could not be justified because 'second-rate things do not instruct; they rather tend to lower and vitiate the public taste' (minute 656). However, Richard Redgrave displayed a clear commitment to a graduated calculus for assessing art's useful effects in his rejection of a pure aestheticism which insists that only the original work of art will do. While admitting a connection between utility and rarity in contending that art's usefulness is greater the more original and singular the object, a reproduction, while not so good, is better than nothing: ' ... there is no doubt that the objects themselves are much finer than the reproduction; but if you cannot give them one thing, you must give them another' (minute 64). Henry Cole's evidence tended in the same direction in his defence of 'democratic art' as 'art of the cheapest kind that circulates among the people'. Taken to task by the committee as to whether the circulation of second rate art might do more harm than good, Cole's reply equivocated between an aesthetic relativism which would see all art as equally good and a position which accepts an aesthetic hierarchy while insisting that, although the effect of art might be most concentrated and
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intense at the peak of that hierarchy, its effect will be simultaneously of a lower intensity but more diffuse and capable of being spread more widely through the social body the lower down that hierarchy one goes. And the same logic, finally, is discernible in the debates which accompanied the development of 'outreach' systems. From its foundation in the 1850s, the South Kensington Museum was conceived as a central repository from which specimen objects could be circulated to provincial museums in order to spread the improving influence of culture more evenly throughout the land. Its effectiveness in this regard was subject to periodic monitoring. Reporting in 1881, for example, a committee established to examine this system of distribution, recorded that 1346 examples of industrial art and 1286 paintings and drawings had been loaned to 7 museums in 1880. Noting how this had been an increase on earlier years, the report went on to identify ways in which the utility to be derived from this method of distribution might be still further increased (see Report 1881). The language of these reports is comfortingly familiar in its recognisable continuity with contemporary bureaucratic procedures, so much so that it is easy to overlook their historical novelty. It is, then, worth underscoring this, for the conception of the South Kensington Museum as a central repository from which art might be circulated, in a capillary fashion, throughout the nation was not without precedent. Indeed, in the establishment and progressive monitoring of this arrangement, reference was frequently made to the envoi system developed in Napoleonic France through which works of art from the national collections in Paris were loaned to provincial art museums. Yet that is about as far as the similarities go. In his detailed survey and assessment of the envoi system, Daniel Sherman argues that, viewed in the light of the centralising ambitions of the Napoleonic period, its primary purpose was to embody and circulate an image of state power throughout the nation. It was for this reason, he thus contends, that less importance was attached to the pictures selected for this purpose than to the labels accompanying them which indicated that they were the gift of the Emperor or of the state (see Sherman 1989:14). The circulation of art, in other words, was undertaken in accordance with a logic that remained primarily juridicodiscursive. In this logic, as Foucault defines it, art serves princely power by symbolising it and making it publicly manifest. The envoi system was thus continuous with those earlier forms through which the power of the sovereign was promoted by circulating his image throughout the nation through coinage and medals, for example (see Burke 1992). By contrast, when utilitarian reformers spoke of the benefits to be derived from art's distribution throughout the realm, this was not envisaged as a means of representing or staging power; the purpose of multiplying the circuits of art's distribution was not to impress the populace by circulating art as a form of power-spectacle. Instead, its circulation was conceived in accordance with a governmental logic in which art, rather than representing power, is a power- a power which, as we have seen from the stress placed on art's divisibility, was susceptible to multiple subdivisions in a program which had as its end not the exertion of a specular dominance over the populace but the development of its capacities.
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Walter Benjamin argued that the development of techniques of mechanical reproduction deprived the work of art of the aura associated with the uniqueness and singularity of its authentic individual presence (Benjamin 1970). The truth is, however, that, side-by-side with the development of such techniques, art was also being inscribed in new processes through which its singularity and uniqueness was subjected to a far more thoroughgoing dismemberment as its unity was disaggregated in a manner that would allow artistic products to be deployed in varying and flexible ways as parts of governmental programs aimed at civilising the population. It was art's existence in an age of mass instruction that was primarily responsible for, not the loss of its aura, as if by accident, but the calculated detachment of art's power and effectiveness from any dependence on the a uratic qualities of its singular presence. No longer serving power by representing it or embodying it, culture emerges, instead, as a resource through which individuals are to be inducted into participation in the exercise of power over and through themselves by using art as a prop for programs of self-improvement and self-management aimed, although in differentiated ways, at the population as a whole. Yet if this is so, then, in view of the widespread and enduring influence of this formative moment in the development of modern cultural policies, we shall have to rewrite the history of the public art gallery. The account which has proved most influential here has been that offered by Theodor Adorno in his conception of art galleries as family sepulchres for works of art which, in abstracting art from real-life contexts and so nullifying its utility, convert its aura into a fetish which serves only to maintain its exchange value - a critique which has its most eloquent modern-day representative in Douglas Crimp's writings on the museum's ruins (writings inspired by a postmodernist reading of Foucault). Philip Fisher notes the central weakness of this tradition when he remarks that the argument concerning art's loss of aura fails to consider the ways in which, when art is placed in new contexts, 'new characteristics come into existence by the process that earlier features are effaced'. There is, then, another way of writing the history of the art gallery, one in which art gains rather than loses something and which we might summarise in Philip Fisher's happy phrase when he says that the accomplishment of the modern art museum has been to bureaucratise art. Emphasising this aspect of the art gallery's history, moreover, will have practical consequences. For in place of those avantgarde critiques which place the art gallery on one side of a divide and life on the other, and which seek to liberate art from the former for the latter, there is opened up the life of art's bureaucratisation as a distinctively modern, anti-auratic form of art's use and deployment which, since no amount of critique will conjure it away, needs to be assessed and engaged with on its own terms. A lengthier discussion of these issues has been published under the title 'The multiplication of culture's utility' in Critical Inquiry, 21(4), Summer, 1995.
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References Benjamin, Walter (1970). Illuminations, London: Jonathan Cape. Burke, Peter (1992). The Fabrication of Louis XIV, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Crimp, Douglas (1993). On the Museum's Ruins, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Dean, Mitchell (1991). The Constitution of Poverty: Toward a Genealogy of Liberal Governance, London: Routledge. Fisher, Philip (1991). Making and Effacing Art: Modern American Art in a Culture of Museums, New York: Oxford University Press. Jevons W. Stanley (1883). Methods of Social Reform, New York: Augustus M. Kelley.
Report of the National Gallery Site Commission [1857] (1971). Shannon: Irish University Press.
Report from the Select Committee on Paris Exhibition, 11 July 1867, Shannon: Irish University Press.
Report on the System of Circulation ofArt Objects from the South Kensington Museum for Exhibition [1881] (1971). Shannon: Irish University Press. Sherman, DanielJ. (1989). Worthy Monuments: Art Museums and the Politics of Culture in Nineteenth-century France. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
What Is An Expert?1 J. P. !Minson A generic picture of expertise in the service of government has for some time now held sway within intellectual circles that pride themselves on their critical detachment from the governmental order and their commitment to an emancipatory politics. Acting on the basis of contestable and exclusive claims to scientific rationality, expert systems and their staff treat the governed as merely instrumental human resources to be instrumentalised in the service of promoting allegedly non-emancipatory, at best amoral objectives such as national economic prosperity. Expert government in this critical intellectual perspective, for instance, in the Habermasian tradition, is a standing affront to Kantian or neo-Kantian political principles of equal autonomy. Citizens in the ideal, republican community, who treat each other only as ends-in-themselves, not as means, will only be subject to rules and regulations that they have actively helped to make or would consent to. Only expert government which promotes such autonomy by conforming to principles of social justice or democratic accountability is redeemable. Surprisingly, perhaps, Foucauldian arguments on governmentality, the disciplines, and political and moral technologies of the self have frequently been interpreted in such a way as to lend such critiques a deeper, 'power' dimension. 2 Modern men and women, so this story goes, are never so thoroughly enmeshed in the governmental as they are when they assiduously pursue their liberation from the forces of repression. On this interpretation of Foucault, for example, sexuality is not so much repressed as repressive: the fulcrum of a powerful medicalising and psychologising dispositif. 3 The inmates of this social disciplinary and hermeneutical goldfish bowl are actively enrolled in the tasks of discovering, refining and 'freely' living out - ie. fixing their true sexual identity, disciplining themselves to take contraceptives, and so forth. My contention is that the Foucauldian tradition can only be taken as a warrant for any singular critical evaluation of expert systems in the name of the principle of equal and authentic autonomy by trading on problems and imprecisions in that work and by ignoring its most productive features. As a device for highlighting both this productivity and those problems I will indicate how certain arguments originally applied to modern literary authorship and to ancient sexual ascesis might be made to both mutually inform and modify one another in being applied to reformulating the status of expertise. Read together with those sections of The Archaeology of Knowledge which treat the formation of subjects and objects, and, in addition, a later interview on 'The functions of literature', the essay 'What is an author?' offers a way of conceptualising the figure of the author as a 'pluralite d' ego' (Foucault 1969:88), a variable amalgam of different discursive self-references and social statuses (eg. the variable functioning of the prefatory 'I' across literary andnon-literarygenres). Thetendencytoidentifytheauthorwitha'definite description' of the individual who writes, qua integral moral personality,
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and to view the work as the latter's characteristic expression is conceived as effect, an artefact of some, not all, relations of appropriation and attribution. The latter for example involves various 'complex and rarely justified' operations (Foucault 1969:74): legal, philological, critical practices of reviewing and publicity, for instance. These critical operations implicate the literary writer in a social circuitry, such as the one obtaining between avant garde transgressive writing, academic criticism and dissertation work, funding authorities and so on (Foucault 1988:08-10). This complication and diversification of the author figure is compounded by the ways in which it is historicised. Especially germane to the present exercise are the changing relations between literate practices and practitioners which function and derive their prestige from the institution of authorship (eg. 'literature'); and those practices and practitioners which do not, or which, like what we now call the sciences, have ceased to be centrally dependent upon the 'author-function'. Equally relevant are the continuities turned up in Foucault's essay between modern secular and medieval religious authorialising methods of textual interpretation in response to problems of medieval biblical exegesis (Foucault 1969:6-77). For all its virtues, 'What is an author?' is in places exposed to the charge of taking some of the romance out of authorship only at the cost of reducing this figure to an effect of social and discursive positionings. There would be critics of Foucault's views on authorship who would ironise around the eminent suitability of Foucault's so called structuralist methodology for the purposes of analysing the figure of the ('soulless') bureaucrat. If the figure of the expert official is to be redrawn in such a way as to render it less amenable to being made to function as the bad object of political romanticism, it is necessary to do more than merely disaggregate expertise into the diverse statuses and institutional effects associated with the 'expert-function' - a purely robotic terminal through which passes a network of functional obligations and positive knowledges. This is where the later Foucault's (1992, 1992a) neo-Aristotelian 'competence'-oriented conception of ethos comesin. 4 In the methodological preamble to his characterisation of classical sexual ethics, Foucault distinguishes from the principled components of ethical life that work of 'ascetic' self-fashioning, or care of the self, which consists in mastering diverse 'arts of living', from 'medical' dietetics to philosophospiritual exercises. It was by cultivating these techniques of the self that, for example, a Roman-imperial notable, living in circumstances conducive to sudden and sometimes violent changes in personal status, could craft himself as at once a distinguished, unperturbable public figure and someone capable of creating a private, 'inner' life of tranquil (self-) contemplation (Foucault 1992a:81ff). How might this focus on the means and milieus of ascetic selffashioning offer a way of registering the ethical and affective dimensions of expert dispositions which the critical-intellectual image of the expert blocks out? The answer, I suggest, is by modifying this focus on the work of ascesis in such a way as to retain that sense of the 'multiplex' and discontinuous character of personhood implied in Foucault's earlier concept of a pluralite d'ego. One might begin by following Peter Brown, who distinguishes be-
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tween the holistic, spiritual disciplines of self-formation which went into the making of the studiously unworldly ancient pagan philosopher or the early Christian holy man, from the far less reflexive, far more worldly kinds of work on the self- modulation of the voice and control of temper, for instance - required by paideia, the preeminently rhetorical education received by Ancient Greek and Roman notables (Brown 1988, 1992). Needless to say, the same individual can in some circumstances acquire the habits of thinking and capacities for being affected which are appropriate to both worldly and unworldly ways of ethically comporting oneself. In other words, it is possible to describe experts as amalgams of institutionally specialised types of ethical character or persona,5 no less than as the bearers of technical knowledges and the terminals of formal-institutional roles and statuses. There is nothing essential incomplete about any of these personae. Certainly, an individual entirely absorbed in their professional persona, like the consummate butler, Stevens in Ishiguro's novel TheRemains of the Day, or the dedicated ('peace-mongering') bureaucrat in the film Life and Nothing But,6 may well render themselves radically incompetent in 'affairs of the heart'. But what we have to ask is whether such men are any more ethically (or emotionally) inadequate than those tiresome individuals who feel compelled to integrate their professional character, eg. as a teacher or a therapist, into their political or family relationships. How would the expert official's capacity for offering dispassionate advice look from this perspective? The usual straw-man cartoon depicts someone pretending to an unrestricted capacity for 'objectivity' deriving from their supposedly scientific knowledge-base. Our observations on Western traditions of spiritual and rhetorical character-formation by contrast point to the possibility that 'frank and fearless advice' may be a remote descendent of the states of mind and feeling associated with stoic self-cultivation: apatheia, ataraxia, adiaphora, constantia, or the inner fortitude required to withstand superiors' traditional inclination to' shoot the messenger'. It says something about the extent to which modem ethical culture is tilted in favour of selfexpression and 'autonomy' that many of these terms have no contemporary equivalents, even though what they stand for is appreciated within particular milieus. An example would be the capacity to cultivate an 'adiaphoric' attitudeie. ethical indifference to matters about which one might have strong sentiments or extensive knowledge, but which, in particular circumstances do not, must not, count as matters of ethical obligation in their job (Minson 1993:66-7,187,129-30). Is not just such an ethical ability embedded in the requirements of everyday official tasks such as chairing a committee meeting or processing tenders and promotion applications? In the latter case, decisions may depend, for instance, upon referees' reports which do not square with a member of the panel's specialist knowledge. Moreover, it may well be that a bureaucrat acting in a 'ringholding' capacity in one meeting may in the next one be called upon to act in the capacity of a zealous advocate. The ability to distance oneself from one's commitments is only one, circumstantially, rather than universally, required characteristic virtue of a contemporary bureaucrat.
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Still, adiaphorism offers a fascinating pointer to what is involved in that component of self-shaping which Foucault called 'the determination of the ethical substance'. What matters, ethically, are obstacles to keeping potentially antagonistic relationships on a' civil' basis. In consequence, the aspects of one's own dispositions that have to be ethically 'problematised' are precisely those things which do count as matters of 'ethical substance' in one's personal capacity as, say, an advocate for a political cause. This is an unavoidable implication of the fact that determining the ethical substance of one's action is always something one does in some particular personal capacity and in respect to some particular institutional domain of objects, concerns, activities. In other words it is a practice of ethical exclusion in respect to other domains. To the extent that someone conducts themselves entirely as a 'principled' kind of moral personality (the kind that too often likes to think it embraces all its 'fellow' ethical personae), they too are committed to treating certain things as matters of ethical indifference. In particular they are ethically released from the duty to take responsibilityfor the consequences of pursuing a principled but contested or otherwise hazardous course of action (Weber 1946). Which is why in many circumstances bureaucrats' characteristic 'failure' to do so can without sophistry be accounted an ethical and cultural feat rather than as evidence that their technical formation has got the better of their ethics. This point brings up a further implication of pluralising the characteristic comportments of officials so as to insist on their ethical as well as technically knowledgeable dimensions. Might there not be analogously circuitous relations between bureaucratic experts and their critics to those relations between authorship and the institutions of criticism picked out by Foucault? Ian Hunter's (1994) arguments on the construction of educational systems as a 'pastoral bureaucracy' exemplifies a preparedness on the part of some sections of public officialdom to welcome, negotiate with, and attempt to make use of secular-spiritual ways of conducting oneself as a principled, whole person which are often at odds with mundane state-centred purposes and methods. Similarly, German Idealist Bildung came to play a crucial role in forming sections of the late eighteenth century Prussian bureaucracy (Rosenberg 1966:82-90). It was particularly important for those whose credentials came from a university education rather than from their aristocratic pedigree, but it also came to form the basis for a broader cultural aristocracy amongst the administrative class. Understanding Kant and Fichte did not help career bureaucrats to conduct statistical investigations. But in as much as these philosophies functioned as manuals for a kind of ethical work on the self, a way of conducting oneself as an enlightened, principled type of personality, they were not without other kinds of effect. Bildung, argues Rosenberg, was a status-ethic, yet it was more than a fashion. Through it, a select minority of civil servants could acquire a heightened sense of social worth, energy, zeal for public service, and inner fortitude in the face of the rigidities and humiliations of their profession. Bildung was thus an ingredient in the political infighting between bureaucracy, the Junker aristocracy and the Kaiser and hence, for example, in the decisions of some of the self-styled
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'inner emigrants' formed through it to 'correct' the statistical information which they were given to know (Rosenberg 1966:193). From this perspective, it is no surprise to discover that celebrated Romantic writers ('Novalis', for example) earned their living as minor bureaucratic officials (Rosenberg 1966:188). Or that leading nineteenth and twentieth century administrative intellectuals and practitioners, from Lorenz von Stein to Woodrow Wilson were disciples of both Hegel and the authors of dry, pragmatic manuals of Prussian 'cameralist' Polizeiwissenschaft, such as Johann Von Justi (Kastner 1981; Wilson 1969). Another ethical persona which may be at odds with the formal-procedural habits of the administrative 'ethos of office' but which typically form a component of the 'expert-function' is a communal self-image, qua member of a 'guild'. What could be a more crucial constituent of the ethical culture of the doctor, the bureaucrat, the police officer? Officials' sense of themselves as citizens may also enter into their work. Expectation of a trackrecord in feminist activity is written into some 'femocrat' public service positions (Minson 1993:111). But even in cases where there is a place for the expression of partisan sentiments and energies in public service, it cannot be assumed that the ethical task is to harmonise partisanship with other, discordant characteristics of the official office bearer such as dispassionateness, confidentiality, or esprit de corps (Minson 1993:129-30). One problem with attempting to reconcile expert-systems and their personnel with a principled democratic republican image of a community of self-governing citizens all involved in decisions that affect their lives is neatly caught in Foucault's late interview, 'The risks of security'. The main topic was the necessity and difficulty of setting up public discussion and defensible policies of 'triage' in health services (Foucault 1986). On the one hand, some rationing of health provision is necessitated by the ever proliferating levels of demand being placed upon a finite health system. Adherence on principle to pious declarations of a universal'right to health' (eg. the best possible treatment for all who need it) only has the effect of permitting powerful sections of the medical profession (here acting no doubt in their personal capacities as members of a 'guild' rather than as servants of the state) to determine de facto, often scandalously arbitrary forms of triage. On the other hand, however desirable it may be from a democratic viewpoint, as Foucault nicely puts it, to reduce the 'decisional distance' between the sites of negotiations and decision-making and the populations subject to them, there are limits to public involvement, and hence to the possibility of public officials' giving expression to their own democratic-ethical impulses in fostering discussion. For Foucault these limits are by no means reducible to the previously mentioned sinister interests: The question that I pose is to know whether a strategy of health - this problematic of choice [ie. triage] must remain mute. Here we touch upon a paradox: this strategy is acceptable ... insofar as it is left unsaid. If it is explicit, even in the form of a more or less acceptable rationality, it becomes morally intolerable' (Foucault 1986:13).
Why? One reason is because the moral and political problems posed by triage are 'somewhat related, observing due proportion, to the right of the
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state to ask someone to die in a war' (Foucault 1986:12). 7 No matter that (independently of democratic processes, incidentally) the historical process sketched by Foucault (1980) under the name of a 'medical acculturation of the population' has made limited expertise in respect to one's own health a mark of what it is to be citizen. No matter if, as an effect of this dispersion of health consciousness and capacities, considerations of 'fairness' and 'equality' form an inevitable constituent of the comportments and calculations of patients, medical associations, and government health authorities confronted by the necessity for determining triage. We can all effortlessly agree with Foucault about the need for community consultation, so that ordinary people might have a hope of 'recognising themselves' in the decisions affecting them. Nevertheless in many circumstances the very attempt to deploy even the most fairminded rational calculations becomes a scandal when made public. One example discussed in the same interview by Foucault (which might be thought to accord with the historical trend to make members of the population responsible for their own health) would be the option of refusing access to facilities for patients with smoking-related illnesses. This option was publicly canvassed in Australia quite recently. However reasonable a proposal it might seem to be, the problems of obtaining 'public' consensus are formidable. In any case, even where democratic negotiation occurs, inevitably it must have a finite organisational form, duration and distribution. Once it is over, and decisions in favour of one policy rather than another have firmed up, eg. in law, these decisions inevitably impact upon citizens in the form of peremptory requirements. For instance, the current pariahstatus of smokers is not the result of any single one-off decision by 'the state' or 'the medical profession'. There was discussion within medical and government organisations, and between them and consumer-protection groups. Union representatives have their say. The odd radio talkback program goes to air. Tobacco-related health problems become the subject of legal actions by citizens. At a certain point, these democratic exchanges come to a halt. One day, the organisation in which one works rules that smoking shall not take place within so many feet of the building. Whether or not such decisions can be 'legitimated' is irrelevant to some people's capacity to regard them as a despotic, nanny-state imposition. 8 In such complex and intractable situations, generalised critique of medical expert government to the extent that it fails the test of democratic transparency is simply naive. So far, I have indicated ways in which elements of Foucault might be productively brought together to produce a reformulation of governmental expertise which does not revolve exclusively around the monotonous theme of ethically blind, instrumentalist, technical knowledgeability. But it is also useful to draw attention to a persistent aspect of Foucauldian argument on governmental expertise, which in spite of itself comes close to doing just that and to that extent invites being hailed as a supplement to existing socialtheoretical critique. For instance, Nikolas Rose (1993:9) defines the object of a genealogy as 'the birth of experts in the conduct of conduct whose capacity to govern the self-steering mechanisms of others is grounded in a claim to
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positive knowledge - in the sciences of the human individual rather than logics of faith'. No doubt this is an important line of development. Certainly the definition is perfectly in keeping with one of the main trajectories of Foucault's genealogical studies. Does not the first volume of The History of Sexuality, subtitled, remember, The Will to Know, trace the migration of sexual confession from the institutional auspices of religion to those of science? The question is whether this is the only significant trajectory, whether it is appropriate, for instance, to trace the family tree of homosexual identity to the pronouncements of sexologists, with barely a mention of its cultivation within literary and artistic circles. What about the possible impacts of the sorts of sensibility cultivated in such circles on the development of scientia sexualis? Is not it worth qualifying the tendency to link sexual expertise's authority to the clinical rather than the chthonic, to a rationalisation as distinct from a certain emotionalisation, or indeed respiritualisation, of sexual life in secular forms? Allied to this tendency is the association of governmental expertise with an implicitly dubious depoliticisation: 'Experts hold out the hope that problems of regulation can remove themselves from the disputed terrain of politics and relocate onto the tranquil yet seductive territory of truth' (Miller and Rose 1992:188). If by 'depoliticisation' is meant attempts to transform tumultuous political conflicts over power and values into supposedly technical matters to be quietly adjudicated and resolved by experts, then three things have to be said. First, 'depoliticisation' may in some areas be a misnomer for a process better described in terms of a shift from' democratic' politicsto'governmental'politics. 9 Second,itmayormaynotbethecasethat depoliticisation of issues (where it does imply a government/politics distinction) is 'a good thing'. Third, depoliticisation may well involve bracketing of questions of truth as a condition of exerting its 'tranquilising' effects. Genealogies of expertise organised around its will to truth are quick to point out that expert systems of calculation and administration have never been innocent of political motives and values. In the case of modem insurance, for instance, it is noted how participative precursors of modem insurance such as trade union sickness funds ' ... provided a base for workers' organisations, served as a resource for the creation of collective identities and, the mobilisation of members for ... strikes' (Miller and Rose 1992:197). How then can we deny that the modem insurance systems which displaced these earlier, 'popular' forms are an example of a politics (a bearer of political values and aims) that pretends to be a-political by parading itself under the mantle of 'rational knowledge'? Let us set aside the historical question of whether such an argument moves too quickly to posit a political cause-and-effect relationship, instead of investigating the technical capacity of the old friendly societies and the like to meet their members' needs. For present purposes, the key question is a conceptual one. Is the trajectory from explicitly ethico-political practices and problematisations to technical ones not based on an unsustainable polarisation between'ethical' and 'scientifico-technical' registers? Certainly this view of the raison d'etat for expert systems in government is not
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confirmed in all Foucauldian work on 'the insurantial'. Take Jacques Donzelot's(1984:128-140)argumentontheemergenceofinsurantialreasoning and systems as a solution to the problem of industrial accidents. To be sure, Donzelot's point is that industrial conflict and its various consequences (strikes, legal suits) are, as Miller and Rose put it, 'de-dramatised', by transposing the issue into a technical question- couched in 'the relative and homogenising language of statistics' - of how best to spread the risks and costs involved in both treating and avoiding industrial accidents. However, lest we jump too quickly to conclusions, Donzelot adds that the effect of this 'socialisation of risk' (1979:139) is to marginalise 'the question of assigning responsibility for the origin of social evils' (cited Miller and Rose 1992:197; cf. also Donzelot 1979:131). Hence, far from confirming a scientific-knowledge-centred line on expertise, Donzelot's argument on industrial insurance suggests that its emergence is predicated upon a displacement of one expert system of conflict resolutionbyanother.Further,themodusoperandioftheinsurantialstrategy, it could be argued, involves removing the issue away from rather than onto 'the territory of truth'. That is to say, on the one hand, the introduction of insurance systems provides an alternative to what was hitherto the only peaceable response to industrial accidents stemming from unsafe working conditions which was 'available' to the worker, namely to go to law. This was of course prohibitively expensive, and typically to no avail (where the courts were biased towards the employer). Or at best resort to legal action issued in damages which the employer could ill afford to meet and which threatened the continuance of the enterprise and hence the jobs of its employees (Donzelot 1979:130). Insurance offers itself as an alternative not only to militant workers' action but also to another (legal) expert-system. On the other hand, what is the raison d'etat of the insurantial approach to industrial accidents if not to displace the question (the radical political activists' and critical intellectuals' question as much as the lawyers') of who or what is truly to blame for them in favour of more pragmatic criteria and methods of decision-making? What goes for insurance and industrial accidents also applies to other chapters in the history of 'governmentality' as various as the establishment of early-modern standing armies and bureaucratically organised regimes as a means of inducing social stability in an era of inter-confessional warfare; or, to take a more specific example, the adjudicative role of doctors in determining the legality of abortions (Minson 1993:185-6). It is possible to see the role of expert knowledges as truceoriented as well as truth-oriented; ie. as driven by a rhetorical and prudential concern to find pragmatic ways out of a political impasse. In example after example, it is possible to discern the role of expertise in government as based in the procedural and ethico-rhetorical skills of the troubleshooter, negotiator or umpire rather than as purporting to cloak itself in the mantle of positive scientific objectivity. Indeed, Foucault himself insists that in some respects the 'science' deployed in the cameralistic 'policing' of populations 'carries ... an immediately pragmatic connotation, akin ... to the calculating know-howofdiplomacy'(Gordon1991:14).Myremarksarethereforenotto be construed as implying a criticism of Foucauldian perspectives on 'the will-to-know' in general.
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Notably, as should be clear from the insistent references to 'self-steering' in Nikolas Rose's formulations, the-will-to-know which drives the mentality of modern government is irreducible to a vehicle for powerful interests to create a monopoly of domineering expertise. Nor to his way of thinking is the autonomisation of clients which is the raison detre of their dependence upon experts seen as bogus, to be replaced some day by a more authentic autonomy. In the same paper cited earlier, Rose (1993:3) comments suggestively on the 'generosity' of psychological expertise. By this he refers to the active dispersion of its ways of making ourselves and our actions intelligible amongst those whom its know - how is designed to help. Moreover, a salutary critical target of Rose's project for 'a critical sociology of freedom' is the privileging of autonomy over other governing values. What do you want from public servants or your doctor? It is difficult, for instance, to derive the virtue of dependability which, as a citizen and patient, I expect from a doctor or a public servant from theprogressiveneo-Kantian 'master-value' of socially responsible autonomy. The virtue (including the dignity) of public service as a form of self-subordination to a political order which is only democratic within limits becomes virtually unsayable in polite ('enlightened') company. But it seems to me that in order to push the problematisation of government through- freedom further it may be necessary to question whether this 'liberal' rubric is the name of the modern governmental game in general. In any event, one effect of my attempt to reformulate the status of governmentrelated expertise using diverse elements of Foucault's work is to expose a series of problems and imprecisions in the thematics of governmentality which flow out of this tendency to identify expertise with a will to truth, especially where this is oriented towards knowledge of the self with a view to making it(self) more autonomous. An example of one such imprecision is Foucault's (1981) characterisation of governmentality in terms of a 'pastoral' power, as involving a 'shepherdsheep game' as distinct from a 'city-citizen' game of constitutions, social contract phantasies, legal entitlements, elections, etc. Consider the following passage from Ben Jonson's Discoveries, a direct paraphrase of Justus Lipsius's late sixteenth century and seventeenth century best-seller, Six Books of Politics or Civil Doctrine. It belongs to the genre of advice to princes, in this case, concerning the exercise of moderation in fiscal policy: 'A prince', writes Jonson, 'is the pastor of the people. He ought to sheer not to flay his sheep, to take their fleeces not their foals' (cited Evans 1992:86). Perhaps there is progress after all! However, the serious point of this exemplification of the part played by the metaphor of pastorship in the genealogy of modern governance is to register the disconnection between the worldly expertise of the taxation office and spiritual pastoral direction. Tax policies may indeed represent a case of governmental action at a distance. They may well link up at some points, by no means all, with low level forms of conscientious selfdiscipline (eg. keeping receipts, making financial life plans). But at the level of the ethical competences required, the 'self' that is implicated in such governance is only tangentially connected to that equally specialised, equally technical form of ethical self which forms the object of perfectionist quests
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for wholeness, spiritual meaning and fulfilment. My shepherd is not always my Lord (or my true self). So, in as much as the Foucauldian thematics of liberal governmentality are ordered around a conception of the population as a 'pastorate', it must be asked whether this thematics does not run the risk of exaggerating the extent to which mundane government and the pastoral direction of the self by the self are inseparable. To do so is a recipe for investing the study of governmentality with the tincture of generalised social critique, since in questioning 'governing through freedom' we seem to be touching on the logic of modern 'liberal' governmentality itselfand what 'we' are or could be. To exaggerate the 'liberal' pedigree of governmentality is also to lose the sense of a continuing intractable and not always undesirable disjunction between the more pragmatic, state centred aspects of the shepherd-flock game and the more idealistic republican city-citizen game.lO It is also to ignore the Reformation origins of republican self-government- ie. to miss the spiritual-pastoral components of the citizen-citizen game itself. This all-toobrief allusion to the secular-spiritual/perfectionist/fantasy dimensions of 'democratisation' and the like points to a challenge to which a suitably modified Foucauldian thematics of governmentality might be able to rise. The challenge is to understand the curiously disembodied reincarnation oftherevolutionaryrepublicanidealincontemporarylife-regulation.Itisas if, consigned to the junkyard of history in terms of any pretensions to being a viable program for a modern pluralistic and commercial state, bits and pieces of the radical, leftist, communitarian-cum-participatory republican vision have become, as it were, the stock in trade of 'spiritual' scrap merchants, whose revivalist customers now include everyone from private corporations, the military, headmasters and church leaders, the mainstream political parties, to the radical fringes of political culture. The hunch on which I conclude is that in order to put this phenomenon in perspective we need to explore the pastoral-spiritual as well as the political-philosophical roots of republican and anti-individualistic traditions, for instance the 'covenantalist' component of Puritan or Congregationalist government in the early days of white North American settlement (Miller 1991). Not the least interesting avenue of investigation would be the question of how peculiar, how unportable are the conditions under which the expertises associated with spiritual direction and 'running' a township, city, a hospital-system, a nation-state can enjoy a close and comfortable relationship. 1
Many of the points made in this paper are indebted to discussion with three of my colleagues at Griffith University, David Saunders, Denise Meredyth, and Ian Hunter.
2
See, for instance, Dreyfus and Rabinow (1982) or the latter's Introduction to Rabinow (1984:14ff). The sinister aspect in which modern ways of exercising power take on in this reading is partly based in Foucault's own way of framing the phenomena of governmentality, the disciplines, etc. in terms of a double
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movement of 'individualisation' and 'totalisation' procedures and the subjectification-objectification couple. 3
A lot of the more supportive feminist reception of Foucault's work goes down such a track, eg. Butler (1990); McNay (1992).
4
One could of course reach for Weber at this point, even though his construction of the administrative ethos is not without its own share of neo-Kantian baggage (Hunter 1994:148).
5
For a parallelline of reasoning see Amelie Rorty' s (1988:1-98) attempt to pluralise the concept of the person, including its affective and morali-psychological components.
6
Is there a more intelligently and sympathetically portrayed bureaucrat in the entire history of cinema? This character and his office are dedicated to the thankless but scarcely heartless work of identifying the Word War One war-dead and locating and informing their relatives of their loved ones' whereabouts. The marvellous 'governmental-political' anti-war joke on which the first part of the film revolves is his technical and moral incapacity to comply with his political masters' request to deliver up an unidentified corpse for the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. There is no such soldier, he maintains, no one whose identity and relatives cannot be traced by the bureau. The intelligibility of the joke depends, in effect, on positing a disjunction between bureaucrats as agents of 'govemmentality' and the nothing-if not 'responsive' democratic politicians (here, bent on constructing war as an object of glorious nostalgia). I thank David Saunders for drawing my attention to this film.
7
A comparison which, one might add, is all the more appropriate in the light of the military origins of 'triage'. According to Baker and Strosberg (1992) it was first used by the surgeon-general in Napoleon's army. Interestingly, triage was effected on the basis of neither the rank ofthe injured, nor how readily they could be patched up and returned to the front, but on the eminently egalitarian basis of the seriousness of the injury and the possibility of medical action being effective.
8
Essentially Ian Hunter made the point of this paragraph to me in conversation.
9
These days you would be hard put to find anyone in discussions on the nature of public administration (at least in Australia or the US) who does not accept that public servants are to a degree part ofthe public policy process (Parker 1993). The ethical question is how to ensure discretionary powers are exercised responsibly in the public interest, not the elimination of such powers.
10 Here we touch upon a key limitationofconceptualisingmodern govemmentality as essentially liberal: namely, the impossibility of acknowledging the abiding currency and ehtico-politicallegitimacy of raison d'etat thinking as part of the corportment, calculations and pronouncements of responsible administrators and politicians in democratic states. In other words, pace Gordon (1991:15-6), raison d'etat is not mortgaged to 'Absolutism', ie. to the political rationality of preliberat cameralistic 'polic' states.lt is only within definite zones of contemporary thought that raison d'etat legitimations for public policy are invariably problematic (Hunter 1994). Nor are all the ways of advocating limits to state action necessarily best understood as grounded in a 'liberal' problematisation of government (Hunter 1993). The guild-mentality driving doctors' defence oftheir autonomy in the face of government measures to increase access to hospital services might be an example.
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Bibliography Baker, R. and Strosberg, M. (1992). 'Triage and equality: an historical reassessment of utilitarian analyses of triage', Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 11(2):1, 3-23. Brown, P. (1988). The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, London: Faber. __ _, (1992). Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire, Madison, Wise: University of Wisconsin Press. Burchell, G., Gordon, C. and Miller, P. (eds) (1991). The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, London: Harvester. Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, London: Routledge. Donzelot, J. (1979). 'The poverty of political culture', I&C, 5:73-86. __ _, (1984). L'lnvention du Social: Essai sur Le Declin des Passions Politiques, Paris: Fayard. Dreyfus, H. and Rabinow, P. (1982). Michel Foucault Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Evans, R.C. (1992). Jonson, Lipsius and the Politics of Renaissance Stoicism, Wakefield, NH: Longwood Academic. Foucault, M. (1969). 'Qu'est-ce qu'un auteur?', Bulletin de la Societe Franr;aise de la Philosophie, LXIV:73-104. __ _, (1972). The Archaeology of Knowledge, London: Tavistock. __ _, (1978). The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: The Will to Know, Harmondsworth: Penguin. __ _, (1980). 'The politics of health in the eighteenth century', in Gordon, C. (ed.) Power/Knowledge, Harvester Press. __ _, (1981). 'Omnes et singulatim: towards a critique of political reason', in S.M. McMurrin (ed.) The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. __ _, (1986). 'The risks of security: a discussion between Michel Foucault and Robert Bono', History of the Present, Spring issue, pp.4-14. __ _, (1988). 'The functions ofliterature',in L. Kritzman (ed.)Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture. Interviews and Other Writings 1977-1984, London. __ _, (1992). The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality, Vol.2, Harmondsworth: Penguin. __ _, (1992a). The Care of the Self The History of Sexuality, Vol. 3, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Gordon, C. (1991 ). 'Governmental rationality: an introduction' in Burchell et al. (eds) The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, London: Harvester. Hunter, I.H. (1993). 'In what sense is liberal government liberal?' Unpublished manuscript. __ _, (1994). Rethinking the School, Sydney: Allen and Unwin. McNay, L. (1992). Foucault and Feminism, Cambridge: Polity. Miller, J. (1991). 'Direct democracy and the Puritan theory of membership', Journal
of Politics, LIII,l.
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Miller, P. and Rose, N. (1992). 'Political power beyond the state: problematics of government', BJS, 43(2):173-205. Minson, J. (1993). Questions of Conduct, London: Macmillan. Parker, R.S. (1993). TheAdministrative Vocation, Sydney: Hale and Iremonger. Rabinow, P (ed.) (1984). The Foucault Reader, New York: Pantheon Books. Rorty, A. (1988). Mind in Action: Essays in the Philosophy of Mind, Boston, Mass.: Boston. Rose, N. (1993). 'Expertise and the government of conduct', unpublished ms. __ _, (1992). 'Towardsacriticalsociologyoffreedom',Inaugurallecture,Goldsmiths College, University of London. Rosenberg, H. (1966). Bureaucracy, Aristocracy and Autocracy: The Prussian Experience 1660-1815, Boston, Mass: Beacon Press. Weber,M.(1946).'Politicsasavocation'inH.H.GerthandC.W.Mills(eds)FromMax Weber, London: Routledge. Wilson, W. (c. 1891-94, 1969). 'Notes for lectures at the Johns Hopkins', in A.S. Link (ed.) The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Vol.7, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Computers and Govemmentality in Australia's Department of Social Security
Paul!l{enman Michel Foucault introduced the concept of governmentality to describe and analyse the way government is thought and practised: who or what is governed, through what practices and to what ends government is practised. 'Governmentality' provides a significant advance over the idea of the Stateasawayofthinkingaboutmoderngovernance.IndevelopingFoucault's notion, Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose argue that governmentality is constituted by 'political rationalities' and 'technologies of government' where the former provide the framework for the elaboration of programs of government and the latter provide the means for their 'translation into the domain of reality' (1990:8). How technologiesmightimpactupon political rationalities is not well explored in discussions on governmentality. My recent study of computer use in Australia's Department of Social Security (DSS) provides a useful empirical basis for exploring how technologies and technological artefacts, in particular computers, impact on ideas about government. In order to develop an analysis of the effects of computer use on practices of and ideas about government, I will first present Foucault's conception of governmentality and Miller and Rose's subsequent advancement of this notion. This will be followed by a discussion of the ways in which computers are used in the DSS and the consequences of such use on policy and policy processes. Finally, these observations will be used to suggest more widespread changes to the object of government, the operation of government and the way government is thought.
Foucault's concept of govemmentality Late in his career Foucault, in a number of mainly unpublished lectures, developed the idea of governmentality which he employed to analyse modern political government (see Foucault 1991; 1982; 1981; cf. Gordon 1991; Smart 1985:121-132). 'Governmentality' - or the 'art of government' or 'governmental rationality'2 - is summarised by Colin Gordon as: 'a way or system of thinking about the nature of the practice of government (who can govern; what governing is; what or who is governed), capable of making some form of that activity thinkable and practicable both to its practitioners and to those upon whom it was practised' (1991:3). Whilst this definition clearly indicates the important discursive nature of governmentality, it also includes practices, technologies and institutions (Foucault 1991:102). Miller and Rose have developed Foucault's notion of governmentality to further assist its application to the analysis of governance. Governmentality, they argue, consists of political rationalities and technologies ofgovernment. The former include: the changing discursive fields within which the exercise of power is conceptualised, the moral justifications for particular ways of exercising power by
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diverse authorities, notions of the appropriate forms, objects and limits of politics, and conceptions of the proper distribution of such tasks among secular, spiritual, military and familial sectors (Rose and Miller 1992:175).
The latter are made up of a 'complex of mundane programs, calculations, techniques, apparatuses, documents and procedures through which authorities seek to employ and give effect to governmental ambitions'. 'Technologies of government' may also manifest themselves as personal selfregulating techniques or governmental practices of the self. Indeed, rationalities of government may articulate what the self is, the proper role of the self in society, and to what goals the self is to aspire. Drawing from his historical survey, Foucault argues that modern liberal forms of governmentality rely on practices which, in Miller and Rose's term, enable 'government at a distance' in order to appear not to be intervening in the private sphere and certain elements of society, such as 'the economy'. For this, 'scientific' 'discourses of truth' play an important role. Consequently, experts, who are seen to be independent of the State, play an essential role in maintaining these 'discourses of truth' and therefore the ability to govern at a distance (Rose and Miller 1992:187-9; Miller and Rose 1990:14-23). Through an analysis of my investigations of computer use and policy processes in the DSS, I wish to address the following questions. First, in what ways are computers governmental technologies, how does their use support, intensify and extend other governmental technologies, and what new governmental technologies are made possible by computer use? Second, in what ways does computer use influence political rationalities, how does computer use support, intensify and extend already present political rationalities, and what new political rationalities do computers make possible?
Computers, policy and the DSS Computers are essential to the operation of the DSS which has the largest computer network in Australia. The computers' relationship with policy in the DSS is wide and varied. Firstly, and perhaps most obviously, computers implement DSS policy. Computers are thus a 'technology of government' for they implement 'programs of government' (ie. policy) which arise from 'political rationalities'. But, as Miller and Rose observe, technologies do not unproblematically implement governmental programs: 'technologies ... produce their own difficulties, fail to function as intended, and sometimes intersect poorly with the rationalities in terms of which their role is conceived' (1990:14). This is certainly true of the experience of computer use in the DSS. For instance, the introduction on 1 January 1993 of a new familyrelated payment (known as Family Integration) on a newly developed computer system was accompanied by major computer problems. These technical problems generated unnecessary work for staff and, to this day, over one hundred 'work arounds' are employed by staff in order to do their job. Besides failing technologies, other technologies and governmental programs may need to be aligned or configured to achieve operation. In the case of Family Integration much of the problem was the communication of various computer systems each with different technical and structural qualities.
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Related to the implementation of policy, computers are also used to automate policy. For instance, computer systems automatically calculate the rate of entitlement from available information, automatically cancel a client's benefit if certain conditions are not fulfilled, and automatically check for overpayments and inform the client (via a computer-generated letter) and the DSS. Interestingly, the Federal government was forced to amend the Social Security Act to legally enable computers to make decisions on the Department's behalf. In the use of computers for compliance, computers protect policy from abuse. Here, all new DSS applicants are scrutinised by accelerated computer matching to ensure that the claimant is not already receiving benefits. Computers also automatically generate reviews of clients on group riskbased criteria (which may have been derived from computer generated statistics) and may involve sending computer-generated letters which require client confirmation. Additionally, on a specialised computer the Datamatching Program matches DSS client data with data from various government departments. Computers help monitor policy. Here the generation of volumes of statistics plays an important role. The Department produces many publications at various time intervals, listing such things as the number of people receiving each benefit with breakdowns on items like sex and rate of benefit, movements in numbers, and the money spent on each benefit. Such statistics are then available to outside welfare and policy observers and for use in answering Parliamentary questions. This helps ensure that policy is scrutinised. Hence, computers also assist in the evaluation of policy. Finally, computers model policy options. Models range from sophisticated spreadsheets, to hypothetical models based on DSS client data, to models based upon Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) household data. Those models based on ABS data are able to assess the impact of proposed policy on the entire Australian population, rather than on the DSS client population only. Many models incorporate Australian Taxation Office rules, as well as social security rules, in order to embrace the complex interactions between the social security and tax systems. Through a variety of methods, all of these models estimate the financial cost to, or savings for, the government of such policies. Various models also indicate the numbers and groups of people affected by a proposed policy change, how they are to be affected (advantaged or disadvantaged), and by how much they are to be affected. Additionally, some of the models are useful for detecting poverty traps and those most 'at risk'. Modelling numerous variations of a proposed policy enables the policy to be refined to achieve the politically desired policy effects. What might be the consequences of this complex of computer use and policy? In answering this question one should first note that computer use may not be the only thing affecting the identified policy or departmental change. Most policy or bureaucratic directions result from a myriad of interlocking technologies, practices and discourses. In making the observation, I am arguing that computer technology plays a significant role in the changes. I identify thirteen broad policy or departmental changes to which computers contribute.
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Policy is implemented more efficiently. There can be no doubt that computers have increased the client to DSS staff ratio, decreased the processing time of new client applications, made client payments quicker, and enabled clients to be administratively transferred more quickly and easily when they move interstate. Policy can be administered differently. With computers, new forms of administration are possible. For example, computers enable datamatching as a process of compliance, enable automatic electronic payments direct to client bank accounts, calculate the rate of payment to a client, and enable determination of client eligibility to be made automatically. Computers change the 'landscape ofpossibility' ofpolicy. Because computers can provide more efficient support for policy and are able to implement more complex formally-defined policy than perhaps would be possible with a human-only administration new policy options are' opened up'. Computerisation increases surveillance. Data-matching between government departments, accelerated computer matching and periodic reviews are all examples of computer-supported surveillance techniques. Computers also monitor how DSS staff use DSS computers. Computerisation creates a reliance on computer systems. In employing computers for a greater number and more difficult tasks than would have been possible without computers, the DSS has developed a dependence on computers and is therefore vulnerable to new dangers or risks related to computer failure. For example, whilst computers have enabled the efficient production of client advices, there have been huge public outcries when printing errors have resulted in clients receiving other clients' personal information. Computerisation increases quantification. The fundamental basis of electronic digital computers means that computers are more suited to and adept at quantitative rather than qualitative tasks. Consequently, a widespread use of and reliance upon computers leads to a focus on quantification, whereby only questions are asked which can be answered quantitatively or questions are answered by ill-fitting quantitative responses. This increased focus on quantification can be observed in the proliferation of performance indicators, management information and statistics, which are an increasing feature of DSS operation. Policy becomes more universalised. 3 Instead of having a more-or-less universal policy in which special cases are dealt with by discretion, handling of special cases become more and more formalised and the latitude for discretionary decisions is progressively reduced. For example, the situations in which the DSS can waiver debts to the Department is now fully prescribed in the Act: all discretionary elements have been removed. Consequently, policy is applied more uniformly. As discretionary elements are reduced and people are subject to more universal rules, uniformity, of both treatment and decisions, is likely to be increased. There are indeed moves to computerise decision making processes further using 'expert systems' so that decisions are more uniformly
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made (Schell1991). 4 Also, people may be more likely to be 'made' more uniform by DSS staff: instead of regarding clients with unique needs as 'exceptions' to be considered under discretionary provisions, their circumstances are made to fit, where possible, the available policy requirements. 9. Policy and administration become more 'rationalised'. A number of the above observations (particularly points one, six and seven) are related to elements of a computer's fundamental makeup or'embodied worldview' which may be collected under the rubric of 'rationality'. Other elements of the world-view embodied in computers which may manifest themselves in policy and/ or departmental administration include a functionalistic approach to policy and its implementation and a focus on process rather than content. Although the rationalisation ofbureaucracies is a well studied sociological theme, the role of computers in entrenching, extending and exaggerating this process must be seriously considered. Indeed, labelling the computer as a 'tool of rationalisation' helps draw attention to the perhaps crucial role computers have played in the rationalisation of organisations in the second half of the twentieth century. 10. Policy becomes more complex. This is due both to the ability of computers to easily implement formally-defined procedures (ie. policy) and to the ability of computer models to explore, and therefore refine, complex policy proposals. Additionally, the reduction of discretion in increasingly universalised policies (point seven), which try to formalise the whole spectrum of human experience, also leads to more complex policy. 11. Policy becomes more targeted. This results both from the ability to implement complex policy options and from making policy which seeks to address issues of poverty and disadvantage in a period of economic restraint.S For example, income and assets tests have been instituted and lowered, young and single unemployed people have experienced reductions in support relative to those with families, and special incentives have been introduced to encourage sole parents and disabled people to seek employment. Such policy directions encourage further complexity of policy. Indeed, this is most evident when government introduces new policy with the condition that 'no one currently in the system will be disadvantaged'. For this to occur, the department needs to establish 'saved groups' wherein those clients already in the system continue to be treated under old policy rules, while people newly entering the system are treated under new policy rules. 12. Consequently, the economic basis of policy decisions increases. When departmental policy change must be budget neutral and politicians want to target a particular group of people for increases in social security support, another group must be created and identified from which to divert that money. The latter receive reduced financial support for no other reason than to balance the books and because they are seen as 'less worthy' than others. This is particularly evident in the treatment of young people under 18 and under 21 both in unemployment and educational support.
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13. Through various activities new groups are created. The previous point illustrates how new groups are created and then labelled as either 'worthy' or 'less worthy' poor. Also, computer models may indicate poverty traps, thereby contributing to the definition of groups caught in those traps. In addition, computer produced and analysed statistics help to construct new groups or alter the definition of groups. For example, when a large percentage of the unemployed are long-term unemployed, there is political pressure to change the definition oflongterm unemployment, as it is not politically desirable to have long-term unemployment being the average experience of unemployed people. Thus the statistical mean, rather than anything else, becomes the standard and the basis for determining 'reality' (cf. Hacking 1975, 1991 ), thus reflecting a focus upon quantification (point six). Computer supported statistics may also 'reveal' 'at risk' groups, such as those who are more likely to experience long-term unemployment, incur overpayments or attempt welfare fraud. In doing so, a risk is specified and the characteristics and the archetypal personality accompanied with that risk are defined. As new groups are created (or identified) they become problematised as a focus for governance. In Miller and Rose's language, the construction of groups is an element of intellectual technologies and is therefore part of the discourses which constitute political rationalities. A study of Australia's Department of Social Security reveals the centrality of computers for the development and administration of Departmental policy. Further, a number of policy and bureaucratic directions can be related to computer use. Indeed, policy is administered differently and more efficiently and policy becomes more universalised, complex and targeted. Most interestingly, in the creation of new groups which result from computer use, intellectual technologies are expanded and new areas of governance are problematised. The next section will draw on these observations to explore more broadly how computers effect governmentality.
Computers and govemmentality What are the connections between computer use and governmentality? Clearly, computers are a 'technology of government', and a technology which has profound effects. As such it interacts with other technologies of government, such as bureaucratic procedures and statistics. In doing so, computers may entrench or exaggerate older forms of governmental technologies: bureaucratic procedures become more complex and statistics become the basis for much computer use. Further, new forms of government technologies, such as data-matching for surveillance purposes, are spawned. Computers also contribute to 'political rationalities'. In particular, the creation of new groups (point thirteen above) contributes to 'intellectual technologies' and thereby provides new regions to be problematised as arenas for governance. Experts enable modern liberal governments to 'govern at a distance' (Rose and Miller 1992:187-9; 1990:14-23). With the importance of computers to contemporary government, computer experts have emerged as new players in shaping policy. Also, as computer models embody knowledge from other disciplines, such as econometrics, comput-
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ers reinforce the role of those experts in governance. Further, the computer itself emerges as a new expert, apparently neutral, objective and rational. The governance of individuals through the development of self-regulatory practices or practices of the self also enables 'government at a distance' (Rose 1988; Miller and Rose 1990:23-7; Dean 1993). Computers have made it possible to increase the frequency of reviews, including unemployment activity tests, thereby intensifying clients' need to attend to themselves in order to live according to DSS requirements. Increased targeting of policy, made possible by computers, has meant that clients have had to pay more attention to such things as investments, income and assets. Computers have meant that the DSS has been more capable in storing and assessing pensioners' investment portfolios. This has enabled the DSS to further target policy in order to save money. Such policies as assuming a minimum interest rate on banked money and deeming unrealised capital gains of shares as income have required pensioners to more rigorously tend to their financial investments. This is clearly an extension and intensification of the self-tending homo economicus (Gordon 1991:43£). The importance of statistics for modern forms of governmentality has been identified by a number of authors, including Foucault (Foucault 1991:96,99££; 1982:252; Hacking 1991, 1975; Rose 1991). There can be no doubt that computers play an important role in the production, distribution, analysis and proliferation of statistics. However, the above discussion regarding the definition of long-term unemployment illustrates how statistics come to constitute reality. When reality is read through statistics, technically derived numbers become divorced from people's lived realities. Anne Harding provides an illustration of this in her 1993 paper which argues that the number of people living in poverty has been greatly overestimated through a combination of technical argument and mathematical manipulation. In one statistical recalculation, the numbers of people 'living in poverty' can be immediately reduced by thousands. Such statistics are used in political debates to justify or criticise government policies. Computers have certainly helped to intensify these political discourses. The idea of 'risk' has also been identified as a 'technico-discursive instrument' of government (Castel1991; Ewald 1991; see also Beck 1992). As we have seen, computers support and build on this notion. Computer data and analyses assist in identifying 'risk' groups: those 'at risk' of long-term unemployment, of raising (unintentional) over-payments and of welfare fraud. These conceptions of risk are then used to justify surveillance and disciplinary techniques (usually supported by computers) to protect the integrity of the social security system or to protect clients from themselves. Beyond these identifications of computers with governmentality, the use of computer modelling provides a new space for the' art of government': the future. Whilst formal models of the world are not new (eg. Newton's or Einstein's laws of the physical world, or mathematics-based economic models), computer-supported models provide the means for a qualitatively different use of such models. Whereas previous models are held to have predictive power, the computerisation of models enable complex interactions to be played out, examined and analysed in far greater detail than was
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previously possible. Computer models thereby enable the Government to consider, think about, problematise and manipulate future policy scenarios. For instance, with respect to social security and taxation policy, policy makers can experiment with variables such as cut-offs of income and assets tests, age cut-offs, levels of payment, taper rates and multiple tapers, tax thresholds, levels of tax rebates, and rates and levels of income tax and the Medicare levy, and compare transferable versus non-transferable tax rebates. What before was mostly impenetrable becomes thinkable (despite the fact that it is often quite difficult to work out why a given modelled change gave a certain result). What was once obstinate becomes pliable and fluid. No longer is policy set in concrete, it becomes open and renegotiable. Consequently, the 'future' becomes problematised. It is, of course, not true that the 'future' was not previously problematised6 - for the programmatic nature of governance implies a programming of the future, and Ewald (1991) argues that (social) insurance is a way of 'disciplining the future'- but with the advent of computer modelling profound changes and opportunities emerge. At no other time, could the complex interplay of tax and social security systems be thought, and therefore become problematised, in the same way as it now can be. Nor could the future be thought so far in advance with such 'clarity' and detail. Computer models therefore 'constitute new sectors of reality and make new aspects of existence practicable' (Rose 1988:184). Thus, with the use of computer models the future emerges as a new field to govern. In governing the future, computer models are therefore important both for constituting political rationalities and as governmental technologies in their own right. Computer models enable 'government at a distance' through' discourses of truth' and experts. They implement models developed in and therefore sustained by other discourses of truth: economic models embody the 'scientific' discourse of economics. Experts associated with these discourses therefore help to validate the corresponding computerised discourses. Also, a discourse accompanied by experts has emerged which deals with the issues of constructing and using computer models. Finally, the computer itself is seen as an expert speaking the 'truth'- it can never be wrong, it is the ultimate in 'objectivity'. The problematisation and governance of the future is not just a concern of the state. To govern the future effectively governments must irtstitute programs which require individuals to govern their own future. Thus, the problematisation of the future occurs also at the individual level where selfregulating techniques are used to govern one's own future. These elements are particularly evident with regard to the question of retirement income, superannuation and insurance. No longer is planning for the future the privileged domain of the wealthy, but it is a legislative requirement for all workers. Recent years have seen a proliferation of financial techniques which seek to provide good government of one's future. One must problematise one's own future in order to accurately assess, govern and plan for one's future, and to reduce future financial costs to the state. A number of outcomes of this emerging aspect of governmentality can be identified. Firstly, policy goals can be extended further into the future. Consequently, policy may be developed which sacrifices the present in
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order to meet long term goals. Instead of focusing upon what is desirable now, present policy becomes a means directed towards a (desirable) future end. As a result, our present becomes problematised as a technical question to be addressed by the expertise associated with computer models. Thus, political debate becomes technical rather than values-based. A technical politics based on contestations about statistics is extended to a technical politics based on contestations about computer models. In Australia, this is no better illustrated than by the political debates of 1991 to 1993 regarding the various computer models of both the Federal Opposition's Fightback! policy package and the government's One Nation package. Computer models accordingly provide political power. They are seen to provide an' oracle' to foresee the future- but they actually constitute the future rather than see or read it. Those contestants who do not have a computer model or who have a less sophisticated model must give way to those with the model perceived to be the most sophisticated. This power play certainly occurs between the DSS which can computer model DSS policy, and the Department of Finance, which doesn't have a similar computer model. A politics may consequently develop which expends energy in constructing an appearance that one's own computer model is more sophisticated than one's opponents. Or, if one's opponents do not have a computer model, one may highlight this fact in order to appear more sophisticated. However, there are disadvantages associated with the use of computer models. Precise modelling of policies opens them up to more detailed scrutiny and criticism. Accordingly, modelling may show results contrary to expectations or, more importantly, may make real for others the apparent implications of particular policies. This is evident again in the politics surrounding the Federal Opposition's Fightback! package: some quarters perceive that the precise detailing of their policy undid their electoral chances. Regardless, there remains a question as to whether the public will accept policies seen to be developed by computerised modelling. Indeed, Prime Minister Paul Keating chose to exploit any such public concern in his 1993 election campaign speech. Labor's plan, he argued, involves a 'change not shaped by a computer model or a textbook, but bedded in reality and commonsense' (1993:4). The widespread use of computers by governments indicates that the possible effects of computer use on practices of and ideas about government go beyond Australia's DSS. Computers are a 'technology of government' and their use generates new discursive items which affect 'political rationalities'. Computer use is associated with 'experts'- indeed the computer itself is an expert- and produces changes in self-regulating practices of government. Thus computers contribute to 'government at a distance'. Further, computers solidify, extend and exaggerate discourses of statistics and of 'risk'. Computer models have also opened up a new area of government: the future and intellectual technologies, experts and self-regulating practices related to the governance of the future have emerged.
Conclusion The DSS has proven a fruitful site for examining how the use of computers effects governance. It is clear that computer technologies combine with a
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myriad of other technologies and discourses to enable, shape and change modern government. Computers solidify, extend and intensify already present aspects of governmentality. Perhaps more than any other area, the problematisation of the future by computer use precipitates qualitative changes to governmentality. For this reason, further analysis of the' governance of the future' may help us understand how governmentalities are formed, shaped and maintained- a topic which is not well analysed. For a start, the above analysis indicates that rather than simply displacing previous governmentalities, newer governmentalities build upon and coexist with older governmentalities. Analyses of how governmentalities emerge and transform and analyses which go beyond justifying, through the use of examples, the descriptive power of the notion of governmentality, should provide a better understanding of our present, our future and the ways in which we might struggle to institute more desirable forms of government. 1
The research described in this paper is part of a PhD in sociology. The work was supported by an Australian Post-Graduate Research Award. Many thanks to my supervisors, John Western and Leonn Satterthwait, for their remarks on a draft of the paper.
2
The use ofthe term 'rationality' is not to be confused with Weber's use of the term. Foucault is not arguing for a process of rationalisation, but rather pointing to particularmindsets(orphilosophies)whichmakegovemmentpossible.Loosely, Foucault's use of rationality here relates to rationale, rather than (Weber's) rational.
3
My use of 'universal' contrasts with the conception of universal versus targeted forms of welfare policy.
4
This focus was also confirmed by a computer systems manager who saw a move towards greater automation of policy.
5
Australia's welfare state has traditionally been targeted. However, targeting has significantly increased since the mid eighties.
6
For different reasons, the problem of the future is constantly a part of the media: we hear predictions about sports results, the weather, the economy and the market, and politics (who might win the election, when might that election be, what might be included in the budget, or who might be In Cabinet). For an account of the early mathematisation of the problem of the future, see Hacking (1975:Ch.13) who describeshow life annuities based on mortality rates were calculated in the seventeenth century.
Bibliography Beck, U. (1992). Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage Publications. Burchell, G., Gordon, C. and Miller, P. (eds) (1991). The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Castel, R. (1991). 'From dangerousness to risk', in Burchell et al. pp.281-98. Dean,M. (1993). 'Social Security Practices, Self-formation, and the ActiveSociety',in Saunders and Shaver, Vol. 2: Contributed Papers, pp.99-110. Donzelot, J. (1991). 'Pleasure in work', in Burchell et. al. pp.251-80. Ewald, F. (1991). 'Insurance and risk' in Burchell et al. pp.197-210. Foucault, M. (1991). 'Govemmentality', in Burchell et al. pp.87-104.
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__ _, (1982). 'The Subject and Power', in H.L. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Sussex: Harvester Press, pp.208226. __ _, (1981). 'Omnes et Singulatim: Towards a Criticism of "Political Reason"', The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, II, pp.223-54. Gordon, C. (1991). 'Governmental Rationality: An Introduction', in Burchell et al. pp.1-51. Hacking, I. (1991). 'How should we do the history of statistics?', in Burchell et al. pp.181-95. __ _, (1975), The Emergence of Probability: a philosophical study of early ideas about probability, induction and statistical inference. London and New York: Cambridge University Press. Harding, A. (1993). 'New Estimates of Poverty and Income Distribution in 1990: The Effects of Reweighting the 1990 Income Distribution Survey', in Saunders and Shaver, Vol. 2: Contributed Papers, pp.203-24. Keating, P. (1993). 'Advancing Australia: Building on Strength', Australian Labor Party Policy Speech, Bankstown, 24 February. Miller,P. andN. Rose(1990). 'Governingeconomiclife',Economyand Society, 19(1):131. Rose, N. (1991). 'Governing by numbers: figuring out democracy'. Accounting, Organisations and Society, 16(7):673-92. Rose, N. (1988). 'Calculable minds and manageable individuals'. History of the Human Sciences, 1(2):179-200. Rose, N. and Miller, P. (1992), 'Political power beyond the State: problematics of government'. British Journal of Sociology, 43(2):173-205. Saunders, P. and Shaver, S. (eds) (1993). Theory and Practice in Australian Social Policy: Rethinking the Fundamentals. Proceedings of the National Social Policy Conference, Sydney, Social Policy Research Centre, University of New South Wales, Volumes 1-3, SPRC Reports and Proceedings No. 111-13. Schell, A.J. (1991). 'The investigation and development of strategies for the improvement of quality in decision making in the Department of Social Security'. Master of Business Administration project report, Monash University. Smart, B. (1985). Michel Foucault. London and New York: Routledge.
Governing Chinese Bodies: The Significance of Studies in the Concept of Govemmentality for the Analysis of Birth Control in China
If by totalitarianism is meant total control by the state and its executives, the
officials, then it can indeed be said that Chinese society was to a high-degree totalitarian ... No private undertaking nor any aspect of public life could escape official regulation. In the first place there was a whole series of state monopolies ... But the tentacles of the State Moloch, the omnipotence of the bureaucracy, extended far beyond that. There were regulations for dress, for the dimensions of public and private buildings, for festivals, for music, for what colors to wear; regulations for birth, and regulations for death. This welfare state superintended, to the minutest detail, every step its subjects took from the cradle to the grave. It was a regime of red tape and petty fuss -yards and yards of tape and never-ending fuss (Balazs 1964:10-1). For all its oriental despotism, the traditional Chinese state at its most efficient could seldom reach the broad masses of the people directly. The individual, after paying taxes and performing certain services required by the law, had little direct contact with the state. He was cushioned in Ming and Ch'ing time by such sub county organisations as the li-chia and pao-chia, whose personnel were mostly selected and appointed by the county government, and by village and clan authorities chosen by the people themselves. While the government remained authoritarian in thought as well as in practice, the traditional saying contained a good deal of truth: 'The sky is high up and the emperor is far away' (Ho 1959:87).
Introduction Western discussion of China's one-child policy rests its analysis on the recognition of a fundamental paradox within the process of 'reform'. Whilst on the one hand social and demographic commentators acknowledge the increased autonomy in economic decision making relinquished to peasant households after decollectivisation in the early 1980s, they cannot, on the other hand, make sense of the most 'draconian birth control campaign in history' instituted at about the same time (Davis and Harrell1993:3). How is it possible, they query, that the Chinese government can create the conditions conducive to market autonomy and yet, concomitantly, insist on intervening in the most 'private' aspects of human and social reproduction? Where is the logic, they ask, in loosening the screws in one area and yet tightening them in another? For such forms of analysis the market and authoritarian forms of government cannot coexist without considerable friction and contradiction. This paper will argue that part of the problem for conventional Western Sinological analysis of this apparent paradox can be traced to certain theoretical presuppositions. That is, it draws too heavily from on a concep-
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tion of the rights and capacities of the autonomous subject. That is to say, these analyses presuppose a pregiven and clearly marked division between state and society; good government fosters mechanisms to cultivate and protect individual autonomy not means for promoting intervention. Hence, in an era of 'reform and openness', highly interventionist fertility control remains an unexplained anomaly. This paper will attempt to distance itself from conceptual juxtapositions such as state and society by arguing that we can go some way to' explaining' such contradictions by referring to the emergence of a specific form of governmental reasoning in China that holds the reproductive autonomy of peasant households and the commodity market, not as natural givens- the reality of which has always been apparent- but as transient conditions in the march towards higher levels of social production. There is no concept here of a distance between government and the operation of individual and market autonomy that we find in liberal governmental rationalities. On the contrary, the latter are artefacts which cry out for intervention, especially for the scientific guidance of Chinese Marxism. In order to fulfil such a task, to explore ways of talking beyond the state, this paper will draw heavily from recent Foucauldian work on 'governmentality' .1 This concept will be useful in such a context because of the innovative ways in which it helps us to describe the amalgamation of a heterogeneous array of governmental technologies (ways or methods of intervening in the non-discursive world constructed bypoliticalrationalities) that work across private and public boundaries to realise, or at least attempt to realise, governmental programs (Rose 1993:286). By this means we can understand the emergence in China of a specific governmental interest in the population as characterised by certain reproductive regularities and capacities which are amenable and open to intervention. A brief genealogical approach will enable us to trace the threads of a concern with reproduction, its amalgamation with other governmental technologies and forms of reasoning, and eventual deployment within the context of the one-child policy. In so doing, we will be in a position to pose the paradoxical relation between market reform and draconian birth control in a somewhat different light- one that, hopefully, takes us some measure beyond the state-society dichotomy. However, a word of caution, the application of the analytical approach of governmentalityin a Chinese context is not without problems. Some of these difficult questions have been addressed in the work of Michael Dutton (1992) and Jeffrey Minson (1993). This paper hopes to contribute to this on going discussion as to the applicability of the concept of governmentality in other cultural and historical contexts. In this connection, it seems to me that we need to begin to understand governmentality in a number of distinct ways. I propose here to examine the application of governmentality in problematising reproduction and health in a Chinese context from two fronts. Firstly, I take the concept of governmentality to be a particular method or way of understanding the 'conduct of conduct' and the technical knowledges centred around the population. Secondly, I also understand governmentality as a specific series of historical phenomena in the West,
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particularly over the last three centuries. Is it justifiable to pose such a distinction? For the purposes of this paper I believe that it is. It will serve as a useful point of departure to begin to pose a number of questions relating to cross-cultural studies in forms of governmental reasoning. As a consequence of this approach, a number of key elements in the development of the concept of governmentality as an object of inquiry, such as Police, 'action at a distance', and expertise, need to be thoroughly scrutinised in any possible application in China. I will attempt to raise these issues in a side-by-side comparison, raising a particular aspect of the governmentality project and then referring to the Chinese case. In this manner, the paper will accumulate a number of questions or problems which will then form the body of the conclusion.
The Chinese State Historically there have been a number of different ways of thinking about forms of government in China. Despite the variety in ways of approaching the problem of government in China, most of the work is captivated by the enigma of state endurance and scope throughout Chinese history. Whilst opinions about the specific nature of the Chinese state differ, the view that the state is despotic in any case persists. Disagreement is limited to whether such despotism is a good or bad thing, and how far the tentacles of the state apparatus extend into society. For instance, as early as the European Enlightenment, Fran~ois Quesnay and other physiocrats held the Chinese bureaucracy in high esteem, and indeed, regarded it as the model of correct government. Amongst the many virtues of Chinese government the French physiocrats admired were the beneficial attitude of the Chinese emperor towards his subjects and what they saw as the welding together of authoritarian state to a market-oriented society.2 On the other hand, Montesquieu regarded the Chinese state as pure despotism in which the emperor ruled by fear alone; only the fear of losing the throne motivated the emperor to act benevolently (Perdue 1987:1-2). Whilst admiration for the Chinese state waned considerably during the eighteenth century, when commentators were increasingly critical of the ineffectiveness of the government to follow through with widespread social and economic reforms, interest in the virtues of 'Confucian' society and order has remerged around the vigorous development of East Asia's 'Little Tigers'. 3 Hence, one of the central questions in problematising forms of government in China has revolved around this question of the despotic nature of the Chinese state and the extent of its influence throughout society. As the opening quotations of this paper demonstrate, it is possible to agree on the despotic nature of Chinese government whilst differing considerably about how far government extends into society. A great deal of scholarly work in the post-Second World War period emphasised the seemingly 'totalitarian' nature of China's new' communist' society. Such work described the state as a monolithic block governing every individual in Chinese society right from the capital to the remotest village by virtue of some form of omniscient and omnipresent power .4 There is now, however, considerable agreement in the study of Chinese government that the Chinese state is not a unitary entity,
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that the Party, army and bureaucracy are all made up of diverse factions and elites. Moreover, it is acknowledged that provincial bureaus, too, have a certain degree of autonomy and flexibility in transposing and realigning central state directives (cf. Shue 1988; Schram 1985:83-4). There is also growing interest in the' spontaneous' development of Civil Society in China in recent years and similar development during the late-Qing (cf. Wakeman 1993; and Rowe 1993) Nonetheless, despite this shift in concern from the overtly totalitarian nature of the state in China to the very specific mechanisms of social control throughout Chinese society, the central theme of locating the 'natural' limits to state intervention in society remains as a significant theoretical presupposition. The theoretical and practical significance of the way in which we problematise the Chinese state is of vital importance to making sense of the process of reform. As Vivienne Shue (1988:75) sagaciously notes: 'obviously, whether we believe we are now catching the state in the act of retreat or in the act of reorganization and reconsolidation will depend largely on how we have conceived the nature and dimensions of the actual Chinese state-society relationship in the recent past'. Within this context, whilst in most cases it appears to be clear that the Chinese state is 'retreating' from overt intervention insofar as it has carried out a number of significant economic and social reforms, the Chinese government policy towards reproduction remains an anomaly. How does one explain the seemingly overt nature of the one-child policy in the light of economic liberalisation in China? Dalsimer and Nisonoff (1987:597) note that: The two current rural policies tum the concepts of 'public' and 'private' spheres on their heads. Although the new agricultural policies reinforce the private decision making of the Chinese household regarding its labor power, the policies of the one-child campaign do the opposite for its reproductive power. The new Chinese family-planning goals and strategies make childbearing a more publicly controlled decision, with publicly enforced consequences. Thus, as state intervention shrinks in one area of rural life (production), so it is expanding in another (reproduction).
As this quotation suggests, most demographic analysis still rests uneasily within the state-society dichotomy. Whereas Aird (1990) and Banister (1987) view the campaign to control fertility as simply a coercive one-way abuse of state power, Greenhalgh (1990, 1993) argues that cadres at the grass roots belong more to 'society' than to the state. This parochial allegiance with the current reproductive interests of rural farmers has led to what Greenhalgh (1993) describes as the 'peasantisation' of the one-child policy in which state objectives are watered down to better suit the aspirations of the local populace. Others have attempted to explain the nature of Chinese birth control policy in terms of the more 'group-minded' and less 'individualistic' attitudes and organisational behaviour of the Chinese people which are conducive to 'mass participation and effective government control' (Peng 1991:283). It seems to me that the way in which the state-society dichotomy is understood in the concept of governmentality offers a useful point of departure to rearticulate this apparent paradox in government policy.
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Foucault's method of examining government rationalities is a way of avoiding the 'problem of the state'. The state is seen as neither a monstrous brute or necessary and privileged institution (Rose and Miller 1992:174-5). This is not to suggest that the way in which the problem is posed in the first place is not important. Rather, we should investigate the extent to which it functions 'within political rationalities and political programs, providing them with an ethical basis and differentiating the legitimacy of varied types of governmental aspiration' (Miller and Rose 1990:8). It seems to me that the series of question posed around the nature of the state within Chinese political rationalities preclude the fruitful application of theoretical terms found within contemporary Western political science. What we need to do is to investigate ways of thinking 'beyond' the state.
Beyond the Chinese State If we take the emergence of the autonomous realm of the social as a very recent and specific historical phenomenon in the West we can begin to articulate our problem in terms other than the distinction between state and society. This is not because the social has not as yet been'discovered' or that the economic conditions for its existence are not yet mature; it simply means that the problem of the 'distance' between state and society is not yet thinkable. I believe that the themes and concerns clustered around governmentality's discussion on Police will serve as a useful point of comparison with government in the Chinese instance. Indeed, characteristics usually ascribed to Police seem to have strong parallels in both traditional and contemporary forms of government in China. For instance, the regulation mania that Pasquale Pasquino (1978:47) speaks of in relation to Police has resonances in the eye for detail attributed to the Chinese bureaucracy. Both Police and traditional forms of Chinese government could indeed be seen in this light as 'total' forms of government. For instance, just as Michel Foucault (1981:252) talks of the concept of Police in terms of its use in seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe as an attempt at the government of all aspects of life on both an individual level and a broader social level, so too Balazs refers to the omniscient and omnipotent Chinese bureaucracy (over a much wider historical period).s However, there are important reasons for qualifying such a comparison -not just in questioning the extent of state control over society or the ability to get individuals to realise state objectives, but in the manner in which forms of governmental reasoning under the auspices of Police presupposed a significant shift in the relation between state and subject and the concomitant emergence of a concept of the 'population'. I am not suggesting here that governments prior to this time did not conceive of the population per se. Rather, what happens is that the perceived relationship between the state and the populous changes on the level of utility. The state reasons in terms of itself and its own security and prosperity. For governmentality this represents a distinct rupture with sovereign and religiously based forms of reasoning (Gordon 1987:298). By contrast, governmental reasoning at this time in China was bound up in the moralistic and cosmological order of an
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'art of living'- or in this case an 'art of governing'. The population needed to be encouraged to behave properly according to a universal set of Confucian and Legalist virtues, but it certainly did not presuppose the intimacy in technical forms of knowledge that emerge around the notion of the population under Police and Reason of State. For instance, Patricia Ebrey (1993:221) notes the cosmological significance of Imperial concern with the disposal of the dead in terms of ritual: The imperial governments from Han times on issued ritual codes that specified in considerable detail what the emperor, imperial relatives, officials, and common people could do in diverse religious and ritual situations. When their parents died, for instance, ordinary commoners could perform rites formally similar to those of the emperor or nobles could perform, but at reduced levels. The size of the coffins, the quality and quantity of the objects they placed in the tomb, the length oftime the body was left encoffined above ground, the steps in funerary sacrifices, and the numbers of participants in the funeral processions all were to be similarly graded. It is worthwhile noting that such ritual regulations which were commonly propagated in government publications and through the example of the throne did not inhibit people from integrating these largely Confucian based practices with Daoist, Geomantic and Buddhist forms of ritualising death. But what of the historical deployment of statistics throughout Chinese history? Surely this is an example of the desire of government to 'know' its object? Whilst there may have indeed been at the disposal of Chinese authorities intricate means of measuring the various capacities of households there was little understanding of using such forms of knowledge in any form of demographic sense as can be associated with Police. For instance, the Qianlong emperor (1736-1795) decided to overhaul the population registration system and requested a more thorough form of registration to help realise 'good government'- an annual account of provincial households and 'mouths' and grain supply (Ho 1959:37). However, this was not followed through as the result of a number of objections by ranking officials who deemed such a task as administratively unfeasible and nonproductive. Ho Ping-ti (1959:38) suggests that their recommendation reveals the lack of even rudimentary de).llographic interest on the part of the high officials and the strength of the conception that 'population' was an interest to the state primarily because of its fiscal significance ... although in common usage the expression 'households and mouths' meant the population in general, in the bureaucratic language of the middle eighteenth century it carried more fiscal than demographic connotation.6
The most significant point for our purposes here, however, lies in the significance of the health of the population as an object of governmental reasoning. Under the auspices of Police the health of the population becomes an asset, something that must be cultivated and maintained for the benefit of the state and happiness of the people (Foucault 1980:169-170). It is not just a matter of assisting the poor, the fragile or less fortunate, but more so of how best to raise the level of health of the whole social body (Rosen 1953).7In China, however, the idea of governing the health of the population for the benefit of the prosperity of the state does not emerge until the later
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years of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) and in very specific circumstances which make a comparison with Police anything but straightforward. That there has been a significant shift in the way in which forms of governmental reasoning in China look upon matters of health and the population is, I believe, beyond dispute. For instance, during the last century of the Qing Dynasty, many villages in China carried out cleansing ceremonies to appease Heaven by the physical purification of sin (cf. Ng 1990). The sanitary outcomes of such events, of clearing the village of filth and impurities, were not recognised in themselves as measures for attaining a healthier mode of life. Hygiene, in this case, was not a means of reducing the possibility of breeding and catching contagions; the very idea of contagion was practically unknown in Chinese medical discourse. Yet not more than a hundred years later after the founding of the People's Republic of China mass 'patriotic health campaigns' were implemented in order to clean the villages and urban areas of infectious diseases. Literally tens of thousands of individuals were mobilised to kill snails and sparrows and other parasitic hosts (Shi and Seifman 1976:305). I think at this point that we can begin to note important changes in the conceptual and practical relationship between government and the health of the population in China. However, it is worth noting that at certain instances in Chinese history, times associated with the significant development of traditional medical theory and practice, such as during the Song and Yuan periods, Chinese government was responsible for disseminating medical information as widely available to the public as possible. Indeed, as Mark Elvin (1973:185) highlights 'no other medieval nation seems to have been so conscious, both publicly and privately, of the problem of health. Huge drainage systems were built in the major cities. Spittoons, powdered soap, toothpaste and, at the very end of the period, the toothbrush came into general use'. The Portuguese in China in the sixteenth century were extremely praiseworthy of Chinese cleanliness and hygiene (Boxer 1974:26-7). 8 Yet whilst there has always been a certain degree of state intervention in matters of health and medicine in China, there was also an underlying lack of interest in medicine on the part of the scholar-bureaucratic classes who regarded it as 'menial knowledge' (xiao dao ). Without an understanding of how such very technical forms of knowledge centred around the body were implanted within the social behaviour of individuals it is difficult to make any substantial judgements about the actual distribution of hygienic practices, despite to say that, by the nineteenth century Western medical missionaries were appalled with the state of hygiene and sanitation in most Chinese cities (Orleans 1972:378). Whether or not these reports can be taken as evidence of decline remains to be investigated.
From Cultural to State Entity In short, I think that the notion of governing the health of the population in terms of benefiting the state emerges in China around significant changes in the perception of race and ethnicity- what it means to be 'Chinese'. The concept that the vital statistics of a population are not only measurable but also comparable with other populations is located in the Social Darwinist and eugenic discourses that dominated the way in which nations were
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thought to coexist. It is at this point, when these discourses begin to gain wide intellectual credibility in China, that I think we can begin to see changes in forms of reasoning about the population and state in China. What I am alluding to here is the transition from cultural entity- China as civilisation, as a way of life - to national entity - China as a distinct race amongst other races (Levenson 1968:95). This transition from the cosmological order to the secular state is a highly controversial issue in China studies (cf. Feutschwang 1992:36). One of the problems associated with such a position is that ittends to suggestthat Chinese society was stagnant and that only the impetus of the intellectually and technologically superior West was able to coax China into the modern world. Whilst I agree there is a certain degree of danger in attributing the impetus for such change to external forces, the impact of new forms of reasoning on means of understanding the relationship between sovereign and subject must be adequately addressed. That is to say, that different societies have different means at their disposal for understanding and specifying the objects of governmental reasoning. The point here is to understand the conflicts and amalgamation of different socio-cultural forms of governmental reasoning and individuation in terms other than the outcomes suggested in philosophically and teleologically founded positions. Whilst development within post-colonial and antiOrientalist studies should be welcomed for attempts to readdress the imbalance in historical writing on non-Western cultures, key issues in the adaptation and amalgamation of different forms of knowledge must be adequately addressed.9 In terms of governing the health of the population in China, Dikotter (1991:44) argues that the emerging discourse of race in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries provided the conditions in which 'society became a body, an organism, a biological entity which required regulation and control'. In order for new forms of reasoning on the relation between body and environment to be accepted it was necessary for the body to be implicated in a discourse of social urgency. Indeed, as Arthur Kleinman (1974:606) argues the control of epidemic diseases and other major public health problems in 'traditional' China needed to be accompanied by changes in the social and economic conditions and not just the import of modern technology. 1o What counts here, as far as mapping out the shift in governmental attention on the body is concerned, are the very specific means of adaptation of Western technologies of government to distinctly Chinese purposes. From this point one can discern an emerging focus on deploying techniques of governing which worked beyond the confines of the family and village. Government began to conceive of the governed in terms of possession of its own regularities and characteristics- that is, as a population. The intrusion of Western technology and concepts acted upon the notion of culturalism. To be Chinese would no longer be seen in terms of adhering to a set of rites - an arts of living. It now meant belonging to a race, and an inferior one at that. Government had to intervene in order to preserve the Chinese race. Inferior stock had to eliminated. In order for the inferior and unwanted to be recognised as calculable and knowable methods of inscrip-
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tion were needed. The insane, the sick and the deviant had to be isolated and acted upon. New forms of social control were necessary. Self-control and restraint now meant more than mere self-cultivation, it also meant fostering the race at large. However, this is not to suggest that indigenous forms of reasoning were completely supplanted by the discourse of race. On the contrary, the real interesting point in this matter is actually around the innovative ways in which traditional forms of governing were amalgamated into a heterogenous 'grab-bag' of governmental technologies. For instance, concern over rapid population growth and its effect on national resources and prosperity were not new and one can trace a long line of concern with demographic pressure on the land. In 1793 Hong Liangqi (1744-1809), often referred to as the 'Chinese Malthus', published an essay on the population problem in China five years before Malthus' famous An Essay on The Principal of Population (Tien 1973:168). Yet whilst Hong Liangqi was worried about the dramatic increase in the population over the last few centuries he was unable to articulate a specific opinion on the matter of reproduction and birth limitation (Tien 1973:170). Itwasnotuntil1926 that his writings were resurrected, but in a completely different context of race, eugenics, and science. In the nineteenth century many Chinese officials and scholars feared that the rapid increase in the 'lower-classes' would lead to social and moral turmoil, as indeed, some had already connected to the outbreak of the Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864). A particularly radical perspective was held by Wang Shiduo (1802-1899) who proposed a series of radical measures imperative for continued social stability (cf. Appendix 1). The renowned nationalist and reformer, Liang Qiqiao put forward proposals to implement widespread public heath measures in order to halt the process of racial degeneration which he believed was inflicting China (Croizier 1968:60). His predecessor and mentor, Kang Youwei, proposed methods of controlling the population through reproduction. Some of his proposals included government sponsored 'pleasure hotels', prenatal education hospitals, and sterilisation of the mentally and physically handicapped (Hsiao 1975:429; Dikotter 1992:198). Hence, there is a certain measure in which the problem of governing the health of the population is an amalgamation of both indigenous Chinese concepts of the social and of the body and of the influence, for a variety of reasons, of Western forms of governmental reasoning. Thus whilst it may be appropriate to examine the way in which the body has been exposed to the gaze of Western forms of individualisation and normalisation, this should not preclude the innovative ways in which, for instance, traditional Chinese medicine and Daoist concepts of the body have been taken up in specific practices of government, both on a social and individual level. These amalgamated knowledges, in turn, find positive deployment in the regulation of physical behaviour - the managing of the population. The intersection of the discourse of medicine and the discourse of race with a specific conception of the role of Chinese government can be discerned as a thread of continuity that underlines concerns with mass hygiene and eugenic campaigns during the Republican era, and the contemporary family plan-
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ning strategies aimed at providing a superior quality of person (yousheng) through the agency of reproduction and nurture after 1978. Our comparison with matters of the population as they are articulated under the auspices of Police must be qualified with reference to the highly specific circumstances surrounding the emergence of a similar conception of the population in China. There is still a great deal to be said for the way in which Police and the emerging Chinese governmental rationality conceive of the population as directly accessible to state intervention- there is, in neither case, a concept of a divide between state and society. However, as far as devising means of direct intervention down to the level of the individual and of instigating widespread public health campaigns, it is not until after the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949 that government can actually get down to the mundane task of governing health on a national level. Nonetheless, I believe that the terms in which the mass hygienic campaigns and the birth control policies are articulated in the People's Republic can best be understood via reference to the emergence of the discourse of race, eugenics and health that develops in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The One-Child Policy: 'We Must Control Population Size and at the Same Time Enhance the Quality of the Population!' Whilst it is possible to note certain parallels between Chinese rationalities of government and Police, the possibility of finding continuities with liberalism are far more difficult to discern. This is a significant point at which I believe understanding governmentality as a method or series of questions and as series of historical events needs to be addressed. Just as it is inappropriate to apply the tenets of liberal political philosophy to the study of Chinese forms of governments precisely for the reasons outlined by governmentality in relation to government in Europe, it follows that it is equally misleading to suggest that the critique of liberal political theory in terms of concepts such as' action at a distance' and expertise can apply to a Chinese context. Let me try to elaborate on this via reference to the one-child policy. Firstly, in terms the concept of governmentality it is liberalism's discontent with the ability of government to know in detail the object of government which represents a significant break with Police. Liberalism, then, proposes to set limits on government intervention precisely because it claims the unknowability for the sovereign of the totality of the economic processes. Proper government for early liberalism means not interfering in the natural processes of market exchange and the conduct of individuals, for it is these individuals that constitute the rationality which keeps things working in the natural way (Burchell1993:270). In short, the state benefits more by governing less. Here liberalism discards the visible ground of the Police conception of order, and affirmed the more opaque understanding of 'processes of population' (Burchell 1991:126-7). Attached to this was the need for members of the population to assume a certain stance towards themselves which would issue forth in a kind of conduct, that is, governing themselves. It is here that it becomes possible to talk of a liberal action at a distance.
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By contrast, in the Chinese case government claims that not only is it possible to know in detail the object to be governed, but further, it is possible to predict the precise outcome of any possible intervention. A prominent Marxist theorist on population theory, Liu Zheng (1980) notes that, 'the population plan of the whole country is based on the reproductive activities ofindividualfamiliesandthefamilybirthplanmustbecoordinatedwiththe national population plan'. The 'plan', in this order of things, is a masterpiece of total calculation- not just of economic data but a range of social targets as well. For instance, in 1973 the State Council directed that population targets were for the first time to be formally included in national economic planning. This in turn led to the development of population statistical devices more suited to the requirements of the plan, such as the Planned Birth-Rate statistic - the percentage of births with birth quotas to all births (Peng 1991:42). Furthermore, with the introduction of household farming in the early 1980s authorities introduced 'double contracts', linking production and reproduction quotas, as a part of the national family planning strategy. Local family planning organisations were required to sign contracts with child-bearingwomen to ensure that they have only one child, penalties were to be levied against those who break their contracts, whilst social benefits were to be provided for those who fulfil them (Yang 1988:6). The administrative procedures for distributing birth-quotas based on economic calculation made in the plan means that during the 1970s and early 1980s the national planning authorities assigned a numerical target for the natural-increase rate to the provinces and expected them to realise it fully or as nearly as possible. The provincial or prefectural authorities in turn translated the targeted natural-increase rate into a planned-birth quota and distributed the quota among the prefectures or counties under their jurisdiction. The county birth planning office is the point of conversion for individual certificates of permission to become pregnant. The county divides the quota out to the relevant communes and townships. The commune, or local People's Government, in turn hands out its quota to the brigades and finally 'each brigade held a meeting of all couples eligible under the marriage-age, spacing, and family-size rules in order to assign individual birth permission for the next year' (Chen 1984:130). A similar strategy of distributing birth quotas is also deployed in the large municipalities and state enterprises. Elizabeth Croll (in Croll, Davin and Kane 1985:206-7) notes that the street or lane committees are responsible for the actual implementation of the one-child policy in the municipalities. These committees (Croll uses an example of a street committee in the West Chang'an neighbourhood of Beijing) are made up of a 'leading group' of six persons responsible for family planning, which includes a head and deputy head of the committee, a medical worker from the local health centre, a member of the Public Security bureau, the head of the local women's organisation and a representative from the street committee office. Each member of the Committee heads a small sub-group made up of representatives of family-planning workers or propagandists and are responsible for one hundred or so households. The typical responsibilities of these workers (usually trained at the local health centre) was to keep the records of their
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familyplans,contraceptiveuse(ofwomenofchild-bearingage)andmonthly cycles: When a young woman from any of her households registered for marriage, she, as the propagandist, received a card from the neighbourhood office which detailed the woman's date of birth, date of marriage, occupation and residence, contraception and her place on the local birth plan or the date beyond which she was permitted to become pregnant (Croll, in Croll, Davin and Kane 1985:208).11
Hence, in the Chinese case, the reproductive habits of individuals are not conceived as requiring the expert intervention of doctors and specialised health workers en masse. The claim to truth and rationality of experts that is so often the focus of work within the concept of govemmentality is not direct in the Chinese instance. Instead, the task of monitoring and intervening is often delegated to individuals within the local community (the street committee) or the work unit who have little expert knowledge in the precise physiological processes of reproduction and fertility. The ingenuity in this instance lies in the ability of these non-specialised health workers to materialise the priorities of the birth control program in their own area in terms of recording the menstrual cycles and use of contraception in relation to the allocated date for birth according to the plan. In China, the expert is not a tutor -he or she does not play a confessional role in tutoring individuals in certain techniques of self-mastery. Planning authorities can act from a distance without the necessary direct intermediaries of expertise as understood in the West. The norm, an integral part of defining the claims of expertise in the West, is not located for Chinese governmental rationality in the immediate present. Rather, the norm is something realised in higher levels of social production. The object, then, is to encourage certain forms of behaviour conducive to realising that goal. The key notion here is one of 'productivity', that is, in emphasising quality over quantity, and the necessity in regulating the quality of the population. It is here that we can discern certain continuities with the pre 1949 discourse on population, race and eugenics. The development of planned birth means that efforts be taken to improve the quality and productivity of future offspring: The socialist enterprise not only requires that the population grow in a planned way, but at the same time that our people develop as a people comprehensively, in the moral, intellectual and physical areas as well. Therefore, in our family planning work we must continue to promote the principles oflate marriage, late childbearing, bearingfewer children, and eugenics (in White and College 1992; 1982:20, my emphasis).
In short, the family planning program that emerged after 1978 called for development in scientific research in the fields of childbirth physiology, birth control technologies and eugenics. Indeed, Wan Li, a prominent Party member throughout the 1980s, noted that the matter of enhancing the quality of the population was a serious social issue and that the propagation of eugenic knowledge should stem right down to the level of the household where eventually, 'People who are fathers, mothers, grandfathers, and grandmothers all must know something about child psychology and nutri-
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tion... ' (in White and College 1992:61). On a similar note, Peng Peiyun (1990:19), minister of the State Family Planning Commission, commented that in order for China to reach its strategic goals in substantial increases in the GNP it is vital that they encourage 'strict control of the growth of the population and the improvement in the quality of the nation's citizens'. 12 Hence, the quality of the population is something that government must begin to manage and cultivate both for the benefit of its citizens and for socialist construction. The whole process of modernisation and economic reform hinges very closely on success in the birth control program. Chinese authorities take the issue of over-population very seriously, especially in rural areas, and regard it as a serious threat to the reform process: While on the one hand it may be true that we have a vast territory and rich resources, we must recognize that these are limited. As the number of people increases, the average allocation to each person becomes smaller and smaller. Therefore, it is not possible nor preferable to rely on increasing population to get rich. Besides, we actually already have a surplus of labor power in the countryside. Our way out lies in carrying out correct economic policies, in resolutely and unwaveringly carrying out the policy of family planning at the same time that we actively develop production, so that population growth will be compatible with the growth ofthe national economy, and so gradually improve the people's living standards (in White and College 1992; 1982:19).
Conclusion What I have tried to highlight here is that we can begin to make more sense of this apparent contradiction between economic liberalisation and authoritarian birth control in light of a genealogy of the specific terms in which the population's reproductive habits emerges as a problem in China. Taken that Chinese governmental discourse is devoid of certain liberal forms of reasoning as they are understood in the work of governmentality, and it is hence misleading to pose the question of individual and market autonomy in terms of a 'distance' between state and society, it is not impossible then to perceive of a form of governmental reasoning in which the market and highly specific forms of technical intervention into daily life can coexist. So what does this mean for the application of the concept of governmentality in other cultural and historical contexts? As I have demonstrated here, when we turn to a Chinese context we are confronted by a number of significant difficulties in translating the analytical method of governmentality. These problems relate in part to the analytical mode of operation of governmentality as it has been applied in the study of modern Western forms of governmental rationality. Government has been described by various exponents of this method in the West, notably in England, as the development of techniques of 'action at a distance'- the means by which liberal governance has been able to live up to the claims of nonintervention and yet realise governmental programs through the deployment of expertise in the form of doctors, lawyers, pedagogists and philanthropists as intermediaries, as well as through the intensification of techniques of self-government aimed at transforming the programmatic desires of government into those of its subjects. If we were to take these suggestions at face value, then governmentality as a method is perhaps so closely
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imbricated in the notion of 'action at a distance' that without this key element its utility in understanding government in a Chinese context is negated. AB I have argued here, the role of expertise in China diverges significantly from the way the term is understood in certain areas of the work on governmentality. Chinese planning authorities act from a distance without the deployment of technical forms of the 'liberal self'. Chinese citizens are not so much as self-governing, but rather, as governed by others. This is not to suggest that there are no means of acting upon the self in Chinese forms of governmental reasoning. The point here is to note that certain techniques of materialising conduct are not internalised in the individual but dispersed amongst others. It is not so much a matter of selfmastery, it is more a matter of mastering others. Perhaps I am talking at cross purposes. It may simply be that we are referring to different forms of expertise- the confessional and the technical. Yet it seems to me that much of what is known as the mode of operation of 'action at a distance', as it is understood by the exponents of governmental reasoning in its liberal mode, is notable by its absence in China. However, there are a number of problems in following this argument too rigorously, for it seems to me that it provides the possibility of setting up a distinction between liberal governmental reasoning and Police. What this suggests is that preliberal modes of governance can be more or less described as unified by some sort of association with Police. This in turn could lead to statements that 'action at a distance' is purely a liberal and Western phenomenon, whilstcultureslikeChinahavegreateraffiliationswithPolice.Myargument is that whilst Chinese forms of governmental reasoning may certainly be better understood in light of the recent work on Police, this should not suggest that liberal governance has a monopoly on 'action at a distance'. It follows from this that if'action at a distance' is not distinctively liberal than what is distinctive about liberal governmental reasoning? Here the concern has been with establishing that government in China is different, without falling back into the misleading formulation held by certain sections of political theory that reduces a Chinese way of doing things to some form of Oriental or Confucian essence. 1 For insightful discussion on the definition of 'govemmentality', Cf. Burchell 1993; Rose and Miller 1992; Miller and Rose 1990. 2 Although Quesnay was concerned that the populousness of China was a cause of great poverty. Cf. Mackerras 1989:38-9. 3 The positive prospects of authoritarian despotism and the market have even gained considerable credit within the mainland Chinese scholarly community under the auspices of the 'New Authoritarianism' debate. Cf. Rosen and Zou 1990. 4 For an example of such work specifically in relation to the family and rural society. Cf. Yang 1959. 5 As I noted earlier, the extent to which the Chinese bureaucracy has historically been capable of extending its power is debatable, and it seems to me that there is little discussion of this issue from the European Police perspective also. Here, however, it does not constitute a significant problem.
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6
Cf. Dutton 1992:25.
7
Michael Osborne (1994:1, draft version) cautions against the use of the term 'medicalization' if by that term we mean that medicine colonises 'the social'. What should concern us is 'specification of the varied fields of application and modes of objectification characteristic of particular medical programmes, and with the ways that such programmes are tied or seek to tie themselves to wider rationalities of government'. Medical techniques and practices are constitutive of the social, but also take their place alongside other forms of knowledges that make up the complex mesh of the biopolitical. Osborne (1994:12, draft version) reminds us that George Rosen counselled against seeing too much of a continuity here between police science and later developments within public health and he cautions us against Pasquino's straightforward connection between Police and great public health campaigns of the nineteenth century. 'Perhaps', Osborne (1994:12, draft version) speculates 'medicine was responsible for, or at least an index of, what one might call the 'de-totalization' of police'.
8 Jesuit Father Pierre Cibot residing in Beijing from 1758-1780 notes in his memoirs that the reason for the apparent longevity of the Chinese people was attributable to their 'simple mode of life, moral purity, benevolence of government, hygiene and principles of medicine' (Wong and Wu 1936:269). 9
Paul Hirst (1994) has compiled an interesting article which goes some way to examining this problem.
10 In 1910-11 a serious plague infected what was then known as Manchuria. The Chinese government sent a select group of 80 traditional Chinese physicians who consequently were counted amongst the victims of the epidemic. The government was then persuaded to dispatch Wu Lien-te who implemented effective sanitary and public hygiene measures to stop the plague from spreading. The measures involved were unprecedented in Chinese history. The healthy and sick were rigorously segregated, bodies of victims were cremated en masse, and the imperial government sanctioned the carrying out of autopsies on unclaimed victims. This permission to perform autopsies is particularly significant considering that in traditional China surgery and anatomy were virtually unheard of on the basis of upholding the sanctity of the body. By 1914, the epochal permission to perform autopsies had been extended on a general basis to physicians, hospitals, and medical schools. Cf. Nathan 1974:57-8. 11 The civic duty to ensure that population growth does not impede on the greater needs of society is also encoded in specific legal statutes. For instance, the 1982 Constitution states in Article 49 that 'Both husband and wife have the duty to practise family planning' (Banister 1987:199-200), whilst the 1980 Marriage Law stipulates that all married couples must practise effective contraception (Greenhalgh 1990:213). Dalsimer and Nisonoff (1987:594) report that some observers have noted extreme measures in the one-child program such as arrest for the offence of 'pregnancy' by Public Security officials. 12 In an interesting, yet brief, article in the Journal ofChinese Philosophy, Ian McGreal (1991) summarises a text by Shi Da-Pu (Vice-President of Xian Medical University and Professor of Ethics) entitled 'The rise and progress of Chinese medical ethics'. In the article Shi refers to the 'new ethics' which goes beyond the traditional relationship between doctor and patient and concerns areas of judgement relating to a much wider social area. Shi is very concerned with articulating the moral concerns that guide the formation of ethical relationships. It is not clear on what foundation these morals rest. Nonetheless, some of the ethical problems that concern us here are those faced by what Shi refers to as Chinese bioethics, ie. euthanasia, the definition of death, the establishment of regulatory standards for artificial insemination, induced abortion, and procedures for handling congeni-
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tally deformed newborns (in McGreal1991:163). Further, these interests are tied closely to not just individual moral duties but a wider duty of collective bodies to improve the conditions and quality of human life. Every individual is the object of a communally inspired moral concern with 'the quality of life'.
Appendixl Wang Shiduo's Measures for Controlling the Spontaneous Growth of the Population (in Dikotter 1992b): 1. People found gambling, smoking opium, reading Song Confucianism, believing in spirits, practising witchcraft or divination, stealing, fighting, begging, wandering, indulging in alchemy or following unorthodox teachings, as well as males marrying under the age of twenty-five, females marrying under the age of twenty, and women with one child who took another husband should all be 'instantly decapitated', 'executed without mercy'. 2. Laws concerning women should be more severely enforced, without considerations of benevolence. Thirteen should be considered the age of criminal responsibility. A crime committed by a child under the age of thirteen should implicate both parents. The death penalty should be carried out without delay. 3. Female children should be drowned. Taxes should be imposed in the female population to implement a thorough infanticide policy: families with two daughters would have to pay double. 4. All female children born of poor parents should be drowned; sons that were physically abnormal, or did not have handsome features, should also be drowned. No more than two sons would be allowed. 5. Temples, nunneries, 'institutes for virgin women' and 'halls of chastity' should be constructed in large numbers. People should be encouraged to become monks or nuns, or to remain unmarried. 6. Abortifacient methods should be popularised. Women with one child should be compelled by law to take drugs (lengyao) to make them abort. 7. Officials should welcome epidemic diseases and other natural disasters.
References Aird,J. (1990). Slaughter of the Innocents: Coercive Birth Control in China, Washington DC: The AEI Press. Balazs, E. (1964). Chinese Civilisation and Bureaucracy: Variations on a Theme, New Haven: Yale University Press. Banister,J. (1987). China's Changing Population, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Boxer, C.R. (1974). in Bowers, J.Z. and Purcell, E. F. (eds) Medicine and Society in China, New York: Joshiah Macy Jr. Foundation. Burchell, G. (1993). 'Liberal government and techniques of the self', Economy and
Society, 22:3. Burchell, G., Gordon, C. and Miller, P. (eds) (1991). The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Chen Pi-chao, (1984). 'Birth planning and fertility transition', Annals of the AAPSS, p.476.
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Croizier, R.C. (1968). Traditional Medicine in Modern China: Science, Nationalism, and the Tensions of Cultural Change, Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press. Croll, E., Davin, D. and Kane, P. (eds) (1985). China's One-Child Family Policy, London: Macmillan. Dalsimer, M. and Nisonoff, L. (1987). 'The implications of the new agricultural and one-child family policies for rural Chinese women', Feminist Studies, 13:3. Davis, D. and Harrell, S. (1993). Chinese Families in the Post-Mao Era, Berkeley: University of California Press. Dikotter, F. (1991). 'The discourse of race and the medicalization of public and private space in modern China (1985-1949)', History of Science, p.24. __ _, (1992). The Discourse of Race in Modern China, London: Hurst and Company. __ _, (1992b ). 'The Limits of Benevolence: Wang Shiduo (1802-1899) and Population Control', Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 55:1. Dutton, M.R. (1992). Policing and Punishment in China: From Patriarchy to 'the People', Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ebrey, P.B. (1993). 'The response of the Sung State to popular funeral practices', in Ebrey, P.B. and Gregory, P.N. (eds) Religion and Society in T'ang and Sung China, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Elvin, M. (1973). The Pattern of the Chinese Past: A Social and Economic Interpretation, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Feuchtwang, S. (1992). The Imperial Metaphor: Popular Religion in China, Routledge, London: Routledge. Foucault, M. (1980). 'The politics of health in the eighteenth century', in Gordon, C. (ed.) Power/Knowledge: selected interviews and other writings 1972-1977, London: Pantheon Books. __ _, (1981). 'Omnes et Sigulatim: Towards a Criticism of Political Reason', in McMurrin, S.M. (ed.) The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Vol. 2, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gordon, C.(1987). 'The soul of the citizen: Max Weber and Michel Foucault on rationality and government', in Whimster, S. and Lash, S.(eds) Max Weber: Rationality and Modernity, London: Allen and Unwin. Greenhalgh, L.F. (1990). 'The evolution of the one-child policy in Shaanxi, 1979-88', China Quarterly, p.122. __ _, (1993). 'Thepeasantization of the one-child policyinShaanxi',in Davis, D. and Harrell, S. Chinese Families in the Post-Mao Era, Berkeley: University of California Press. Hirst, P. (1994). 'The evolution of consciousness: identity and personality in historical perspective', Economy and Society, 23:1. Ho Ping-ti, (1959). Studies on the Population of China: 1368-1953, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
HsiaoKung-Chuan,(1975).AModernChinaandANewWorld:K'angYu-Wei,Reformer and Utopian, 1858-1927, Seattle: University of Washington Press. Kleinman, A. et al. (eds) (1974). Medicine in Chinese Cultures, Washington: John E. Fogarty International Center for Advanced Study in the Health Sciences. Levenson, J.R. (1968). Confucian China and Its Modern Fate: A Trilogy, Vol. 1, Berkeley: University of California Press. Liu Zheng, (1980). 'There must be a population plan', Renmin ribao, 2 June.
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Mackerras,C.(1989). WesternimagesofChina,Hong Kong, Oxford: Oxford University Press. McGreal, I.P. (1991). 'The new dimensions of Chinese medical ethics', Journal of Chinese Philosophy, 18:161-168. Miller, P. and Rose, N. (1990). 'Governing Economic Life', Economy and Society, 19:1. Minson, J. (1993). 'Registering China', Southern Review, p.26. Nathan, C. F. (1974). 'The Acceptance of Western Medicine in Early 20th Century China: The Story of the North Manchurian Plague Prevention Service', in Bowers, J. Z. and E. F. Purcell, (eds) Medicine and Society in China, New York: Joshiah Macy Jr. Foundation. Orleans, L. (1972). Every Fifth Child: The Population of China, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Pasquino, P. (1978). 'Theatrum politicum. The genealogy of capital- police and the state of property', Ideology and Consciousness, 4. Peng Xizhe, (1991). Demographic Transition: Fertility Trends in China since 1954, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Perdue, P.C. (1987). Exhausting the Earth: State and Peasant in Hunan, 1500-1850, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. Rose, N. (1993). 'Government, authority and expertise in advanced liberalism', Economy and Society, 22:3. Rose, N. and Miller, P. (1992). 'Political power beyond the state: problematics of government', British Journal of Sociology, 43:2. Rosen, G. (1953). 'Cameralism and the concept of medical police', Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 27. Rosen, S. and Zou, G. (eds) (1990). 'The Chinese debate on the New Authoritarianism', Chinese Sociology and Anthropology, 23:2. Rowe, W.T. (1993). 'The problem of 'Civil Society' in late imperial China', Modern China, 19:2. Schram, S.R. (ed.) (1985). The Scope of State Power in China, London and Hong Kong: School of Oriental and African Studies, The Chinese University Press and St. Martin's Press. Shi Ming Hu and Seifman, E. (1976). 'Medical Education in China', American Journal of Chinese Medicine, 4:3. Shue, V. (1988). The Reach of the State: Sketches of the Chinese Body Politic, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Tien, H.Y. (1973). China's Population Struggle: Demographic Decisions of the People's Republic, 1949-1969, Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Wakeman, F. (1993). 'The Civil Society and Public Sphere Debate: Western reflections on Chinese political culture', Modern China, 12:2. White, T. and College, S. (eds) (1992). 'Family Planning in China: Documents on Family Planning since the Third Plenum of the Eleventh CCP Central Committee', Chinese Sociology and Anthropology, 24:3. Wong Chi-min and Wu Lien-te (1936). History of Chinese Medicine, Shanghai: National Quarantine Service. Yang, C.K. (1959). Chinese Communist Society: The Family and the Village, Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press. __ _, (1988). 'Curbing births key to future', Beijing Review, March 7-13.
A Foucauldian Genealogy of Income
Introduction The purpose of this paper is, to survey the outstanding events leading, to the regulation of accounting and of income, of bringing to reality an object known as income in Australia, to investigate a system of power that regulates the practice of income, and finally to question the forms within which individuals are obliged to recognise themselves as subjects of income. 1994 marks the one hundred and ninth year of the founding of the first body of accountants in Australia. This founding body has regulated accounting practice and stipulated the mandate of income in Australia. With this formation, society in Australia had entered a phase of a cycle of power, social control and discipline. It also begins the process of exclusion. In a span of a little more than a century, this process has provoked a tumult in Australian society, resulting in a disordered and divided society bringing in its turn misery, poverty, fear and suffering. Clearly it is through the genesis of income and its regulation that the 'poor' in Australia are marginalised, excluded, controlled, victimised, repressed and oppressed. The events leading to this outcome are closely interrelated and can be viewed as successive acts of one, indivisible drama, whose climax no-one could have perceived and whose conclusion no mind could have foreshadowed. Viewing these one hundred and nine years as the constituents of a single entity, we note the chain of events proclaiming the rise of the accounting profession and the regulation of income and the acceptance of income as a factor in the establishment of social security. As of June 1993, the Department of Social Security as an institution, serviced around five million people in Australia, with outlays, including operating costs, amounting to $31.4 billion dollars (Department of Social Security 1993:2). This has culminated in the creation of a category of the 'poor' in Australia.
Foucauldian Genealogy History becomes 'effective' to the degree that it introduces discontinuity into our very being - as it divides our emotions, dramatises our instincts, multiplies our body and sets it against itself. 'Effective' history deprives the self of the reassuring stability of life and nature, and it will not permit itself to be transported by a voiceless obstinacy towards its millennia! ending. It will uproot its traditional foundations and relentlessly disrupt its pretended continuity. This is because knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting (Foucault 1980:154).
Effective history, as Foucault has demonstrated, is the history of dispersed, often disrupted and discontinuous events, without making any references to the metaphysical, universal or constants. Methodologically, it is a history of chance, a history of random events. In seeking for these casual unconnected events, the motive is to problemise the issue to be analysed
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(Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982:9). Effective history is not about a search for origins; it is discontinuous and does not seek to establish a singular historical meaning, nor does it attempt to discover the 'truth'. Genealogy, unlike passive history, attempts to make the origin visible by shedding new light on significant connections between incongruous concepts and occurrences, which would under ordinary scrutiny be unobserved. In the act of searching for visibility, new links, new strategies develop and new tactics are revealed. In such an analysis, objects are placed in relation to other objects in a different manner, different institutions placed in a different mode and a whole new history unfolds before our very eyes. Thus, for Foucault, Genealogy is gray, meticulous, and patiently documentary. It operates on a field of entangled and confused parchments, on documents that have been scratched over and recopied many times... Genealogy does not oppose itself to history as the lofty and profound gaze of the philosopher might compare to the molelike perspective of the scholar; on the contrary, it rejects the metahistorical deployment of ideal significations and indefinite teleologies. It opposes itself to the search for origins (Foucault 1980:139-140).
Genealogy is then a method in history that analyses history devoid of a set plan, without teleology, without continuity or unity -but looks at events, accidents and coincidences and places them in a new relation from one to another. New histories may result from the same view of history. Thus for Foucault, history is a tool by which some experience could be investigated. The Use of Pleasure, Foucault's second volume of The History of Sexuality is typical of the history that Foucault undertook to study. Foucault sought to study an experience, namely sexuality. According to Foucault, that experience is understood only as a result of three axes that interplay with each other. On the one hand, there are fields of knowledge that are born on the distant horizon. Later there are types of normativity, that a system of power regulates. These norms are brought into existence through the birth and operations of certain institutions. Finally, there are forms of subjectivity that result from this entire scheme. In Foucault's words: To speak of'sexuality' as a historically singular experience also presupposed the availability of tools capable of analyzing the peculiar characteristics and interrelations of the three axes that constitute it: 1. the formation of sciences (savoirs) that refer to it, 2. the systems of power that regulate its practice, 3. the forms within which individuals are able, are obliged, to recognize themselves as subjects ... (Foucault 1990:4)
The object of such a scrutiny must be made clear. The objectives are to explain how human beings are, firstly, the objects of knowledge. Later, human beings become the subjects of that knowledge. A secondary objective is to throw new light between the inter-relationship between power and knowledge; to explicate how one sustains the other. This paper also intends to provide a critique of the way in which the human sciences have functioned as tools of power, of social control, of discipline and of exclusion. Beyond this, the goal of this exercise, ' ... an exercise of oneself in the activity of thought... ' (Foucault 1990:9) is to learn to what extent the effort to think one'sownhistorycanfreethoughtfromwhatitsilentlythinks,andsoenable it to think differently (Foucault 1990:9).
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Recently, accounting historians have re-examined the explanations for the emergence of accounting. A traditional explanation for the rise of accounting, has been that accounting is the result of the rise of capitalism or industrialisation and new business and organisational needs. However, there have been other histories that are just starting to emerge, which include the emergence of administrative power (Miller and O'Leary 1987), the professionalisation of accounting (Loft 1986) and also the role of the state (Miller 1986; 1990). While Littleton (1966) explains that accounting has risen due to industrialisation along with the rise of financial markets, these new histories have given a social, political and ideological twist to the history of accounting. Hoskin and Maeve (1986) for example link the emergence of accounting as an instrument of disciplinary power. In viewing accounting as disciplinary power, a fundamental element is the concept of surveillance. Here surveillance implies hierarchical observation, normalising judgement and examination. Disciplinary strategies facilitate the maintenance of order and organisation, create subjected and docile bodies, and establish in the body the constricting link between an increased aptitude and an increased domination (Foucault 1977:138). Mcintyre (1990:215) sums up the Foucauldian genealogist as one who writes against, who exposes, who subverts, who interrupts and disrupts.
Accounting as a science Before the concepts of numbers and of writing, a system of 'official' record keeping existed without the aid of writing. Using memory, prehistoric humans traded on a barter system with exchange of goods being concluded without carrying a transaction any further. However,itcould be argued that humans, in the most primitive times had some sense of numbers. As Hird (1975) puts it, 'This stage of development would not call for counting: the group would not think 'there are only nine of us- who is missing? but, more simply "where's Fred?"' Littleton (1966) lists the antecedents of double entry bookkeeping to be the art of writing; arithmetic; private property; credit; commerce; capital; and money. Surely these factors must have existed for bookkeeping to have appeared. But long before these antecedents, humans were already counting(Bunt,JonesandBedient1976;Newman1956;Struik1967).Kar1Absolom, an archaeologist, discovered a bone in Central Czechoslovakia which dates back 30,000 years. Fifty-five notches, in groups of five, are cut into the bone, with the first 25 separated from the remaining by one of double length. 'It is reasonable to assume that he made a notch for each object in the collection that he was counting' (Bunt et al. 1976:3). From this discovery, it emerges that pre-historic man was aware of three important concepts. The first is oneto-one-correspondence; the second numeration; and the third is wealth. As interest in possessions and wealth increased the need to keep count became a necessity. Temple accounts, for example, show receipts and disbursements, wage payments, rental income, interest and real estate transactions (Brown 1971). In Egypt, receipts and disbursement records, remained as lists, without a summary with ledgers, and most importantly, without any attempt to isolate income. This was so because an increase in assets was the way success was measured (Chatfield 1977:7). Wealthinsuchforms created
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methods of record to serve their needs. Keister (1965) examines Mesopotamian records dating back to 4500 BC to 500 BC and observes that the scribe of Mesopotamia was the predecessor of today' s accountant. Chatfield (1968) examines Medieval Bookkeeping and notes that the accounting practices of the Manor and the Government adapted accounting records to meet the Manor's and the Government's needs. Clearly, wealth still remained in dormant mode. But wealth in the form of palaces was idle: it changed from being held stagnant to becoming active, by way of goods and ships, to create more wealth. Thus the change in the concepts of wealth excited the development of double entry bookkeeping. Irish (1947) cites the fifteenth century as a time of great excitement, with ships exploring the world with a great and sudden expansion of commerce, and of wealth. Initially, it was individual courage and adventure that produced wealth, but as time passed by, money could be risked, but not lives, and hence the silent partner evolved. It is this evolution, where wealth stayed on shore but entrusted goods and ships to the active trader, that resulted in a real need for accounting. Accounting was particularly important when dealers dealt on behalf of several silent partners, for each of whom a comprehensive set of accounts had to be produced. This led to a progress in accounting methods. The income from each venture had to be determined. More crucially, wealth took on the form of capital and having invested this capital, the normal methods of keeping count no longer sufficed. This was further spurred on by the separation of ownership and control. The Crown made incorporation exclusive, and had incorporated the Russia Company (chartered in 1555), the East India Company (1600) and the Hudson's Bay Company (1670) which were all monopolies. The East India Company, in 1613, for example, ceased to issue terminable stock and by 1657 the company had a permanent invested capital with limited right to transfer shares. A new form of corporate structure evolved and accounting with it. With permanent capital, the income of the company had to be determined, since a large number of people had contributed capital. The distance between ownership and control made determining the statement of wealth more important, (the balance sheet) and the income statement more important. The income statement could be argued to be ofless significance than the balance sheet, depending on the concept of income that is accepted. One view of income is that it is the surplus of total valued assets over total valued liabilities, brought about by the comparison of successive balance sheets between two accounting periods. The surplus method, as this is called, stresses the importance of the balance sheet in determining corporate income. The major issue is to determine which particular assets and liabilities, along with their valuation bases, should be included to determine income (Keh11976:3-13). The second view, is that income is determined as the excess of total revenues less all expenses fairly chargeable to the period's revenue, with the resulting figure being income. Basically, this method emphasises revenue and expense transactions recorded in nominal accounts summarised in the income statement. Income is based on recent financial transactions, rather than on periodic asset valuations (Keh11976:331).
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The birth of income This section develops the argument that the income statement method of determining income was the preferred method of deriving income. This section will also attempt to survey the developments circa 1844 in the nineteenth-century companies Acts in Britain, to demonstrate the great importance that was placed by legislators on income, and that the creation of 'income' is singularly an accounting act. Parliamentary investigations into the activities of regulated companies, clearly indicated that the income statement method was used in the testimony of witnesses and recommendations of various committees and commissions. The determination of income was clearly determined by revenue and expense transactions recorded in nominal accounts. Before revenue is recorded in determining income, it has to be supported by an exchange transaction. The revenue realisation principle in determining income is as fundamental now to accounting, as it was in the middle of the nineteenth-century. Jones and Aiken (1993) provide a useful summary of the events and acts that relate to the greater importance of income over the balance sheet. The development of British judicial law since 1889 comprehensively rejects the surplus concept of income in favour of the determining of income that was made available for the payment of dividend. The income statement method, where income is the result of revenues less expenses, was supported by the British judiciary, especially the Court of Appeal, for a variety of legal, ethical and commercial reasons (Weiner 1928; Littleton 1934). For example, in 1844 a central and confidential witness before the Select Committee onJoint Stock Companies, when asked, 'What would you consider clear profit?' clearly emphasised the income statement method: .. you take what has been expended within the half-year for the purpose of your trade, and you take your returns, and the clear profit arising from receipts above expenditure on those transactions is what ought to be divided, and no more .... you will recollect what a balance sheet is, I have seen balance sheets more than once showing a large profit, the realisation of which has ended in a very considerable loss, because until my balance sheet and the assets I have stated are realised, which may take two or three years to realise, that balance of profit and loss is not realised, and it may prove to be ephemeral (British Parliamentary Papers 1844)
Another example, which highlights the importance of the income statement was that one of the most important reasons for State intervention over assurance companies, was that these companies were using deceptive methods of profit determination. In particular, the questionable practice of including as divisible income, unrealised future premium income in the gross without deducting expenditures was strongly condemned. These recommendations were included in the Life Assurance Companies Act which was passed in 1870. Using asset valuation for determining income was rejected as early as 1865 by the Economist, because it lacked reliability of valuations and clearly advocated the profit and loss method (The Economist 1890:919-20). For example, the treatment of accounting practices of marketable securities in financial institutions clearly indicated that unsold shares should never be estimated at more than cost price and that the only
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credit to the income statement should be actual realised profits. 'Actual gains should be the source of dividend, but we should not divide all of them. We may and should anticipate future losses, but never future profits' (The Economist 1865:126). Frederick Whinney, the eminent accountant testifying before the 1895 Davey Committee makes a similar point:' ... no increase of the value of assets should be carried to (the) profit and loss account... I venture very respectfully to urge that the true commercial principle is not to call anything a profit until it has been made.' (British Parliamentary Papers 1895:79). Questionable profit determination was also one of the issues addressed by the Secret Committee on Joint Stock Banks 1836-1838. The committee had been elected to explore the reasons for the failure of several banking institutions and also to regulate the banking industry. Many notable witnesses had testified that banks were paying dividends when they were making losses, and sometimes out of depositors' funds. The committee also revealed that bad debts expense and operating losses were not being written off in the income statement, nor were they disclosed to the shareholders. Premium income on issued shares was treated as divisible profits and many contingent income items, which were not yet realised, were treated as divisible incomes and declared as dividends. These were further enhanced by the severe economic depression during this time, followed by intense competition among banks and the pressure to pay dividends. This was further complicated by the fact that directors could hold significant shares in their own bank creating intense pressures to distort income. The Joint Stock Banks Act (1844) largely adopted the recommendations of the Secret Committee, and made it compulsory to disclose a income statement in nonprescribed form to shareholders. More compelling evidence of the importance of income, during this time comes from the Select Committee on the Audit of Railway Accounts (1849) and the Royal Commission Report on Building and Friendly Societies (18711874). This is particularly so with the Select Committee on the Audit of Railway Accounts. This committee in fact, seems to have been established, as the result of abuses in the determination of income, and was the committee that dealt exclusively with company accounting issues. It was primarily concerned with railway companies charging items of expense to the capital account instead of the revenue account. This distorted the determination of income and was done for the sole purpose of boosting profits at the discretion of directors. Further evidence of the importance of income is available from The Building and Friendly Societies Act, which was the result of The Royal Commission Report in Building and Friendly Societies, established by Parliament in 1871. The investigations which ended in 1874, covering four reports, with over eight thousand pages of evidence from one hundred and fifty witnesses, preeminently concern the impropriety of many societies in crediting the income statement with unrealised income and other gains in the determination of income. This was further aggravated by the attempt to minimise or conceal their actual trading expenditures to keep up their dividend-paying power. The Royal Commissioners recommended disclosure, including a compulsory audit, of the income statement. This brief history makes it clear that income is a product of accounting.
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Income measurement in Accounting Barton (1990:135-450) summarises the theory I debates in income measurement in accounting. Income, according to Barton is central to financial accounting because of the importance of information on income for decision making and also for the purposes of accountability. Income also lies at the heart of business operations and financial accounting. Income is the reason people work, why investors invest, and why economic activity is carried out. It might be said that accounting as a craft, exists to determine income. For Barton, ... the basic purpose of income measurement can be summarised as the provision of information to guide prudent conduct in the use of resources. Income must also be measured because it affects legal relationships as profit accrues to owners and not to creditors or employees. Finally,it must normally be measured for taxation purposes, both personal income tax and company tax' (Barton 1990:436).
However, this whole area of income measurement is the subject of great confusion, disagreement and crusading. 'In reality, there are as many variations on each system as there are authors, and in practice parts of the different systems are frequently mixed up together' (Barton 1990:435). Income, as an abstract notion, resulting from various measurement procedures, does not take the form of any particular asset acquired, and cannot be separately identified and proved. Income is really a derived measure of a surplus or is the additional wealth generated after maintaining capital intact. The measurement of income runs into two difficulties, namely, the difficulties of measuring stock of assets and liabilities at two dates, and the problem of dividing wealth into two notional parts. This leads to the valuation of wealth problem and the capital maintenance problem. Thevaluationofwealthfacesatleastfourchallenges,includingquantities of assets and liabilities, the measurement properties of the dollar, the asset valuation base, and the wealth and income measurement systems, each of which can give a different measure of income and of wealth. To maintain capital intact, is to divide the end-of-period wealth into the base component and the incremental component. The value of all resources used must be a first charge on the resource inflow to enable replacement of their value. Here the recovery of capital is the basis of the matching principle of income determination, where income is the process of deducting all expenses from revenue. Thus the resources gained from operations are separated into the return of capital and the return on capital. This presents two problems. The first concerns the measurement of the resource inflows from sales and measurement of the firm's own resources used up in the process: stock of assets are usually heterogeneous rather than homogeneous. The second problem is that the specific interpretations of the concept of capital maintenance vary according to the valuation system used. Other problems also pose an obstacle to the measurement of income. For example, the problem of capital gains, which are neither income nor capital, the separation of income from capital, where income must be severed from the base for it to be recognised, the criteria of the necessity of realisation before income is recognised. There are also the problems associated with the
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intention of acquiring an asset, the problem associated with expected changes in value as being treated as income. These all bear stark testimony to the inability of defining what income is in accounting. Indeed, there are several concepts of income: Pure Historic Cost Income, Constant Dollar Value Income, Current Cost Income, Current Selling Price Income, Real Current Cost Income, Real Selling Price Income, Present Value Income, Real Present Value Income, Historical Cost Income Modified by Doctrine of Conservatism, Historic Cost Income Modified by Asset Revaluation, Legal Income, Taxable Income. Clearly, there is no shortage of concepts of income. This is compounded by the number of net asset valuation base and the criteria for the division of wealth; between income and capital maintenance. Barton (1990:447) sums up by saying that: ... it should be recognized that in realistic circumstances there is no universally correct measure of periodic income. A limited number of answers is possible according to the specific valuation principles and dollar measurement properties selected. The choice between the income concepts to be measured should depend on the purpose for which the measurement is required.
Income in accounting standards In 1994 income in accounting was defined as: 'increases in economic benefits during the accounting period in the form of inflows or enhancements of assets or decreases of liabilities that result in increases in equity, other than those relating to contributions from equity participants' (ASA and ICAA 1994:135). Income and its definition encompasses both revenue and gains. Revenues arises in the course of the ordinary activities of an enterprise, while gains represent increases in economic benefits which are in essence no different in nature from revenue. The International Accounting Standards Committee (IASC) in their International Accounting Standard (lAS) Framework is clear about the recognition criteria that must be applied in the recognition of income. Paragraphs 92 and 93 of the lAS Framework, under the Accounting Conceptual Framework state: Income is recognised in the income statement when an increase in future economic benefits related to an increase in an asset or a decrease of a liability has arisen that can be measured reliably. This means, in effect, that recognition of income occurs simultaneously with the recognition of increases in assets or decreases in liability. The procedures normally adopted in practice for recognising income, for example, the requirement that revenue should be earned, are applications of the recognition criteria in this framework. Such procedures are generally directed at restricting the recognition as income to those items that can be measured reliably and have a sufficient degree of certainty. Para 77 of the lAS Conceptual Framework, further states: Various kinds of assets may be received or enhanced by income; examples include cash, receivables and goods and services received in exchange for goods and services supplied. Income may also result from the settlement of liabilities. For example, an enterprise may provide goods and services to a lender in settlement of an obligation to repay an outstanding loan.
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Clearly, it is accounting that regulates and brings into existence 'income'.
Social security as a regulator of income In Australia, the concepts of income used to control the rates of payment, are rigidly financial- a characteristic which can activate unfairness on its own, since income upon which social security bases its rates of payment includes income to which a person may have no practical access or it ignores the social dimensions of income, including kinship obligations. In Australia all pensions, benefits and allowances are subject to an income test, with most attracting an assets test. The test that produces the lower rate of payment is the one that the Department of Social Security applies. There are, of course, a variety of income and asset tests specific to the pensions, benefits and allowances. Each of these tests allow for a degree of freedom, which does not take income and assets below a defined threshold. The income test is less generous than the assets test. Carney and Hanks, (1994) provide a useful summary of income as conceived by the Department of Social Security, but state that they are an 'imperfect substitute'. And yet, despite its imperfections and the inadequacies of the definition of income, it is and remains the keystone of the Australian social security system. Within this scheme, some income sources get special treatment, to cater for certain policies. The examples of the aged, the disabled, wife, carer and sole parent pensions all include the income test, that treats income with special emphasis on 'maintenance income'. This income has a degree of freedom, where up to a certain amount of income is taken to be of no further account, and only maintenance income above this amount counting. Any surplus maintenance income will join any surplus of 'non-maintenance or ordinary income' with its own degree of freedom. Both are then added up to calculate the rate of pension payable. Under the Social Security Act of 1991, income is an aggregate concept, which consists mainly of the sum of the various gross amounts from all sources. No deductions are allowed and losses from one activity cannot be offset against profits from another. The Act does not allow any discretion about what is counted as income. Apart for business and investment income which introduces special rules about deductions and about how returns are to be calculated, income from all other sources are to be totalled. Business and investment income, along with maintenance income, is treated differently from all other income. The Social Security Act of 1991, defines income' in relation to a person, as: a. an income amount earned, derived or received by the person for the person's own use or benefit; or b. a periodical payment by way of gift or allowance; or c. a periodical benefit by way of gift or allowance; but does not include an amount that is excluded under subsections (4), (5) or (8). The 'Income amount' is taken to mean (a) valuable consideration; or (b) personal earnings; or (c) moneys; or (d) profits; whether of a capital nature or not. Further, 'income from personal exertion' means an income amount that is earned, derived or received by a person by way of payment for personal exertion by the person but does not include an income amount received as compensation for the person's inability to earn, derive or receive
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income through personal exertion. Ordinary income means income that is not maintenance income. Such a view of income is multi-layered and broadly inclusive. It includes monetary derivations, entitlements or receipts, including receipts from sources which are of a capital in nature. Income, for Social Security, is valued in money terms, is a gain or increase over time which can or has been realised. The only restrictions applying to the concept of income, are that income is to be earned, derived or received and is counted once it meets these conditions. Thus, income is said to have been earned when the work or service which gives rise to the right of payment has been completed in accordance with the contract of employment, whether or not the money is then paid. For example, if the contract provides for the rate of payment to be determined after the work is performed (eg. after assessment of the quality of work), then income is not earned until this later point. Income is said to have been derived once it accrues as a matter of legal right, whether that right has been exercised or the funds can be speedily realised. Income is said to have been received where funds come into a person's possession or moneys are credited to the person's local or overseas account. Income from a business source is taken as the 'net figure after deducting the costs of generating that income'. Any differences in book value of trading stock on hand constitute profits or losses which must be brought into account. Maintenance income consists of several ingredients. It catches both the amount of a payment (such as a cash transfer) and 'the value' of a benefit (such as rent or education expenses, which is received in one of three forms: (1) child maintenance from a parent; of a dependent child, in the form of a transfer 'for the maintenance of the child'; (2) direct child maintenance from a parent (or partner or former partner of the parent) of a dependent child, in the form of a transfer 'for the child's own maintenance, or (3) partner maintenance from a partner or former partner for the person's own maintenance. Capitalised maintenance income is also brought into account.
Historical Developments The 1890s may be said to mark the end of an epoch of thirty years of rapid economic and social progress. With the discovery of gold in the 1850s till the late 1880s, Australia was a land of golden opportunity with labour shortages, ensuring that there was high wages and only temporary unemployment. Poverty, if any, was concentrated mainly among the aged and the infirm. Australia had developed a public relief system, which was catered for by outdoor relief agencies or crude indoor relief institutions, or by families. With the 1890s, a new set of circumstances was to cause a change in the relief system in Australia. Firstly, the noticeable ageing of the migrant Australian population, increased the incidence of aged destitution. In 1891, the population of Australia was about 3.2 million of which 2.9 per cent were 65 and over. During the next ten years, the aged population grew 2.5 times the total population growth over the same period to reach 151,000 in 1901. Secondly, the economic conditions deteriorated drastically. In Victoria alone, the unemployment rate reached 25 per cent by 1893. These two factors left the poor and the aged to seek refuge in the few public outdoor relief
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institutions that were available in the 1890s. But more importantly it is the imprisonment of the aged and the destitute, by wealth, and for no other reason than having no lawful means of support that led to the birth of Social Security in Australia. The Victorian Royal Commission on Old-age Pensions declared in 1898: ' ... we are impressed with the glaring injustice occasionally inflicted upon the aged and the destitute, against whom there is no allegation of crime, of being charged under the Public Offences Act with having no lawful means of support, and sent to gaol' (Victorian Royal Commission on Old-age Pensions Report 1898). The Sunday Times noted on 16 February 1896: It certainly would be a great blessing to poor old people to be at liberty and
obtain the pure air instead of cooped up in these asylums as at present, where they dare not speak no matter how they are treated, for from the highest to the lowest who have the least authority over you, they all have their way to punish you if you give the least offence and it is of no use to complain because if an investigation takes place where one would speak the truth, they would think nothing of telling a lie to keep in favour of the authorities, so that it is almost impossible to get fair play (cited in O'Brien 1988:55).
With a great increase in poverty, mostly among elderly people, a more sympathetic public attitude towards the poor emerged. The Victorian and New South Wales governments began to search for an appropriate social security policy. A great variety of policies were suggested, including in-kind transfers, means-tested or universal non-contributory age pensions and cash transfers financed by actuarially-related compulsory contributions. The in-kind transfer approach was firmly rejected because it was believed that while it might remove the obvious symptoms of poverty, it would not attack the root cause of aged destitution. The compulsory-contributory cash transfer approach was rejected, with private insurance given as example, and that the future benefits payable should never exceed the estimated value of the contributions receivable, plus any accumulated funds held. Three reasons were given for this. The first, it was believed that 'it would involve ... an immense amount of officialism and complicated machinery which is extremely costly', (Victorian Royal Commission on Old-age Pensions Report 1898:XVI). Second, that this approach would neither solve the problems, nor would it cater for people who were unemployed, sick, the widowed and the married women, none of whom could be regular contributors (Neild 1898:56). Finally, this approach would be politically unacceptable because it would infringe personal liberties (NSW Select Committee on Old-age Pensions 1898). Thus almost by default, a non-contributory pension scheme became the only feasible alternative. Australia's first social security scheme was introduced in 1900 by a conservative government in New South Wales. Victoria introduced a similar scheme soon after, with Queensland following in 1908. The Federal scheme came into effect in 1909. The Commonwealth decided to provide supplementary relief of up to lOs a week to people who were destitute but deserving aged and invalid. In 1993, the Department of Social Security's income security programs were administered under the provisions of the following Acts. They are:
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Social Security Act 1991; Family Law Act 1975, Part XIVA; Defence (Transitional Provisions) Act 1946, section 13; Defence (Re-establishment) Act 1965, Parts V and VA, and section 59 in respect of powers and functions under Parts V and VA in relation to payments to individual; 5. Re-establishment and Employment Act 1945, Division 3 of Part XI (and Part XII insofar as it applies in relation to that Division), in relation to payments to individuals; 6. Data-matching Program (Assistance and Tax) Act 1990. As of June 1993, six other Acts, mostly amending the Principal Acts received Royal Assent during 1992-93: 1. The Social Security Amendment Act 1992; 2. The Social Security Amendment Act (No.2) 1992; 3. The Data-matching Program (Assistance and Tax) Amendment Act 1992; 4. The Social Security Legislation Amendment Act (No.2) 1992; 5. The Social Security Legislation Amendment Act (No. 3) 1992; and 6. The Social Security Amendment Act 1993 1. 2. 3. 4.
Forms by which self is determined Social Security uses income, as a tool, as an instrument, to draw a line in society to distinguish between 'rich' and 'poor'. Indeed, the poor and 'poverty' are created only through the regulation of income. Prior to the creation of 'the poor' and 'poverty', Australia stood as an economic whole. With the introduction of accounting into Australia, and of the regulation of 'income' by accountants, a process was set in motion that could not be reversed. It brings into existence an object known as 'income'. Thus Australia and Australian society, with the acceptance and application of the concept of 'income' has never been a whole. The term welfare in itself is not easily defined. Welfare captures all collective interventions made to meet certain needs of the individual and/ or to serve the wider interests of society (Titmuss 1958), and those social arrangements, patterns and mechanisms that are typically concerned with the distribution of resources in accordance with some criterion of need (Mishra 1981). Edwards (1988) provides a useful summary of the debates in relation to the social welfare system in Australia. Welfare, according to Edwards, has now become a state matter, which includes health, education and training, housing, social security and income maintenance, and personal social services and to some extent, policies of employment, recreation, leisure and the arts. Australia's welfare history follows several phases. These phases include centralised political control that took the form of private bodies providing welfare services, first with the old age and invalid pensions, a phase beginning in 1908 and later in 1912 with a maternity allowances scheme. It was not until1940 that further legislation was passed that dealt with health, child welfare, repatriation, war widows and child benefits schemes. Between 1941 and 1949, legislation was passed covering child endowment, widows, pensions, new maternity allowances and funeral benefits, unemployment, sickness and special dependency benefits, free medicines and
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hospital treatment in public wards, child and maternity benefits for indigenous people, and the setting up of employment and rehabilitation services as well as a federal department of social services. Following closely in the 1950s, were medical and pharmaceutical benefits schemes, subsidies to institutions and programs for the aged and handicapped. The Social Security Portfolio currently includes the Department of Social Security (DSS), the Social Security Appeals Tribunal (SSAT) and the Australian Institute ofFamilyStudies (AIFS). This Portfolio, was responsible for five million people, with outlays on payments to clients and operating costs amounting to $31.4 billion. One of six programs that Social Security administers is known as 'Corporate and other Services' which includes subprogramssuchasCorporateManagement,Corporateinfrastructure,(which includes Work Environment Management, Computing Infrastructure, Financial Management, Property Management and Legal Services) Agency Functions, Social Security Appeals Tribunal, and the Australian Institute of Family Studies. The remaining five programs are all based on 'Income'. Foucault has shown that human beings are both the object of knowledge and the subject of knowledge. Bentham's Panopticon is a typical example. Prisoners are not only kept in line from the outside, but also by themselves, where they fear that they are being watched by the all-seeing eye of centralised surveillance. If this is the case, following Foucault, then, the 'poor' in modern society, experience the sensation of being 'poor' from the outside as well from the inside. Thus the 'poor' are not only led to believe that they are 'poor' from the outside, by Social Security, which makes payments and insists on certain modes of behaviour but the 'poor' also occupy themselves, in determining self, with the qualities of being in 'poverty'. The physical conditions that surround them, their living in crowded quarters, without privacy, alcoholism, physical violence against wife and children, early initiation into sex, high incidence of the abandonment of mothers and children, a sense of resignation and fatalism are all internalised by the 'poor'. Thus a two way process occurs. Wealth, through Social Security, marginalises, excludes, controls, victimises, represses and oppresses and the 'poor' are 'led to focus their attention on themselves, to decipher, recognise, and acknowledge themselves as subjects ... bringing into play between themselves and themselves a certain relationship that allows them to discover, ... the truth of their being' (Foucault 1990:5).
Conclusions It is often alleged that some people are poor because they do not work hard.
In reality it may be found that poor people work harder than those who earn higher incomes. In the broadest sense, discrimination results in any society where the range of opportunities open to some individuals differ from person to person. Discrimination is also possible when some groups are relegated to a position below the poverty line. Two groups worth mentioning are aborigines and women (Podder 1978). There is a great body of literature that has, over the past two hundred years or so, in Australia, analysed the manifestation of the symbols of poverty. Such analyses, on their own are necessary since they provoke
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thought. However, the real issue with an analysis of poverty is income. That indeed is the real, the original cause for the manifestation of poverty. A genealogy using Foucault's axes has made clear the inter-relationships between the birth of sciences that make reference to income, a system of power that regulate its practice and forms within which individuals are able and obliged to recognise themselves as subjects. Clearly, it is accountants that bring into reality the object of income. The Department of Social Security regulates the practice of income, and in this process, has created 'the poor' which has obliged individuals to recognise themselves as subjects of income. This analysis shows that the true problem with the study of poverty and of the poor stems from a particular, perhaps positivist, view and definition of wealth through accounting. Foucault's genealogy has the potency to liberate knowledge from its shackles, leading us to the removal of those elements of past knowledge codes that now constitute obstacles to the emergence of a unified and reconstructed human society.
Bibliographical References ASA and ICAA (1994). The lAS Framework, p.135. Barton A.D. (1990). The Anatomy of Accounting, 3rd edn, University of Queensland Press. British Parliamentary Papers (1844). Q. 1265, and Q. 1315. British Parliamentary Papers (1895). Vol. LXXXVIII, Clause 6, p.79. Brown, R. (ed. and partly written by R. Brown) (1971). A History of Accounting and Accountants, New York: Augustus M. Kelley Publishers. Bunt, N H.L., Jones S.P, and Bedient D.J. (1976). The Historical Roots of elementary Mathematics, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall. Carney T. and Hanks, P. (1994). Social Security in Australia, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chatfield M. (1977). A History of Accounting Thought, rev. edn, Robert E. Krieger Publishing Company. Chatfield M. (1968). Contemporary Studies in the Evolution of Accounting Thought, Dickenson Publishing Company. Department of Social Security (1993). Annual Report 1992-1993, Canberra: AGPS. Dreyfus, H.L., and Rabinow, P. (1982). Michel Foucault: Beyond structuralism and hermeneutics, Brighton: Harvester. Edwards, A. (1988). Regulation and Repression, Studies in Society, Allen and Unwin. Foucault M. (1980). 'Nietzsche, genealogy, and history', in Bouchard, D. (ed.)
Language, Counter-memory, Practice: Selected essays and interviews by Michel Foucault, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, New York: Cornell University Press. __ _, (1977). Discipline and Punish, London: Allen Lane. __ _, (1990), The Use of Pleasure, The History of Sexuality, Volume 2, trans. from the French by Robert Hurley, New York: Vintage Books. Hird, F.M.W. (1975). 'A Speculation On The Origins of Accounting', Accounting Historians Journal, Vol. 2, pp.17-21.
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Hoskin, K. and Maeve, R.H. (1986). 'Accounting and the Examination: A Genealogy of Disciplinary Power', Accounting, Organizations and Society, 11(2):105-36. Irish, A.R. (1947). 'The Evolution of Corporate Accounting', The Australian Accountant, 17:480-501. Jones, S. and Aiken M. (1993). 'The significance of the profit and loss account in the evolution of 19th century regulated financial disclosure: A new interpretation of British accounting history 1836-1900'. Paper presented at the AAANZ Conference, Darwin. Kehl, D. (1976 ). Corporate Dividends, New York, Arno Press (first published in 1941 ). Keister, R.O. (1965). 'The Mechanics of Mesopotamian Record-Keeping', The National Association of Accountants Bulletin, pp.18-24. Littleton, A. C. (1934). 'The Dividend Base', Accounting Review, June, pp.140-8. Littleton, A.C. (1966). Accounting Evolution to 1900, New York: Russell and Russell. Loft, A. (1986). 'Towards a Critical Understanding of Accounting: The Case of Cost Accounting in the UK,1914-1925',Accounting, Organizations and Society, 11 (2): 13769. Mcintyre, A. (1990). Three Rival Versions ofMoral inquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy and Tradition, Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press. Miller, P. and O'Leary, T. (1987). 'Accounting and the Construction of the Governable Person', Accounting, Organizations and Society, 12(3):235-65. Miller, P. (1986). 'Accounting for Progress -National Accounting and Planning in France: A Review Essay', Accounting, Organizations and Society, 11(1):83-104. __ _, (1990). 'On the Interrelations between Accounting and the State', Accounting, Organizations and Society, 15(4):315-38. Mishra, R. (1981). Society and Social Policy, 2nd edn, Macmillan. NSW Select Committee on Old-age Pensions, Report, 1898, p.6. Neild J.C. (1898). Report on Old-age Pensions, Sydney, p.56. Newman R. J. (1956). 'The Rhind Papyrus'. The World of mathematics, New York: Simon and Schuster,4 Volumes: 1:170-8. O'Brien, A. (1988). Poverty's Prison- The Poor in New South Wales 1880-1918, Melbourne University Press. Podder, N. (1978). The Economic Circumstances of the Poor, Commission of Inquiry into Poverty, Consumers and Clients Series, Canberra: AGPS. Struik J.D. (1967). A concise history of mathematics, 3rd rev. edn. New York: Dover Publications.
The Economist (1865). Vol. XXIII, February 4, p.126. __ _, (1890). Vol. XLVIII, July 19, pp.919-920. Titmuss, R.M. (1958). Essays on the Welfare State, Allen and Unwin. Victoria Royal Commission on Old-age Pensions (1898). Report, p.V. Weiner, J., (1928), 'Theory of Anglo-American Dividend Law: English Cases', Columbia Law Review, Vol. XXVIII, pp.1046-60.
'This Is Not A Prison': Foucault, The Panopticon And Pentonville1 John Pratt Since the publication of Discipline and Punish (1977), the impact of Michel Foucault on the way in which it has been possible to think about punishment, and to understand its form and purpose has been both profound and far reaching- as befits such a momentous work. Having said this, though, what I wish to attempt here is to rethink and redevelop some of the main themes of Discipline and Punish (in the manner say of Bottoms 1983 and Garland 1990). In particular, I will argue that rather than Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon becoming the exclusive model for subsequent penal development in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (at least in relation to the two penalsystemswithwhichiammostfamiliar,BritainandNewZealand),we should also look to Pentonville prison, opened in London in 1842. Equally, if my argument is correct, then this has implications that go beyond matters relating to the nature of penal confinement in the last century. As I will go on to substantiate, it raises important questions in relation to our understanding of the form and consequences of penality today. To begin with, let me briefly recap Foucault's main argument. As is well known, it can be said that he turned what might be called the orthodox history of punishment upside down - and also resurrected the long-neglected study of the sociology of punishment (after the pioneering work of Rusche and Kirchheimer 1939). Thus, if the Enlightenment is usually associated with freedom, humanity, order and the provision of security, in Discipline and Punish Foucault shows the other side of the coin: that is, the state of 'unfreedom' in which many now found themselves. If the Enlightenment brought about certain liberating effects, then it also ushered in new forms of social control-less intent and spectacular than had previously been the case, but at the same time more diffuse and systematic. These were the intentions of penal reformers such as John Howard who had tried to make the penal institutions more orderly and rational than had previously been the case. And of course, Jeremy Bentham's model prison, the Panopticon assumes major significance for Foucault since it embodied precisely such values. Designed in 1791, it would have brought order instead of chaos, productivity instead of waste and, through its architectural design, would have made it possible to see everything at all times from a central point: We know the principle on which it was based: at the periphery, an annular building; at the centre, a tower; this tower is pierced with wide windows that open onto the inner side of the ring; the peripheric building is divided into cells, each of which extends the whole width of the building; they have two windows, one on the inside corresponding to the windows of the tower; the other, on the outside, allows the light to cross the cell from one end to the other. All that is needed, then, is to place a supervisor, in a central tower and
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to shut up in each cell a madman, a patient, a condemned man, a worker or a schoolboy (Foucault 1977:200).
Life in the Panopticon would then be a kind of micro-society that was totally controlled and regulated - a version in miniature of the way society at large could be disciplined in the same way. The fact that the Panopticon was never actually built and remained nothing more than a blueprint (and was indeed specifically rejected by a House of Commons Commission in 1810, see Ignatieff 1978:112) is not the issue, as Foucault argues in Discipline and Punish (1977:224-5) and subsequently (for example, Foucault 1989:183). Instead, the importance of the Panopticon lay in its demonstration of how it had become possible to think about penal confinement in the Enlightenment era. By harnessing the emerging 'human sciences' to earlier methods of disciplinary training to be found in such sites as the armed forces and monasteries, the Panopticon thus 'represented the abstract formula of a very real technology, that of individuals' (Foucault 1977:225). As such, the Panopticon was not just an ideal which influenced the subsequent development of nineteenth century penality; it had much wider significance. It also became, according to Foucault, the model for the subsequent development of social control in modern society as a whole. On the one hand, we find strategies of discipline designed to produce 'the obedient subject, the individual subjected to habits, rules, orders, an authority that is exercised continually around him and upon him, and which he must allow to function automatically in him' (Foucault 1977:128-9), ultimately leading to a transformation of 'the soul' (1977:125), on the other, surveillance. In this particular respect, in a society where surveillance was a key strategy of control, what was so perfect, so exquisite about the design of the Panoptic on was that the prisoners would never know when they were being watched:'the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so' (1977:201, my emphasis). In other words the art of the Panopticon lay not in its capacity to destroy a few selected unfortunate individuals, as had been the case in the penality of the pre-Enlightenment era; instead it lay in its capacity to observe and to gain knowledge of any number of its occupants that it chose, at any time that it chose. It carried a permanent, omnipresent threat to all within its reaches. From the prison, Foucault argues that these techniques were gradually diffused out to the rest of society, making it take the form of a 'carceral archipelago', taking on a 'carceral texture, consisting of a "carceral network"' and so on. In this respect Foucault suggests that the carceral system which began with the Panopticon is completed with the opening of Mettray agricultural penal colony in 1840 (basically a reformatory for juvenile offenders). 'Why Mettray? Because it is the disciplinary form at its most extreme, the model in which are concentrated all the coercive technologies of behaviour' (1977:293). Here, the minutest departure from the norm can lead to punishment; and 'the entire parapenal institution, which is created in order not to be a prison culminates in the cell, on the walls of which are written in black letters: 'God sees you" (1977:294). From such beginnings, we see the development 'of an art of punishing that is still more or less our
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own' (1977:296). In other words, the framework of modern punishment and, indeed, the basis of social control in modern society itself- was set down in this period between 1787 and 1840 and based on the strategies to be found in the Panopticon and Mettray. Here, though, I want to suggest that it may well be erroneous to rely on the Panopticon as the unrealised ideal for subsequent penal developments. Indeed, as other writers have suggested (Ignatieff 1978; Evans 1982), this blueprint may well be more representative of the closure of one form of penal confinement- that to be found in the pre-Enlightenment Houses of Correction- rather than that to be found in the Enlightenment era itself. This is not to say that there is no 'carry over' of some of the ideas embedded in the Panopticon model, particularly the emphasis it gave to surveillance in subsequent penal developments. But this in itself raises a further issue in relation to Foucault's work. The history of punishment, as David Garland (1985) has illustrated in his work on Britain, and as I have attempted to do so in my work on New Zealand (Pratt 1992), does not reveal the mutually exclusive layers of development that Foucault infers - such as the sudden shift from punishments on the body to institutional training around 1800. Instead, it is much more likely to be the case that we find incremental growth and refurbishment in the particular system of thought which constitutes 'punishment today', instead of sudden change which sweeps aside all that had preceded it. As it is, what is largely absent from the internal regime of the Panopticon, and certainly receives little if any consideration in Discipline and Punish, is that great imperative of Victorian political economy, the less eligibility principle: that is, the idea that those who would become a burden on the state in whatever capacity, would endure worse conditions than those of the poorest non-dependents. In other words, if such people came to be institutionalised then they would pay dearly for this- not in money, because they probably had none or, in the case of prisoners, had no choice in the matter, but in terms of suffering and humiliation. As I will go on to suggest, it was the Pentonville regime in which these ideas were encapsulated.
The Emergence Of The House Of Correction Certainly, the early nineteenth Century saw the birth of the modern prison, modern in the sense that: imprisonment became the centrepiece of the penal system; its internal regimes were based on classification, the separation of different groups of offenders and standardised rules and procedures; at the same time a barrier was created (for the first time) between 'the imprisoned' and the rest of society. Thus Ignatieff (1978:3) describes the impact of Pentonville as representing 'the culmination of three generations of thinking and experimentation with penitentiary routine. Standing on a huge sixacre site, behind 25 feet high walls, it loomed over the workers' quarters around it, a massive, three pronged fortress of the law'. Penal confinement itself, though, has a much longer history and, in fact goes back to at least the twelfth century (see Pugh 1968). The original sites were varied and ranged from the dungeons of castles, to rooms in inns and, additionally, urban localities such as Newgate gaol and The Fleet prison in London. Initially, it was argued by writers such as Bracton in the thirteenth
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century that confinement should be used only in the cases of offenders pending trial and should not be used as a punishment in itself. However, a century later, 'there were many more opportunities for being consigned to [prison]. First, there was immensely more coercive imprisonment than is now practical. There was also a great deal of penal imprisonment for every type of fraud, contempt, disobedience to authority, failure in public duty and petty crime ... ' (Pugh 1968:386). Langbein (1976) suggests that one reason at least for this multiplication of opportunities for imprisonment relates to the growing recourse to the settlement of disputes by litigation rather than feud (hence the growing number of actions for trespass at this time). By the same token, what had once been actionable in tort then developed into semi-indictable actions. Indeed, the emergence of criminal law itself at this time was representative of the changing nature of state form. It was made possible by the growth of monarchical authority- some central controlling force- from whom the law emanated to depersonalise conflict, and thus render feuding as a form of dispute resolution unnecessary and archaic. One of the results of this shift from personalised to state managed conflict resolution was a growing recourse to penal confinement: both prior to the hearing, to ensure attendance, and afterwards, to ensure the execution of penalties. Furthermore, the nature of this confinement was clearly part of the tapestry of life in late medieval society, as the following extract indicates: some time in the later 14th century, two aldermen of Colchester, taking pity upon the prisoners constricted in stocks outside the town gaol, set up two posts outside the entrance to the gaol to which the prisoners might be chained. So chained, the prisoners might stand, sit, or lie and beg their sustenance from passers-by (Pugh 1968:327).
There are a number of striking features in this description. First, the way in which the concern of the aldermen for the suffering of the prisoners manifested itself: the response was to free them from the stocks- but to then chain them to a post, to facilitate their begging. Second, and stemming from this, it is clear that the sight of the prisoner per se, in the street, having to beg, did not trouble these by-passers. Third, there is no barrier between the confined and the rest of society: the two interact with each other. From these beginnings, the next significant development in penal confinement in Britain took place with the opening of the London Bridewell in 1553. This was to be a place of confinement 'for the strumpet and idle person, for the revolt that consumeth all, and for the vagabond that will abide in no place'. The Bridewell, in effect, was the first House of Correction, combining principles of the poorhouse, workhouse and penal institution - and at the same time prepared to house the diverse categories of the population who fell under such headings. It was an institution that was prepared to take any category of social deviant. Rusche and Kirchheimer (1939,1968:44) describe one such house as taking the form of 'an orphanage, an institution for the blind, deaf and dumb, a lunatic asylum, an infant welfare centre and a penal colony all in one'. The common theme of the Houses of Correction as they sprang up in northern Europe was that 'work is the true aim of life'. But what kind of
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labour would the inmates perform in the house of correction? Let us turn to Rusche and Kirchheimer, (1939:43) for a summary: The labour power of the inmates was utilized in one or two ways: either the authorities ran the institution themselves or the occupants were hired out to a private employer. Occasionally the whole establishment was hired out to a contractor. Male inmates were occupied chiefly in rasping the hard woods used by the dyers, a practice first introduced in Amsterdam. This was particularly difficult work, requiring considerable strength and stamina. Prisoners worked in pairs with a twelve-bladed saw, and the normal week's output for two men was three hundred pounds of wood. One hundred pounds had to be delivered every day. In the eighteenth century, the Dutch found wool manufacture to be more profitable and introduced it into several houses of correction. The women inmates, chiefly prostitutes and beggars, were engaged in the preparation of textiles.
It is important to stress here that inmate labour was intended to be productive; to increase productivity the inmates could be given a share in the profits: so again, the fact of confinement did not altogether shut them off from customs, habits and indeed, the business mores from the world outside the institution. The origins of the House of Correction lie in changing attitudes to labour and poverty that emerged in the course of the sixteenth century. The declining power and authority of the Church in newly Protestant countries such as England forced the break up of feudal society through enclosures of church land (which also help to explain why the House of Correction tended to be a phenomenon located in northern Europe). A new property-less class had been created, dependent for charity on local citizens, rather than the Church and monasteries. In England and Wales, Elizabethan Poor Law had shifted the burden for such provision from the private to the public sector by imposing an obligation on local communities to furnish work for their able-bodied poor. Thus an Act of 1572 set up the general system of relief based on parties; an Act of 1576 was introduced 'for the setting of the Poor on Work and for the A voiding of Idleness'. An Act of 1609 made the erection of Bridewells compulsory in every county. Similarly, in Europe, the Amsterdam rasphuis was opened in 1602; in Paris the Hopi tal-General was founded in 1656. However, opinion on the extent to which the Houses of Correction actually became profitable institutions is divided. In France, it appears that the Hopital-General and its equivalent institutions only succeeded in building up debts, whereas in Germany the contractor succeeded in making great profits. In Britain the popularity of the House of Correction fluctuated with rises and falls in unemployment - being used most when unemployment was high in the periods 1590-1640 and 1690-1720. At other times there was, if anything, a reversion to more corporeal and public punishments (see Sharpe 1984). Equally, as we move into the eighteenth century it is apparent that the intent of these establishments became steadily more blurred and there was little by way of order and production. The rapid turnover of prisoners, administrative confusion, poor organisation and lack of facilities had made the original objectives seldom realisable. As such, at the dawn of the
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Enlightenment, one prison visitor to Clerkenwell House of Correction in London in 1757: observed a great number of dirty young Wenches intermixed with some men, some felons who had fetters on, sitting on the ground against the wall, sunning and lousing themselves; others lying sound asleep; some sleeping with their faces in the men's laps, and some men doing the same by the women. I found oninquirythatthese wenches, mostofthem, were sent hither by the justices as loose and disorderly persons (quoted by Ignatieff 1978:32).
At the same time, there were still no significant barriers between the prisoners and the public. John Howard was told by the keeper of Rochester gaol that 'liberality of the public is so great that we cannot keep the prisoners sober. Persons have even desired to be confined to have the liberty of the begging grate' (Ignatieff 1978:34). Indeed, this practice continued until the early nineteenth century. Dickens (1837, 1969:595) wrote that most of our readers will remember that, within a very few years past, there was a kind ofiron cage in the wall ofthe Fleet Prison, within which was posted some man of hungry looks who, from time to time, rattled a money box, and exclaimed in a mournful voice, 'Pray remember the poor debtors. Pray remember the poor debtors.
As it was, in contrast to the Enlightenment values of order and certainty, penal institutions in the late eighteenth century represented only disorder and uncertainty. At the same time, imprisonment itself was becoming more available for a broad range of nuisance type offences, as exemplified in the Vagrancy Act of 1744: [this] assembled together categories of social condemnation that had been accumulating in various statutes since the day of Elizabeth and added new ones to bring it up to date with the labour discipline needs of the 18th century masters. Besides giving magistrates the power to whip or imprison beggars, strolling actors or gamblers, gypsies, peddlers and 'all those who refused to work for the usual and common wages ... all persons wand'ring abroad and lodging in alehouses, barns and houses or in the open air, not giving a good account of themselves' (Ignatieff 1978:25).
And yet the only institutions and places of penal confinement that were able to receive this growing body of unwanted members of society were completely at odds with the Enlightenment outlook.
The Panopticon It was against this background that Bentham's plan for the Panoptic on were
drawn up. His architectural design would attempt to remedy the deficiencies of the existing modes of penal confinement- by creating order from the disorder that these now represented. Despite the fact that his institution was to be multi-purpose, the first imperative was to divide up the confined populations - each into their specialised Panopticon: penitentiaries for prisoners, then a further series of identically structured institutions for appropriate groups- the deaf, dumb and blind, orphans, single mothers are just a few that Bentham had in mind. 2 Then, after the first division had been accomplished and the prisoners gathered together, a further division would take place. Cellular confinement would produce 'solitary and sequestered individuals' (Bentham 1787; 1843:46-7), rather than 'the crowd' that spilled
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over from goal to the community and vice versa in the pre-Enlightenment era. Within the Panopticon, crowds of undifferentiated criminals would be divided into specific companies. This was necessary since 'crowds, among men whose characters have undergone any sort of stain are unfavourable to good morals. They exclude reflection and they fortify men against shame' (1787; 1843:138). Hence, and following Howard, Bentham spoke against association between debtors with criminals; and [the] mixture of the as yet unhardened with the most hardened and corrupted among criminals. Other association might also here and there be noticed in the same view: such as that between minor delinquents and such classes of criminals whose offences were of the deepest dye; that between convicted and unconvicted criminals; and that between criminals under sentence of death, and others whose lot was less deplorable' (1787, 1843:138).
In contrast, companies would be formed according to the following rules: '1. Put not in the same company, corrupt and uncorrupted; 2. The more corrupt the individuals, the less numerous make the company' (1787; 1843: 139). This would then make it possible 'to avoid those compact, swarming, howling masses that were to be found (hitherto) in places of confinement' (Foucault 1977:200) and- almost as importantly for Bentham- had also been decamped on the other side of the prison walls: 'in the contrivance of the fences [around the prison] I had of course two classes of persons in view: the prisoners within; and hostile mobs' (Bentham 1791; 1843:105). Hence both the internal arrangements and external approach to the Panopticon were of vital significance for Bentham. On the inside, the Inspection Tower would allow for surveillance at all times; but at the same time, the observers themselves would be under scrutiny. Although built beyond city walls, the Panopticon would be thrown open to the public in whom would be vested a right of inspection. Indeed, Bentham even suggested that an inn be built near the Panopticon to provide refreshment to the anticipated stream of visitors. But how were the occupants of the Panopticon to be transformed from the undisciplined pre-Enlightenment mob to the rational citizens of the Classical age, fulfilling their civic duties and responsibilities? Here is where the layout of the approach to the Panopticon becomes all important. First of all, set it back away from the public, unlike for example, Newgate gaol: that building, including the keeper'shouse, ran along the public footway ... no impediment does it present, natural or legal, that can hinder any single man, or any body of men, from introducing their eyes or hands close to the keeper's windows. A little army may come up with clubs and iron bows to the very door, ready to force it open... (Betnham 1791, 1843:108). Instead, make the approach 'one only: a walled avenue, cut through and from the surrounding wall to the front of the building, thrown back purposely to a certain distance, say, for example only 240 feet ... ' (1787; 1843:105). In this way, hostile mobs on their way to the prison could be broken down into an orderly procession of individuals, as they passed along the avenue. Should they refuse, then they would simply be barred further
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access at various points along it. Thus, it was as if Bentham envisaged a perpetual flow of information taking place: on the one hand, guards, strategically placed, could relay information back to alert a further set of guards to close gates and so forth; on the other, there would also be a flow of information out of the Panopticon, conveyed by the visitors as they left. This process would ensure that there was still no impenetrable barrier between the institution and the public. The latter would be welcome observers. Indeed, this open relationship between institutions and the public also helps to explain another aspect of the Panopticon: the comparative lack of castellation and fortification around its perimeter. Such Gothic artefacts only flourish in a society of secrecy; they can only convey a message about the world they hide when the public has no access to it to judge for itself. But, of course, in the Panopticon there would be no such secrecy: all could be revealed at any time, and it had been designed to allow the public to judge for themselves the efficiency and consequences of its internal regime. What, then, was to happen within the Panopticon? Foucault (1977:205) sees it as 'polyvalent in its applications; it serves to reform prisoners, but also to treat patients, to instruct school children, to confine the insane, to supervise workers, toputbeggarsandidlerstowork'. Themostproblematic issue for our concerns here is in relation to 'the reform of prisoners'. What Bentham seems to have in mind is the way in which participation in labour might 'teach the prisoners a lesson' - which in itself does not seem to resemble discipline in the way in which this term is used by Foucault (that is, designed to effect a transformation of the prisoner's 'soul'; see also Bottoms 1983). Unremitting performance at labour was designed to make the prisoners understand the consequences oflaw breaking- and also the rewards that good works, through labour, would bring. And the public as well as the prisoners (rational subjects all) would be able to see for themselves the consequences of law-breaking. As such, the organisation and objectives of the Panopticon were much the same of those of the House of Correction but, in a manner befitting the Enlightenment era in which the plans were drawn up, were put on a more rational, more orderly basis. Thus, theopportunityforconstantsurveillancewouldensuretheefficient performance of labour. Furthermore, the entire management of the institution was to be contracted out to the private sector: 'I would farm out the profits, the no-profits, or if you please the losses, to him who, being in other respects, unexceptionable, offered the best terms' (Bentham 1787, 1843:47). As such, the success of failure of the institution - in economic terms depended upon the managerial ability and nous of its manager. Furthermore, this person would now be accountable to the public at large through the publication of his accounts- 'the whole process and detail of his management, the whole history of the prison' (1787, 1843:47-8). Again, the Panopticon prohibited secrecy, and as to use to which the prison labour would be put, 'who can say? -least of anybody, the legislator. Sometimes one sort, sometimes another' (1787, 1843:141). In other words, it would be up to the manager of the Panopticon to decide how his particular charges would be used and hired out (1787, 1843:49).
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In effect, there was no central, controlling bureaucracy to devise a set of rules unique to the penal institution which would also have the effect of separating it off from the rest of society. Instead, the general terms of the free market would apply to allow the prisons to be run at a profit. Bentham merely proposed the following guidelines on the division and deployment of convict labour: first ... those who already are possessed of businesses capable of being carried on with advantage in the prison: in the second, those trained up to businesses which though not capable in themselves of being carried on within such limits, yet by the similarity of operation have a tendency to render it more or less easy for a man to learn some of those other business which are' (1787,1843:49) the third rank would involve the employment of 'porters, coalheavers, gardeners, and husbandmen' and 'in the last I would place men regularly brought up to the profession of thieving and others who have never been brought up to any kind of industry' (1787, 1843:50). Clearly, then, Bentham favoured very diverse labour programs to ensure that the labour potential of each convict would be maximised. Indeed, he was very much against what he termed 'labour for labour's sake' (Bentham 1791, 1843:143); this could lead only to 'unprofitable trade' (Bentham 1787, 1843:51). Even so, it was this same principle that had been embedded in the Hard Labour Bill, to become the Penitentiary Act of 1779, which had provoked his original interest in the Panopticon model. Indeed, the 1779 Act had not simply legislated for unprofitable labour but hard labour, labour designed for the specific purpose of being unpleasant, over and above any profit that it might then produce. Bentham's reaction to this concept was as follows: when one turns to the hard labour bill, it looks as if the framers of it had been under some anxiety to find out businesses that they thought might do in their penitentiary houses ... [for example] 1. treading in a wheel; 2. drawing in a capstan for turning a mill or other machine or engine; 3. beating hemp; 4. rasping logwood; 5. chopping rags ... I find some difficulty, however, in conceiving to what use this instruction was destined ... (1787, 1843:51). In contrast, he argued that: I do [not) see why labour should be the less reforming for being profitable. On the contrary, among working men whom the discipline of the house would so effectually keep from all kinds of mischief, I must confess I know of no test of reformation so plain or so sure as the improved quantity and value of their work (1787, 1843:50). Again then, performance in labour seems designed to offer the prisoners a kind of morality lesson, with little served up by way of Foucauldian disciplinary training, while at the same time ensuring that a profit is made for the prison manager. Ifthiswastorepresent'aBenthamitephysicsofpower'(Foucault1977:209), then it can also be seen as an extension of earlier penal developments, embodied in the plans for the House of Correction, rather than a radical break from them. The prisoners are simply expected to learn the lesson that the performance of hard work is pointing towards: the rewards of virtue. By
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the same token, the prisoners would be paid 'the going rate' for their labour: 'the workman lives in a poor country, where wages are low; but in a poor country a man who is paid according to his work will exert himself at least as much as a rich one' (Bentham 1787. 1843:54). This would also allow the prisoners to build up savings for their release (1787, 1843:55), thus placing their future in their own hands - the state had no management of this. Nonetheless, it is also clear that Bentham, along with contemporary penal reformers, sought to distinguish the penitentiary from the disorder and ineffectiveness of previous penal institutions -but in such a way that this would also be in line with the prevailing mode of political economy. AB such, it was thought that those institutionalised should not receive any advantage from their imprisonment since this would raise their status above that of 'the poorest [non-imprisoned] class'. But there were also limits to the austerity and unpleasantness of the institutions, otherwise they would become counter-productive and destroy anypotentialfor labour (and profit making) that the inmate might have. Furthermore, these establishments were mean to impose a minimal burden of expenditure on the State. Hence Bentham's house rules: 1.
2.
3.
Rule of lenity: the ordinary condition of a convict doomed to forced labour for a length of time, ought not to be attended with bodily suffering, or prejudice, or danger to health or life. Rule of severity: saving regard due to life, health and bodily ease, the ordinary condition of a convict doomed to a punishment which few or none but individuals ofthe poorest class are apt to incur, ought not to be made more eligible than that of the poorest class of subjects in a state of innocence and liberty. Rule of economy: saving regard due to life, health, bodily ease, proper instruction, and future provision, economy ought, in every point of management, to be previously considered. No public expense ought to be incurred, or profit or saving rejected, for the sake either of punishment or of indulgence' (Bentham 1791, 1843:122).
However, as Ignatieff (1978:110) suggests: 'such a conception of institutional management may have been couched in the new language of political economy but it was hardly novel. It was an adaptation of the contract system that had been practiced in many workhouses and houses of correction since the late seventeenth century (see also Melossi and Pavarini 1981:40; Evans, 1982:195). As such, it would seem that these particular aspects of the Panopticon represent the endpoint of one era of penal development rather than the starting point of that which came to dominate nineteenth century penality.
Pentonville To move from the blueprint of the Panopticon to the opening of the model prisonPentonville, we have to build in a number of crucial features that were missing in Bentham's dream. Equally, we have to disengage ourselves from some of the lines of development that were embodied in it. In relation to the former, this includes the introduction of the rule of silence - not only unmentioned in the Panopticon outline, but presumably, unthought of, since, within such an institution, it could only be unproductive. How would it be possible to engage in any kind oflabour that would bring profit without
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any kind of communication- at least between contractors and prisoners? As with conversation between inspector and prisoner, Bentham envisaged that this might take place by means of 'conversation tubes' running from the Inspection tower to each cell, and demonstrating the values of 'certainty, promptitude and uniformity' (Bentham 1791, 1843:85). Notwithstanding this, the point here is that the rule of profitability does not seem to have stipulated that labour should become totally individualised and a noncommunicative exercise. However, the rule of silence at all times became a key element in prison discipline in the 1830s. It had first been introduced in the American penal system. At Auburn, the prisoners were confined in their cells by night, but worked by day in associated workshops under this rule ('the silent system'). By contrast, in Philadelphia, prisoners were made to endure as much as five years total seclusion broken only by visits from the prison staff. The prisoners worked and slept and took exercise on their own in tiny walled pens attached to each cell ('the separate system'). After some study of each in the 1830s, the British Home Office came down in favour of a modified version of the latter, taking the view that 18 months in solitary confinement rather than between5 and 10 years would be sufficient to induce repentance. Such ideas eventually found their way into the architecture and administration of Pentonville prison. If this incorporated the principle of surveillance to be found in the Panopticon, in other respects there were important differences. The rule of silence was introduced and policed to extraordinary lengths. For example, to prevent any communication, prisoners wore masks during exercise; to prevent even any noise at all from breaking the silence, wardens would wear slippers to avoid being heard. Furthermore, in Pentonville, it was not so much the prisoners who were policed at all times, rather than the space between the cells they occupied to prevent communication and containment (Ignatieff 1978). Pentonville had also become a place of secrets, in a way in which the Panopticon could never have been. A firm barrier had now been placed between the prison and the public, exemplified in the form of the portcullis entrance to Pentonville and supported by the castellation around the walls, which came to feature in subsequent prison building in the nineteenth century, even to the extent of decoration with fetters and ball and chain (see Evans 1982). Such Gothic imagery was designed to give a message that the bland exterior of the Panopticon, and the open society it housed, had no need of. Now, barring observation of what happened inside Pentonville, this house of secrets, its exterior architecture would tell the public what happened on the inside: no escape, pain, suffering- you would be advised never to come here. But, perhaps even more significantly, the main disengagement from the Panopticon ideal is 'the severance of labour from profit' (Evans 1984:297) that we find in Pentonville. In the latter, prison labour was turned into an affliction, a form of penitence; it would become pointless not because of poor organisation, or lack of clarity in penal objectives. It was made pointless by deliberate intent. Prison labour was made deliberately pointless. Indeed, its sheer uselessness was meant to enhance the convicts' awe of such a punish-
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ment and deter them from committing further crimes. Again (and contra Foucault 1977) it was not on account of any disciplinary training that the prison might offer which made it a popular sanction - but the fact that its regime would deprive inmates of everything they had known previously. Prison would thus be the greatest possible waste of one's life: even its labour was designed to produce nothing at all. But, as we have seen, the concept of 'hard labour' predates Bentham's writing itself. The 1779 Penitentiary Act (to be the subject of much criticism by him) had legislated this concept into prison administration. To bring this about, special instruments of prison discipline such as the treadwheel and the crank came to find their home in 19th century penal institutions. Furthermore, s. 40 of the Act provided for the wearing of coarse prison uniforms for the purpose of humiliating the wearers- and Bentham himself had no objection to the humiliation of prisoners per se. The only caveat that he raised to this particular feature of the Act was that uniforms could simply be discarded. Something more permanent was needed to bring about this effect. He thus considered 'partial shaving of the head, or of the beard, or the chin or mouth; or the shaving of the eyebrow' - alternatively it might be possible to stain the prisoners' skin 'instances of chymical [sic] means of producing marks or washes applied to the forehead, or to one or both cheeks, or, in short to the whole face, so as to discolour it' (Bentham 1778, 1843:20). Even at this time, it was recognised that prisons could be used not to provide training butterror. Prison Commissioner Paul proclaimed that 'I am not of the number of those who from a misplaced tenderness of heart would unbind the just terrors of the law. I am far from thinking that prisons should be places of comfort - they should be places of real terror' (quoted by Harding et al. 1985:123). Indeed, Paul, it seems, took Bentham's ideas of humiliation a full 50 percent further and introduced complete shaving of the head. This had a hygienic purpose, but it was also intended to bring 'a mortification to the offender, it became a punishment to the mind' (Ignatieff 1978:101). If, though, the prisons are to be used to humiliate, the nature of the prisoners' appearance becomes only one aspect of this process. The next step is to make their participation in the hard labour projects entirely pointless. In Britain, as late as the 1820s produce (such as corn) from treading the wheel and so on was being sold on the open market (Evans 1982:295). By the 1830s, though, we find Prison Inspector Crawford criticising the emphasis placed on productive prison labour and on the training of prisoners in work skills. 'It is one thing to render a convict a skilful mechanic and another to induce him to become an honest man... it should never be forgotten that a goal is not a school for the instruction of artisans, but a place of punishment' (quoted by Harding et al. 1985:148). And then we find this shift in opinion reflected in the Pentonville regime: instead of producing corn, the prisoners would produce nothing: they would tread the wheel and turn the crank endlessly and eternally - for nothing. It may well be the case, as Foucault (1977:239-44) suggests, that at a time of labour shortage this disassociation between work and profit was necessary because of outside pressures brought to bear by the representatives of
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free labour. But at the same time, it brought the prison administration firmly into line with the cornerstone of social policy proclaimed by the Poor Law Commission: the less eligibility principle. It was no longer the case Bentham's maxim- that prisoners should not enjoy 'more eligibility' than the poorest free people (Report of the Poor Law Commissioner 1834). By the 1830s the principle had been inverted: those confined had to suffer more than those who were free and non-burdensome, they had to be actively penalised. What was to be the end product? The production of 'docile workers'? Perhaps, in some cases. More to the point, though, the association between labour and pain, humiliation and futility seems to have been designed to produce a permanently scarred and suffering class. If the exterior of Pentonville was designed to put outsiders off from ever visiting there, the internal regimes were designed to frighten away, to deter the ex-convicts from ever contemplating a return. On their release, they might not carry the distinguishing features that Bentham dreamed up for them but the way in which they carried the prison stain and its disqualifying power - was a sign, a warning to others of what happened to those who ventured into criminality. As such, the transformation of prison labour (from utility to uselessness) was a major feature in the institutional matrix of Pentonville. Indeed, the severance of labour from profit was disturbing to Benthamites such as James Stuart Mill, quoted by Evans (1982:297): to make labour an affliction and to deny a man recompense for it was unwise. The monotonous drudgery ofthe mill was quite acceptable, however, so long as a certain pleasure was obtained on the profit. For the prison to instil a desire to work in shiftless and lazy inmates it would need to function as a miniature model of the free-track economy.
But, by now, the rules of prison life were no longer governed by the same rules of free society. As we see in the Pentonville regime, less eligibility dominated, not free trade. Nor was there any space for the entrepreneurial zeal of private contractors in Pentonville. The private sector only led to disparities and uncertainty. To ensure the standardisation of rules, categories and classes, the state would have to assume central control of its penal institutions. And from now on the prisoners would be subjected to the rules of prison society, not those of the world outside it. Matters such as their garb, enforced silence, pointless labour, minimal contact with friends and family led to the estrangement of the prisoners from the world outside the prison. Indeed, far from being a feature of the ebb and flow of everyday life as had previously been the case, prison now brought everyday life to an abrupt halt. The prison walls denoted its endpoint; within them, a new life, based on totally different norms and values- that had suffering and deprivation at their heart - would begin. But so too were the prison guards themselves affected by this estrangement, by virtue of having to police this world within a world that the penal institution had become. Their own remoteness from free society was enforced by their very conditions of employment - for example, rules of residence which compelled them to live on or adjacent to the prison. And the
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more withdrawn for all parties life inside the gaol became, the more the divisions between it and life outside deepened. Subsequent penal developments in Britain in the nineteenth century followed the same route. The Report ofthe Carnavon Committee (1865) outlined the 'hard bed, hard labour, hard fare' program that dominated institutional life. On the matter of diet, the Commissioners recommended that the best arrangement of a prison dietary would be one by which the prisoner having assigned to him, at first, the lowest possible diet consistent with the maintenance of health, should be enabled to earn by industrious exertion a diet gradually improved through progressive stages. Common sense seemed to indicate that the amount of food given should have some relation to the labour undergone, and that the natural stimulus offered by having an object to work for would act beneficially on the prisoner in a sanitary as well as in an industrial point of view (Parliamentary Papers [PP] 1864 xlix:608).
And work should be of the severest kind: ' ... whilst industrial occupation should in certain stages form a part of prison discipline, the more strictly penal element of that discipline is the chief means of exercising a deterrent influence, and therefore ought not to be weakened, as it has been in some gaols, still less to be entirely withdrawn' (Report of the Carnavon Committee 1865, quoted by Harding et al. 1985:159). In this context, the purpose of punishment was expressed as follows by the Lord Chief Justice in 1863: 'the reformation of the offender is in the highest degree speculative and uncertain, and its permanency in the face of renewed temptation exceedingly precarious. On the other hand, the impression produced by suffering inflicted as the punishment of crime, and the fear of its repetition are far more likely to be lasting' (PP 1863 xxi, vol.1:88, my emphasis). Again, the disciplinary training of offenders seems to be at a minimum level. The main purpose of imprisonment was to disadvantage the prisoners through suffering. It was assumed that this would then deter them from future crime, rather than bring about any transformation of their attitude, character and so on while in prison. Furthermore, in the early twentieth century, when such reformatory training was introduced to the penal systems of countries such as Britain and New Zealand, it did not simply replace the existing ideas on penality centred largely around deterrence; it had to be mediated through them. Thus in New Zealand there was opposition to any form of training at this time, which might in some way advantage the prisoners over non-prisoners. In 1910, the point was raised in the debate on the Crimes Act Amendment Bill that where there is the slightest possibility of education and healthy refining influences helping to bring them back to proper ideas oflife, it is a good thing that the State should employ them in any way it can. But it is a very different thing if we are going to make our gaols factories to train men who, after they come out of gaol, are going to look for employment in the walks of life where they have to rub shoulders with men who have never seen the inside of a gaol' (New Zealand Parliamentary Debates [NZPD] 1910 vol.151:538).
Similarly: 'we must always remember that our prisons are places of punishment, and not encourage people to go there for the sake of getting through the winter' (NZPD:541);
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in furthering the principle of reformation, we should not lose sight altogether of that other principle - a necessary one in our legislation, necessary in the interests of public morality and public safety- that due punishment shall be meted out to that person who commits a crime' (NZPD:SlO); 'the primary object of sending a man to prison was to punish him as a personal deterrent and as a deterrent to others, not to reform him (NZPD:538).
To offset such criticisms, the New Zealand Justice Minister had to give a familiar set of assurances. The training he had in mind was to be of a very basic nature, such as rudimentary agricultural work or labouring; women convicts would be taught social etiquette and given the opportunity to learn a useful trade in such areas as 'domestic service', 'cookery', and 'dressmaking'. In this way, the prisoners would only gain a very limited and introductory knowledge. This would qualify them to return to society, but was not intended to give them a qualification per se since this would give them an unfair advantage over non-lawbreakers and would be counter to the less eligibility principle. It seems clear that these feelings still influence the nature and form that penality takes today. For example, in New Zealand there are periodic outbursts against prisoners having access to colour television, Christmas dinners or even- a recent incident- being fed chicken. But even more significant, perhaps, is the way in which this sentiment constrains the way in which governments can actually go about the process of penal reform. The possibilities for character transformation through punishment envisaged by Foucault have, at least in New Zealand and England and Wales, always been limited because of the determination to ensure that prisoners will not be 'advantaged' by breaking the law. This presents us with the following paradox. To be a success, to ensure that prisoners do not keep coming back soon after their release, to turn them into 'docile bodies', managerial logic actually demands that they, and offenders in general should receive certain benefits - education, training for employment, skilled counselling and so on - in a bid to remedy all those personal deficiencies which, particularly since the reforms of the early twentieth century, have been accredited with responsibility for their criminal behaviour (see Pratt 1992; on England and Wales, see Garland 1985). Yet the reality is that governments can provide hardly any of this. They can only make patchwork repairs to the system. They are constrained by financial stringencies, the lack of staff sufficiently skilled in the high levels of expertise that changing people's behaviour actually requires and so on. But they are also constrained by public opinion which demands punishment and not what appears to be 'treats' (Walker and Hough 1988). In effect, it is as if the form that punishment takes today is mediated through '[the] two contrasting visions at work in contemporary criminal justice: the passionate, morally toned desire to punish, and the administrative, rationalistic normalising concern to manage' (Garland 1990:180). In effect, it is clear that the forces underlying 'punishment today' do not have 'social control' as their sole aim and objective. Indeed, the disciplinary training that features so strongly in Foucault's work has a fairly limited role within modern penal institutions today.3 apart from anything else, governments have seldom had the resources and are politically constrained from
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the full development of such projects. Indeed, these constraints are likely to have their origins in cultural factors. When such influences are brought into play they can ensure that the apparatus of punishment has little of the relentless consistency and rationality that Foucault implies. Not only this, but the sheer pointlessness and deprivations in prison life so brought perhaps helps to engender the culture of danger and violence to be found there (see for example Scraton et al. 1991).
Mettray What, though, ofMettray, the ColonieAgricole, opened in 1840 and which for Foucault assures the hegemony of the carceral network? Again, it is possible to see the significance of this particular institution in a somewhat different light: not as marking the closure of the particular line of penal development that Foucault attributes to it, but, rather the beginning of a new one. To establish what this might be, let us refer to the description of Mettray provided by Evans (1982:391-2): It was not exactly a prison. Central supervision was given up and replaced
with 12 independent but still autocratic family units, planned to appear as part ofa small rural village. The mysterious but mechanical morality of solitude was supported by the instruction and example of 'parents', the cell by the home (my emphasis).
In certain respects, Evans seems to be in agreement with Foucault's (1977:297) contention that the regulatory code which the institution obeyed meant that it was located 'well beyond the frontiers of criminal law'. Indeed, its inmates could be sanctioned not just for law breaking but for offending the values of 'family life' which Mettray was determined to impose on them. From these beginnings, such reformatory regimes spread throughout France and greatly impressed American penal reformers such as Wines: '[there is] nothing of the prison about them- no walls, no spies, no guards; family influences are made prominent and predominant' (quoted by Evans 1982:393). The point is, though, that what we see emerging here is a split in criminal jurisdiction - between adults and juveniles. For the rest of the nineteeth century (certainly in jurisdictions such as England and Wales and New Zealand) adult behaviour would be regulated by and large according to principles of classical legal theory and Victorian political economy (see Wiener 1990; Pratt 1992a). Against this, the forms of penality regulating the behaviour of juveniles clearly bears much closer resemblance to Foucault's own concept of discipline. From this divergence around the mid-nineteenth century, the subsequent realignment and point of intersection between the two modalities takes place in the early part of the twentieth century. This saw the impact of the 'new penology'4 which led to the much greater investigation into the background of offenders, the introduction and extension of indeterminate sentences and so on. Indeed, Garland (1985:19) refers to such developments as forming part of 'the modern penal complex': there no longer exists a universe of fact and equal legal subjects which coincides with the same adult population. Now there are categories which pose exceptions to the rule, classes which exhibit only limited degrees of freedom and a large population of'special cases'. Neither reason nor responsibility can any longer be simply presumed in the presence of juveniles,
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vagrants, habituals, inebriates or the feeble-minded. The modern system's recognition of these diverse populations, and the new criminologies which encouraged this enlightenment and sought to extend it, together prompt the question of 'who are you?' whenever an offender enters their gaze.
But apart from its role in the early history of the modern penal complex, Mettray has a further significance. It was a prison that did not wish to be seen as a prison- in some respects it was a prison that did not wish to be seen at all. It was built in the country, away from the urban locality of most of its inhabitants: it wanted to give the appearance of being an unremarkable feature of a 'small rural village'. In this respect alone, it stands in marked contrast not simply to Pentonville, but to the imagery of modernity itself. The modern city of the Enlightenment would be a city dominated by institutions- as we find in Pugin's lithograph, reprinted in Evans (1982:241 ). Here, 'the modern city' is shown to have the following buildings at its epicentre: a church, a lunatic asylum, a gasworks and a prison- all of which have since disappeared from the centre of urban life. As far as penal institutions are concerned, Mettray can thus be seen as representing the origins of that line of penal development - hitherto largely unnoticed or at least unremarked - which saw the displacement of the prison from its position of dominance in the City; indeed, where such buildings remain they are likely to be regarded as outmoded relics from a bygone era or even tourist attractions.s Surely it is the case that most prison buildings in the twentieth century have followed the example ofMettray. These institutions have been hidden away- in the country, or remote suburbs, or by disguising their facade- as if there is now something quite shameful or disturbing about even the very sight of a prison. In this respect, the disappearance- from sight- of the penal institution can be linked to a much longer historical antecedent. Pieter Spierenburg (1984) has charted the gradual 'taming' and the ultimate disappearance of public executions in Europe from the fourteenth to the early nineteenth century. For him, the main cause of this was the growing sensitivity to and distaste for 'disturbing events': carried out in public. This catalogue included toilet habits, the butchery of animals, sexual conduct, and the infliction of pain and suffering on others. Legal punishment, as it then was, obviously came into this latter category and, as these sentiments of distaste gradually became more pronounced and refined, he argues, so the form that punishment took began to change. The subsequent reorganisation of personal habits, architecture, social practises and so on that was engendered by this growth of 'the sensitivities' (see also Thomas 1984) has come to form the foundation of the social life, etiquettes and expectations of modern Western societies. The diminution of corporeal punishments and also their privatisation was part of this process. My argument here then (and which extends Spierenburg's thesis) is that if prisons were initially suited to replace the public and corporeal punishments of the pre-Enlightenment era, the prisons themselves were then subjected to the same sensitivities and came to be caught up in the move to have any aspects of modern punishment hidden away. Let me illustrate this point by reference to prison building in Wellington, New Zealand. In the
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nineteenth century, there were two goals, built in the centre of the city. However, opposition to the presence of the Terrace Gaol had begun from the late 1870s, when the area became an affluent residential area for civil servants working in the nearby parliament buildings (Hamer 1990). Thus, in 1883, it was suggested that it is impossible to avoid pointing out the deplorable mistake made by the Government in setting down a convict establishment in the centre of this city... It is objectionable from every point of view- objectionable as opposed to all good taste or propriety in placing a criminal lazar-house on the finest site in the whole town, where a public building dedicated to some noble or benevolent purpose should stand as the cynosure to the public eye (NZPD 1883, vol.205:360).
With this prison again in mind, it was later claimed that the presence of gaols in cities 'was like a man having a rubbish tip on his front lawn' (NZPD 1900, vol.113:599). Equally, its intended replacement, Mount Cook Prison, built on a central hill which allowed it to dominate the entire landscape of Wellington, had to be left 'lying idle' because of 'local agitation against any housing of prisoners amongst that community' (Report of the Inspector of Prisons 1900:3). In 1909 the Terrace gaoler reported that 'the time has arrived for erecting new prison buildings ... in regard to the male prison, I beg to suggest that one be built in the country, surrounded by plenty of land' (Report of the Inspector of Prisons 1909:11). The prison should be hidden away, they seemed to be saying, so that it could be forgotten about, rather than remain as the centrepiece of any modern town or city. The death knell of the Terrace Gaol was finally sounded in 1924 when it was reported that [this prison] has been obsolete for some years past, and fully ten years past the site upon which it stands was promised to the Wellington Education Board for school purposes. An infants school has already been built on a part of the reserve adjoining the prison itself... [and] it became obvious that the prison could not be allowed to remain permanently on the fine site it occupies, to the possible detriment of the present scholars and of others for whose accommodation the remainder of the site is very badly required (Report of the Under Secretary for Prisons 1925:5).
In 1921 Mount Cook prison was closed; in 1924 building started on 'Wellington Prison No.2' at Watts Peninsula, now known as Mount Crawford. It is hidden behind the curves of the bay and unless one actually lives in the locality it is, to all intents and purposes, invisible to the rest of the city. Thus over a very short period, Wellington's urban prisons disappeared- and it would seem that any attempt to specify the identifying features of modern penality must take into account the continuous moves to have the punishment process hidden away.
Punishment Today How, then, does this reinterpretation of the significance of the Panopticon, Pentonville and Mettray affect the way in which we should understand punishment today? Clearly, one of the most significant aspects of modern punishment is, in the manner of the Panopticon, its capacity for surveillance. Indeed, as we see
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embodied in the architecture of the Panopticon and its surrounds, this necessitated surveillance not only on the inside but outside the institution as well: both prisoners and those coming to view them could be scrutinised at any time. As society has since developed, strategies of surveillance have changed somewhat. This no longer means simply watching or keeping a check on suspicious individuals whenever we choose to do so, although there are no doubt examples of that that we could look to: such as probation and that new technology of punishment (electronic monitoring of offenders and so on). But, in addition, surveillance of the population at large (cf. Mathiesen 1983) through the collection of records, keeping files and so on is also possible. Here, then, is the Western way of punishment: in addition to what one has done, it is the kind of person one is that matters. A record, a file, a dossier that agencies with the power to judge individuals (the school, the hospital, social welfare and so on- not just the courts and the police) may contribute to and which tells the recipient all about 'the kind of person' the recipient is thought to be (Pratt 1992b:112).
Indeed, as Foucault (1977:299) himself suggests: 'the 'carceral' with its many diffuse or compact forms, its institutions of supervision or constraint, of discreet surveillance and insistent coercion, assured the communication of punishments according to quality and quantity: it connected in series or dispersed according to subtle divisions the minor and the serious penalties, the mild and the strict forms of treatment, bad marks and light sentences. You will end up in the convict-ship, the slightest indiscipline seems to say; and the harshest of prisons says to the prisoners condemned to life: I shall note the slightest irregularity in your conduct. As such, this aspect of the Panopticon embodied a crucial strategy of control- and also can be seen as a metaphor for the kind of society in which we live today. But it is only a partial metaphor. Running alongside this line of development we also find the remnants and legacies of those forces that were housed originally in Pentonville rather than the Panopticon. First, the way in which the infliction of modern punishment has come to be associated with disadvantage, disqualification and deprivation, rather than 'discipline' in the Foucauldian sense of the term. Such pains of imprisonment today are not caused by the hideous physical suffering and torture of the pre-Enlightenment period but by the remorseless decay of the human spirit that prison life engenders. We will ensure that crime brings you less than nothing, seems to be the message. Nothing itself would imply some sort of penal equilibrium: if dues are paid, the slate can be wiped clean, so to speak. But, second, this would be too easy, indeed, too 'rational', given the emotive forces and sensibilities that help to constitute modern punishment. No, you will carry the consequences of your conviction with you always and rest assured that, although you might like to forget about it, the state itself never will. 6 And the state is still prepared to pick up the pieces and foot the subsequent bill for the lives it so fractures. For most prisoners, the only useful training they receive is in survival tactics; instead of producing'docile bodies', the most usual prison product is that of damaged and scarred individuals.
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Third, let us consider the consequences of the way in which punishment has faded into the background of modern society. This in itself reinforces the pains of imprisonment through estranging all it houses from mainstream society and so on. Indeed, rather than contemporary prison regimes serving as models on which the rest of society is founded, prisons have become places of exclusion, places that the rest of society does not care to have involvement with and would indeed prefer to have hidden out of sight because of the discomfort that the very thought of imprisonment raises. If prisons are no longer as physically dominant as they used to be, they remain fearful spectres that haunt the weltanschauung of Western society, because of their association with suffering and loss rather than training and profit. 1
2
3
4
5 6
This title is, of course, a parody of Foucault's own Ceci n'est pas une pipe [This is not a pipe] (1983). I would like to thank Bob Tristram and Kevin White of the Department of Sociology, Victoria University of Wellington for their encouragement of this paper; and two anonymouse reviewers for their helpful critical comments of an earlier draft. This paper was first published in Social and Legal Studies, (1993), 2:373-95. Evans (1982:281) writes that: '[Bentham's] manuscripts are littered with odd fragments extending the principle ever more widely. In one of these can be found plans for a Panopticon chicken coop called the Ptenotrophium. In another the penitentiary was to be the nucleus of a colony which would include the Sotimion for unsupported mothers ... '. My attention has been drawn to the fact that, ten years ago, writing about developments in the regulation of the young and unemployed, I made the point that such groups were being housed in new disciplinary institutions. Furthermore, 'in this new era of controt the current localities of disciplinary training do not put a scar across the face of society,like old institutions did: indeed, we count it as a sign of progress, an indication of our journey towards a more civilized society that we have left behind these relics from our past. What we now find is that many ofthe training workshops etc. are to be found in outlying, rarely visited city areas, or in old warehouses or disused church basements (and, of course, those on 'work experience schemes are well camouflaged as real workers - the only difference being that they receive no wages). This submerged part of the population rarely trespasses across the appears of reality, at the onset of 1984... ' (Pratt 1983:357). Clearly, the hidden nature of this training can be seen as part of the same processes which have helped to shift prison and other 'disturbing events' outofsightinmodemsociety. Butitisalsoclear,ofcourse, that something much closer to discipline in the Foucauldian sense is taking place in these sites rather than the penal institutions. Indeed, experience of such discipline has become part of the veryday experiences of the young unemployed in particular. But the location of discipline here rather than int he penal sector would again seem to point to the way in which the punishment process has been determined by values which largely exclude such training. Again, prisons, rather than being towards the end of a continuum of controt impose a rigid distinction between their criminal population and the rest of society. By the term 'new penology' I am referring to the work of the Italian scholars, Lombroso, Garofalo and Ferri and their successors; and the impact of new initiatives in punishment, such as the Elmira Reformatory. See Pratt (1992a); Pasquino (1991). As in the example of 'old Melbourne Gaol', now a National Trust Building, but situated in the heart of downtown Melbourne. See Pratt (1992b:98-9). This, of course, is notwithstanding the (extremely limited) reforms brought about by such legislation as the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 (in England and Wales). This provided for convictions to be 'spent' under certain circumstances.
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Bibliography Bentham, J. (1778, 1843). 'A View of the Hard Labour Bill', in Bowring, J.• The Works of Jeremy Bentham, Vol. IV, Edinburgh: William Tait. __ _, (1787, 1843). 'Panopticon; or the Inspection House', in Bowring, J., The Works o!Jeremy Bentham, Vol. IV, Edinburgh: William Tait. __ _, (1791, 1843). 'Panopticon: Postscript', in Bowring, J., The Works of Jeremy Bentham, Vol. IV, Edinburgh: William Tait. Bottoms, A. E. (1983). 'Neglected Features of Contemporary Penal Systems' in Garland, D. and Young, P. (eds), The Power to Punish, London: Heinemann. Dickens, C. (1837, 1969). The Pickwick Papers, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Evans, R. (1982). The Fabrication of Virtue, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish, London: Allen Lane. __ _, (1983). Ceci n'est pas une pipe [This is not a pipe], London: University of California Press. __ _, (1989) Foucault Live, New York: Semiotext(e). Garland, D. (1985). Punishment and Welfare, Aldershot: Gower. __ _, (1990). Punishment and Modern Society, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harding, C. et al. (1985). Imprisonment in England and Wales, London: Croom Helm. Ignatieff, M. (1978). A Just Measure of Pain, London: Macmillan. Langbein,J. (1976). Torture and the Law ofProof, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mathiesen, T. (1983). 'The Future of Control Systems. The Case of Norway', in Garland, D. and Young, P. (eds), The Power to Punish, London: Heinemann. Melossi, D. and Pavarini, M. (1981). The Prison and the Factory: The Origins of the Penitentiary System, London: Macmillan. Pasquino, P. (1991). 'Criminology: The Birth of a Special Knowledge', in Burchell, G. et al. (eds), The Foucault Effect, Brighton: Harvester Press. Pratt, J. (1983). 'Reflections on the Approach of 1984: Recent Developments in Social Control in the UK', International Journal of the Sociology of Law, 11:339-360. __ _, (1992a). Punishment in a Perfect Society, Wellington: Victoria University Press. __ _, (1992b). 'Punishment and the Lessons from History', Australian and New
Zealand Journal ofCriminology,25:97-ll4. Pugh, R. (1968). Imprisonment in Medieval England, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Report of the Carnarvon Committee (1865). Parliamentary Papers, IX. Report of the Inspector of Prisons (1909). A to J, H20, Wellington. Report of the Poor Law Commissioners (1834). Parliamentary Papers XXVII. Report of the Under Secretary for Prisons (1925), A to J, H20, Wellington. Rusche, G. and Kirchheimer, 0. (1939, 1968). Punishment and Social Structure, New York: Russell and Russell. Scraton, P., Sim, J. and Cashmore, E. (1991). Prisons Under Protest, Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Sharpe, J. (1984). Crime in Early Modern England, 1550-1750, London. Spierenburg, P. (1984). The Spectacle of Suffering, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Walker, N. and Hough, M. (1988). Public Attitudes to Sentencing: Surveys from Five Countries, Aldershot: Gower. Wiener, M. (1990). Reconstructing the Criminal, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Part Nine Management Studies
Foucault, Power, Social Theory and the Study of Organisations1 Stewart Cfegg After Foucault, power becomes conceived as a set of techniques, disciplinary practices, in the service of values, as well as the more or less stable or shifting networks of alliances that such disciplinary practices make possible through their elective affinities between wholly contingent forms of identity, extended over a shifting terrain of practice and discursively constituted interests. Points of resistance will open at many points in the network (Foucault 1984:95) whose effect will be to fracture alliances, constitute regroupings and reposit strategies (Foucault 1984:96). Discourses are the means by which a certain power (of theorising: a theorising power) is constituted. The will to power becomes manifested not in a Zarathustra but in the mundane techniques and routines of everyday institutional and professionallife. Central to Foucault's conception of power is its shifting, inherently unstable expression in networks and alliances. Rather than a monolithic view of power as invariably incorporating subjectivities, the focus is much closer to Machiavelli's (1958) strategic concerns or Gramsci's (1971) notion of hegemony not as structural ideology but as a 'war of manoeuvre', in which points of resistance and fissure are at the forefront. The subjectification of disciplinary power operates primarily through enhancing the 'calculability' of individuals (Foucault 1977:192-4). Individuals become calculable to the extent that they become subject to 'comparative, scalar measures and related forms of training and correction' (Minson 1986:113). The objective of disciplinary techniques is normalisation, the creation of routines, predictability, control. Foucault focuses on the historical range of discourses that increasingly limit, define and normalise the 'vocabularies of motive' (Mills 1940) that are available in specific sites ('situated contexts' in Mills' terms) for making sensible and accountable what it is that people should do, can do and thus do (Clegg 1989). It should be clear that this does not rule out the possibility of there being phenomena such as a class that rules: what it does, however, is to make it empirically contingent. Power normalises through discursive formations of knowledge. The terms of these ways of constituting the normal are institutionalised and incorporated into everyday life. Our reflexive gaze takes over the disciplining role as we take on the accounts and vocabularies of meaning and motive that are available to us as certain other forms of account get marginalised or simply eased out of currency. Socially available accounts are not random. What gets said and done in and around organisations as 'management' and forms of resistance to it is thus a suitable case for treatment. Where there is something other than randomness there must be pattern. Pattern requires rules for its constitution, and unlike randomness, offers the possibility of its decoding through what is apparent.
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The concept of rule has a central theoretical role to play in this account. It enables us to transcend the limits of individualist accounts of 'interpretative understanding' as a type of privileged access to the subjectivity of the other. Foucault's (1977) account of phenomena like the' disciplinary gaze' is in this sense post-verstehende: it makes no claim to a privileged access to historical subjectivities but instead asks how it is possible that they might have been constituted as they are. What assumptions and practices made them possible? What rules account for their existence? Conceptually, 'power' has been inscribed within contextual'rules of the game' that both enable and constrain action (Clegg 1975). Rules are implicit and contextual to the reasoning that subjects engage in. In this case they are inherent and articulatable aspects of the subjects' own reasoning. They may know and sometimes they can express what it is that they are doing when they are doing ruling and making discriminations of various kinds. Sometimes, however, as in the case of grammatical rules used to make coherent conversation, the person may be unable to formulate what the rules are even as they are aware that they are and others are employing rules. In addition, rules are an analytically post hoc device. In this case the subjects are able to make sense, use discriminations adequately and inter-subjectively yet be at a loss to be able to describe the rules that they use to do so. The conception of social life put forward here regards it as peopled by practitioners accomplished in the arts of everyday reasoning and discrimination. Sometimes they will be able to articulate the rules that they are using. Sometimes they will not be aware of the rules. Where the latter is the case, a role for the social analyst is to formulate as well as to interpret the rules and to observe the use made of them. Contrary to Weber's hermeneutic orientations, one does not belong in the subjectivity of another: we live in a post-verstehende age where interpretative understanding is less an empathetic insight into the subjective state of the other and, as Foucault suggests, rather more a grasp of their discursive possibility. An adequate analysis cannot proceed on the basis of a recovery of what the subjects of an organisation really think. To assume that the intuited contents of subjectivity might be of primary analytical importance is to suffer from an understructuralised account of organisation action. It is to assume that the relations of meaning in organisations are reducible to the intuited or articulated 'vision' of particular subjectivities, usually those of the chief executive(s), as in Peters and Waterman (1982). While these are importantasanelementsettingtheframeinwhichorganisationstructuration occurs, they do not have the exaggerated significance that these gurus of the culture literature have suggested. It is because of this that the subsequent failure of intuited 'excellence' should not be a surprise. Firm analytic foundations remain wanting. There are connections here with Weber and his emphasis on 'charismatic leadership'. A verstehende emphasis that privileges even objectified subjectivity is still too understructuralised in its conception (see Bryman 1992). An 'embedded' perspective, to adopt Granovetter's (1985) terminology, one that sought neither to be 'over structuralised' nor 'understructuralised' in its analysis, (to draw the obvious analogy with his critique of' oversocialised' and 'undersocialised' accounts
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of economic action) would be one that sought to ask what makes possible specific words, actions and their patterned assembly as rationalities? What discourse, what grounds, what assumptions make it possible that one understands what one does of what others do? What are the member's categories that are available in what language community? Members of organisations and other structured arenas of social life use discursive resources of practical reasoning in the work of making sense of other people and things. Thus, to treat the matter of subjectivity without being understructuralised in one's treatment is to regard it as a public and observable element in the language games of specific settings, such as organisations. It means that one can be precise in the collection of conversational data that, after transcription, allow researchers to access and judge the means that constitute 'subjectivity' (see the discussion and supporting appendices for' Al, the ideal typist', in Clegg 1975). Rules provide the underlying rationale of those calculations which agencies, both individual and collective, routinely make in organisational contexts. Action only gets designated as such-and-such an action by reference to whatever rules identify it as such, a position that has significant implication for the conceptualisation of subjectivity. Rules can never be free of surplus or ambiguous meaning: they are always indexical to the context of interpreters and interpretation. Where there are rules there must be indexicality, although it will be variable. Some rules will be ruled into everyday usage through institutional devices that give them materiality, such as the law, as an obvious example. Yet, in principle, no rule can ever provide for its own interpretation. At its simplest, a 'No Standing' street sign does not mean what, referentially, it seems to say. All rules mean more than they may seem to say because all rules require contexts of interpretation. Contexts of interpretation, however variable, stabilise across people, time and space as any translator of any language into any other language knows only too well. Yet, every day life is not so much like a language as similar to a multiplicity of over-lapping and incomplete language games with ambiguous, shifting and frequently under-codified rules. Where rules are instantiated and signified, where people say, do or otherwise act on them, interpretation occurs. 'Ruling' is an activity. Some agency, or more usually, a plurality of agencies must do the constitutive sense-making process that fixes meaning. The favoured metaphor for linking power and subjectivity through resistance is that of language games. Where rules tend to be the subject of contested interpretation, there will be resistance. However, language games are only similar in some respects, and not others, to board games or other sports. Some players have not only play-moves but also the refereeing of these as power resources. Consequently, the invocation of rules implies discretion. Organisations incorporate their members through the hiring contract, however informal it may be. The knack of successful management and supervision involves translating into actual labour power the hours of the day that the person hired rents to the employing agent. The discretion of the hirer/mandator has to shape and channel that of the hiree/mandatee, to
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realise the capacity to labour in and through labour power subordinated to a strategic purpose. These are the conditions of effective management. Standing in the way of their realisation is the embodiment of the potential labour power hired as the capacities of people who may be more or less willing to work as subjects ruled by managerial discretion and control. Always, because of embodiment, the people hired as labour power will retain ultimate discretion over themselves, what they do, how they do it. It is, after all, the hire of their embodied and cognitive capacities that the hirers seek to use. A potential source of resistance resides in this inescapable and irreducible embodiment of labour power. The gap between the capacity to labour and its effective realisation implies power and the organisation of control. Management is forever seeking new strategies and tactics through which to deflect discretion. The most effective and economical of these are those that substitute self-discipline for the discipline of an external manager. Less effective but historically more prolific, have been the attempts of organisations to close the discretionary gap through the use of rule-systems, the mainstay of Weberian influenced analyses of organisations as bureaucracies. Such rule systems seek to regulate meaning in order to control relations of production. Hence, relations of meaning and production are inexorably interlinked in organisation. Organisation implies control. The notion of control implied is a sense of stabilisation of corporate and differential membership categories across space and across time. Control is never total, of course: indeed, in some formulations it is the contradictions inherent in the evolution of regimesofcontrolthatexplainitsdevelopment(CleggandDunkerley1980). Total control is impossible, in part because of agency. It will be open to erosion and undercutting by the active, embodied agency of those people who are its object: the labour power of the organisation. The experience of power is inescapable whenever there is effective organisation, binding independent agents together, yoking them to the pursuit of a purpose made common. Yoking enables the extension of a central strategic agency to the strategic agency of others: it extends and broadens the field of application for any central power. Consequently, the deployment of any central power depends upon a paradox: the extension of a strategic agency depends upon a relative dilution of its strategic contingency through elaboration via agencies that are made strategic by their enrolment. Pluralism is inherent to organisation. Notions of 'bounded rationality' (Simon 1976) support this contention. A central aspect of the idea of power stresses normative compliance and consent as the achievement of its success. The authority of an agency increases in principle by that agency delegating authority. Yet, the delegation of authority undermines central power by surrendering some of its powers to delegated others. Delegation of authority goes on through rules and language; both necessarily entail discretion and discretion potentially empowers delegates in ways that need not be organisationally authoritative. There is always a dialectic to power, always another agency, another set of standing conditions pertinent to the realisation of that agencies causal powers against the resistance of another. Consequently, as Barbalet (1985:539)
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has suggested, the power of an agent will always be less than the capacities that agent mobilised when attempting to achieve a specific outcome. Intentions rarely get realised, if we mean by 'intention' reports of the outcome projected by an agency at the outset. Without resistance we would note that there may be a genuine consensus of wills, what Habermas (1984) terms an 'ideal speech situation', and thus no antagonistic agency, or that there may be a capitulation by a metaphorical'B' and their strategic subordination to a metaphorical' A'. Alternately, and of far more likely provenance in these post-structuralist and post-Foucauldian times, we might say that there is a discursive constitution of a field of force in which subjects articulate a sufficiently similar form of voice that flattens and homogenises difference. Not quite a one-dimensional existence, but a canon of difference that tolerates ambiguity. No special proof is necessary to establish that there are precious few ideal speech situations in any sphere of human relations, even at their most personal and pianissimo, let alone their extension across space and time. The human condition, in whatever form of organisation, rarely achieves this grace. Where there is organisation there will be resistance, as well as power, contradiction induced by control, rationalities instead of rationality and passions as well as interests. The bricolage of values, power, rules, discretion, organisation and paradox in any concrete situation depends upon the discursively dominant categories of the age, the space, the time, the place, the organisation, under review. Organisation may seek to secure particular representations across specific spaces but can never arrest time: it always elapses. No insurance entails the continuity of any particular fixture as the mode of communication, interpellation and address with which subjects will constitute themselves and others. Communication without dialogue is impossible. Dialogue entails some limits to totalitarianism to the extent that its horizons are open and its participation not restricted, as Habermas (1984) works out in his late flowering of the Weberian, modernist project. Such dialogue, or conversation, invariably, will not be ideal where it is organisational. Organisation means more or less domination and distorted communication. The flow of communication through, up, down, across, into and out of an organisation structure while it can qualify the extent of distortion will rarely eliminate it. Complex organisation entails that this should be so. Hence, any ideal of organisation democracy, premised on an ideal speech situation, is chimerical. Organisation theory condemns us to a specific form of conversation, a further implication of the views developed here. Giddens (1976) writes about a particular form of the 'double-hermeneutic' that applies to organisation theory as I propose it. The discourse of organisation theory represents and reflects back upon the practice of organisation. This practice, as established in this paper, is irremediably part of the conversation that is culture, relatively enveloped and contained within the organisational form. Theorists should speak dialectically, through intellectual traditions to those cultural practices that they study and through those practices to their intellectual traditions: here the best exemplar is probably Foucault, in his various revisions of our understanding of intellectual traditions, such as penology (Foucault 1977), where the encounter arranged between the
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traditions and the archives transform our understanding of knowledge, (and, it should be added, power), in terms of practices understood as practical knowledge. Some theorists of a critical nature have proposed that 'openness' be established as the norm for 'collectivist organisations'. Others suggest that open dissent is functionat anyhow. Dissent is not necessarily 'functional', however. It is not merely a matter of the 'functions' of social conflict (Coser 1962). If dissent becomes too emotional in the person or too embedded in the organisation, the paradoxical outcome may be that it undercuts further expression of that which it represents, as members shy away from hurt and pain. One should not assume an analytical endorsement of'openness' in favour of'concealment'. Whereas concealment has been the basis for the practice of modernist organisation in the past, and such practice has become increasingly subject to criticism, (Clegg 1990; Boje and Dennehy 1992), one should not assume that technologies of openness will deliver a liberal ideal of an organisation world of free and equal individuals. To practice openness, as much as concealment, also requires disciplinary practices of power - this much, at least, one should know from Foucault (1977). One can frame a normative order in which voice is encouraged rather than discouraged. Yet, where this is the case, strong organisational frames usually feature. Such framing devices, usually embedded in recruitment and containment constituted through a strong ideological commitment, as in most successful collectives (Rothschild and Whitt 1985), function as a form of surrogate control. Openness does not equate with nondistorted communication. Where openness is premised on recruitment in an ideological image conversation in the organisation becomes more monological as values get cloned and reinforced in recruits. Cults exemplify this to the greatest extent, often tragically, as in the 1993 Waco tragedy. Any organisation with a strong value base risks the ultimate paradox of becoming cultish and thus increasingly incapable of reflexivity with respect to the environment in which it operates. Consequently, where a value of openness is paramount, successful organisations must build dissent into their practices, even as it may challenge the core values of the organisation. Practising power in such a context thus becomes a case of listening acutely, to hear silences and ellipses, as well as what is evident; of seeking to draw others and oneself into discursive dissonance in order to find that which can be agreed as the basis for that which will be done that few can deny the wisdom of doing; of building an organisational environment of alliances, networks and overlapping conduits ofinterest. Such a realpolitik of power, one submits, will open the door to postmodern organisation futures made more reflexive by less hierarchical distortion of power and more capable of learning from the potential voices for their conversation, even as one realises that all road maps to Utopia must ultimately lead nowhere. 1
A version ofthis paper also appears inNatter, Schatzki and Jones (eds), Disciplining Boundaries, Guilford, 1996.
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Bibliography Barbalet,J.M.(1985).'PowerandResistance',BritishJournalofSociology,XXXVI(1):52148. Boje, D.M. and R.F. Dennehy (1992). Managing in the Postmodern World: America's Revolution Against Exploitation. Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall/Hunt. Burawoy, M. (1978). 'Towards a Marxist Theory of the Labour Process: Braverman and Beyond', Politics and Society, 8, pp.247-312. Burawoy, M. (1979). Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process under Capitalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Burawoy, M. (1985). The Politics of Production: Factory Regimes under Capitalism and Socialism. London: Verso. Clawson, D. (1980). Bureaucracy and the Labor Process: The Transformation of US Industry 1860-1920. New York: Monthly Review Press. Clegg S. R. (1990). Modern Organisations: Organisation Studies in the Postmodern World. London: Sage. Clegg, S. R. (1975). Power, Rule and Domination: A Critical and Empirical Understanding of Power in Sociological Theory and Organisational Life. London: Routledge and KeganPaul. Clegg, S. R. (1989). Frameworks of Power. London: Sage. Clegg, S. R. and D. Dunkerley (1980). Organisation, Class and Control. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Clegg, S. R. and W. Higgins (1987). 'Against the Current: Sociology, Socialism and Organisations', Organisation Studies, 8,(3):201-21. Coser, L. (1962). The Functions of Social Conflict. Glencoe, TIL: The Free Press. DiMaggio, P. and W. Powell (1983). 'The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organisational fields',American Sociological Review, 48(2):147-60. Edwards, R. (1979). Contested Terrain: The Transformation of the Workplace in the Twentieth Century. New York: Basic Books. Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Harmondsworth: Penguin. __ _, (1984). The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Harmondsworth: Peregrine. Giddens, A. (1976). New Rules of Sociological Method. London: Hutchinson. Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the Prison Notebooks. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Habermas, J. (1984). Reason and the Rationalization of Society. London: Heinemann. Keiser, A. (1987). 'From Asceticism to Administration of Wealth: Medieval Monasteries and the Pitfalls of Rationalization', Organisation Studies, 8(2):103-24. Landes, S. (1969). The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press. Littler, C. R. (1982). The Development of the Labour Process in Capitalist Societies. London: Heinemann. Machiavelli, N. (1958). The Prince. London: Everyman.
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Marglin, S. (1974). 'What Do Bosses Do? - the Origins and Functions of Hierarchy in Capitalist Production', Review of Radical Political Economics, 6, pp.60-112. Marx, K. (1976). Capital (Volume 1). Harmondsworth: Penguin. Mills, C.W. (1940). 'Situated Actions and Vocabularies ofMotive',American Sociological Review, V: pp.904-13. Minson,J. (1986). 'StrategiesforSocialists?Foucault'sConceptionofPower', pp.10648, in M. Gane (ed.) Towards a Critique ofFoucault. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. O'Neill, J. (1987). 'The Disciplinary Society: from Weber to Foucault', The British Journal of Sociology, XXXVII(1):42-60. Peters T.J. and R.H. Waterman Jr. (1982). In Search of Excellence. New York: Harper and Row. Rhinehart, L. (1972). The Dice Man. Frogmore: Panther. Rothschild, J. and J.A. Whitt (1986). The Cooperative Workplace: Potentials and Dilemmas of Organisational Democracy and Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Simmel, G. (1971). On Individuality and Social Forms, edited and with an introduction by K. H. Woolf, London: Collier-Macmillan. Simon, H.A. (1976). Administrative Behaviour. New York: Free Press. Thompson, E.P. (1967). 'Time, Work, Discipline and Industrial Capitalism', Past and Present, 38, pp.56-97. Weber, M. (1978). Economy and Society: An Outline ofInterpretive Sociology (2 Vols), G. Roth and C. Wittich (eds). Berkeley: University of California Press.
Foucault and Management Studies: Postcritical critique?
This paper was to have been an exploration, or at least give an interpretation of, how Foucault's notion of governmentality might be applied to current developments in management studies in general and Human Resource Management (HRM) in particular. In this light I was to have explored HRM as the technology by which people are constructed and construct themselves as 'human resources'. However, on reflecting on what I was doing I decided instead to present a more provocative paper that more directly addresses some of the difficulties that I am attempting to work through. These difficulties relate to, on the one hand, finding Foucault a fascinating and 'enlightening' theorist to come to know, but on the other, finding myself drawn into a style of application of Foucault's work that was symptomatic of the sort of analysis that I sought to critique in pursuing Foucault in the first place. In this paper, I raise issues concerning the way that Foucault is being taken up by some theorists in management studies (and in other areas as well). I am concerned that Foucault's work, rather than building critique such that 'facile gestures' are difficult, is actually being used to restrict critique. This restriction occurs through the application of analysis that is consistent with the technique of Foucault's writing (be it archaeological or genealogical) but that lacks what I believe was Foucault's emancipatory desire. While theorists typically emphasise the significance of Foucault's critique of claims to universality, the same emphasis is not placed on Foucault's debt to Marx. While Foucault himself talks of their being no need to acknowledge this debt directly- he is clear that Marx has had a major impact on his work- to the extent that he says that 'one might wonder what difference there could ultimately be between being a historian and being a Marxist' (1980:53). My intent here is not to argue that Foucault was Marxist, but to argue that both Marx and Foucault shared a concern with emancipation, and that this concern should not be subordinated to the technical. While theorists such as Smart have argued that 'a political discourse promising 'emancipation' constitutes at best a form of rhetoric' (1986:169), I adopt an interpretation of 'emancipation' consistent with Poster's. Poster suggests that the focus of critical theory is on furthering critique rather than striving for some utopian freedom- where such critique 'attempts to promote the project of emancipation by furthering what it understands as the theoretical effort of the critique of domination begun by the Enlightenment and continued by Karl Marx' (Poster 1989:1). The concerns I raise here have developed from claims, most notably from Habermas, that Foucault is a neo-conservative. Like Smart (1986), I do not see Foucault's lack of either a political rationale or a direction for action
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sufficient cause to tar Foucault with the neo-conservative brush, butl cannot getawayfromtheimpressionthatmanytheoriststakingupFoucault'swork are promoting a neo-conservative position. By 'neo-conservative' I mean analysis that does not advocate that which is explicitly 'conservative', but that presents an analysis that posits that the interpretation is enough, that to advocate anything other than this or that is to be untrue to the abhorrence of universalising. The malleability of Foucault's work to the neo-conservative position comes about primarily due to Foucault's representation of power. While the distinction Foucault draws between sovereign and disciplinary forms of power may be interpreted as one of the strengths of his work, Fraser highlights the difficulty in using this particular interpretation when she argues that, for Foucault, power-free cultures, social practices, and knowledge are in principle impossible. It follows, in this view, that one cannot object to a form of life simply on the ground that it is power-laden. Power is productive, ineluctable, and thereforenormativelyneutral (1989:31 ). The consequent 'normative confusion' provides a platform not for critique in the sense of providing emancipatory potential, but for critique that contributes to elaborate interpretations of power relations, and not much else. The problem I have is highlighted by returning to Marx's Theses of Feuer bach suggesting that while the philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways the point is to change it. This thesis is made all the more pertinent in the light of what Jameson (1984) refers to as 'Late Capitalism'; the apotheosis of capitalism; 'the purest form of capital yet to have emerged, a prodigious expansion of capital into hitherto uncommodified areas' (Jameson 1984:78). In this context, I argue that the neo-conservative position is implicitly pursued through the 'normative confusion' that Fraser identifies. As power is inherent in all relations, the initiative for emancipation from forms of exploitation inherent in capitalism (or any other form of exploitation or subjugation) is lost: not only is the grass on the other side of the fence not any greener, but distinguishing between the fence and the grass becomes increasingly problematic. Not only is there no basis on which to prefer one form of discipline over another, but exactly where the boundaries of that discipline are is unclear. As Neimark argues 'plucking Foucault away from Marx ... removes his work from its ground, robs it of what could be its emancipatorypotential and thereby yields a Foucault that readily reinforces the current global integration of capitalism and its ideologies' (1994:97). This point is ever more significant in examining the application of Foucault in management studies at a time when 'the modern corporation has emerged as the central form of working relations and as the dominant institution in society' (Deetz 1992:2). In looking at Foucault in management studies, I am conscious of the tool-like application of concepts such as power /knowledge and aware that this presentation of ideas as (neutral) tools- as instruments outside of power relations - is exactly part of that which Foucault was concerned with. These are some of the issues I will briefly explore in outlining the application of Foucault's work in management studies in general and the application of Foucault's work in the relatively new discipline of Human Resource Management.
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Foucault and Management studies While Burrell (1988:221) suggested that Foucault's work was so important to the study of organisations that it may have lead to' a significant reordering in the theory of organisations', a recent search of ABI inform (the main periodical index in management studies) covering the last eight years produced only fifteen references- hardly an indicator that such a 'reordering' is underway- at least not in the mainstream of management studies. In looking at the application of Foucault in management studies it is important to understand the nature of this discipline. While management theorists are quick to identify the liberatory and the empowering aspects of their approaches to managing, an incisive description of management is provided by Ball who writes that management is 'a theoretical and practical technology geared to efficiency, practicality, and control... it presents itself as an objective, technically neutral mechanism dedicated only to greater efficiency' (1990:157). The presentation of management theory as neutral and objective is especially vivid in the work of Frederick Taylor, generally recognised as the 'father' of modern scientific approaches to management. What makes Taylor's work especially interesting is Taylor's construction of the managerial subject. Webster and Robbins argue that Taylor proposed that the raison d'etre of modern management was that 'managers were to act as information specialists - ideally as monopolists - as close observers, analysts and planners of the production process' (1993:245). This is a theme that Braverman emphasise in identifying the prioritisation of knowledge/information as the 'key to scientific management' (Braverman 1974:113). In this light we could almost say that Foucault, and especially the concept of power I knowledge, is 'Taylor made' for application to Management studies While Burrell offered Foucault as 'suggestive of alternative ways of approaching problems and ordering material' (1988:221) these alternatives should not be interpreted as necessarily being oriented towards change towards emancipation. It is significant that when taken up in certain ways, Foucault provides a platform for a reinforcement of the status quo - a pia tform for 'safe' analysis. Analysis that is 'safe' because it carries with it the academic credibility that has developed around Foucaultian approaches and that is dominated by an air of instrumentality and objectivity inherent in the application of the new Foucaultian tools. Ironically, the attention focuses as it does in the positivist sciences, in ensuring that the method of 'true' Foucaultian analysis is adhered to. The consequent lack of emancipatory interest is consistent with an analysis where any representation of degrees of oppression (which would therefore provide the basis for an argument for emancipation) is argued to be untenable given that such a hierarchy would simply be one of many competing disciplinary power/ knowledge regimes. In exploring why theorists take up Foucault it is interesting to reflect on the reasons given by Sewell and Wilkinson who write that: 'theoretically, we were drawn to the work of Foucault for its elegance and simplicity in developing a conceptualisation of the means by which the actions of individuals can be controlled in time and space through
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mechanisms of surveillance or Power/Knowledge' (1992:285). It is this 'elegance and simplicity' that has seen the Panopticon and power /knowledge generating much interests in management circles - not surprising perhaps considering the historical development of the factory system as one in which issues of surveillance and control have been central management concerns (indeed arguably the main management concern). 'Prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons' (Foucault 1979:83 cited in Burrell1988:230). While the 'elegance and simplicity' of concepts such as power/knowledge are helpful they are of course primarily cosmetic. More significant in my mind is that Foucault argued that we 'must analyse institutions from the standpoint of power relations, rather than vice versa, and that the fundamental point of anchorage of the relationships, even if they are embodied and crystallised in an institution, is to be found outside the institution' (1982:222). Caputo and Yount's normalising of the concept of 'institution' had them referring to an institution as 'the more readily definable macroobjects, grosser instruments for the finer, more elemental workings of power' (1993:4). This leads me to ask the question to what extent can we expect theorists from within management studies (or any institution) to be able to extricate themselves so as to be analysing institutions from the perspective of power rather than power from the perspective of institutions? It is interesting to briefly pause at this moment to reflect on Said's work where he considers the representations of the intellectual- in particular he considers representations of the intellectual as 'individual'. Given groups of intellectuals are aligned with institutions and derive power and authority from those institutions, Said asks if there can be any independent, autonomous functioning intellectual: an individual distinct from the context in which he I she intellectualises. He argues that it is pointless to attempt to rid intellectual work from the influence of context and that instead we should attempt to highlight the ways in which that intellectual endeavour is a product of context. We should try to understand for example, how the truths exposed by the management consultant are a product of the particular demands that the consultant experiences. Back to the issue of whether we are analysing institutions from the perspective of power or power from the perspective of institutions. I would like to briefly turn to the case ofHRM and Townley's 1993 paper. Townley suggests that HRM may be seen as 'an attempt to quantify or reduce the indecisiveness in the employment relationship between contract and performance'. While Townley presents a very interesting examination of the different elements of HRM as seen through a Foucaultian lens, she presents an analysis from within rather than from without the institution. While analysing the various ways that the subject is constructed (for example, Townley looks at dividing practices such as performance appraisal systems and how they classify and order each individual in their own space), Townley's focusing on HRM as an attempt to 'reduce the indeterminacy of the employment contract' provides a neo-conservative bias through taking as her starting point the neo-classical economics inspired transactions cost economics.
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The effect of this institutional standpoint is to channel the analysis away from debates that criticise the institution- away from debates over whether the employment contract is an adequate basis of the employment relationship or away from exploring the significance of, for example, the differential power positions inherent in neo-classical inspired theory - and in doing so contributes to the extension of Human Resource Management being seen as an issue primarily of instrumental rationality. The issue of HRM is presented as a technical problem- a problem of 'the information gap that arises from the indeterminacy of the employment contract and .... the requirement to articulate the space that exists between expectation and deliverance of performance' (Townley 1993:524). This is not exploring institutions from the perspective of power but of power from the perspective of institutions. The effect is that rather than challenging the status quo, Townley contributes to the extension of managerial discipline through analysis that promotes interpretation at the expense of change. Townley's article is of the genre that Neimark refers to as lacking an 'emancipatory impulse' (1994:100), of the genre that Marx was referring to when he chastised the quest for interpretation over that of change. Townley's analysis may be interpreted as providing support for the instrumental representation of HRM through her couching of the HR project within the parameters of transaction cost economics. Townley goes back to what she refers to as the 'basic building block' on which HRM practices are premised - namely the employment relationship. She does not consider the political context in which this employment relationship come to be constructed as such- an analysis that contributes to the representation of HRM as the more developed form of personnel management - 'more developed' due to its increasingly (and exclusively) instrumental discourse'. In raising the issues I have raised here, my interest is not to argue for a return to a materialist basis for emancipatory theory (as Murray 1991 or Armstrong 1994 do) but to argue that there must be some basis for advocating something other than what we have now. If we are to critique humanist representations such as freedom, emancipation, progress etc. we cannot simultaneously hold onto the pejorative reference to discipline. If we are to take Foucault up we must do so with a view to continuing the tradition of emancipation. To do so we need to do more than just develop skills to enable us to apply the Foucaultian tools. In taking up Foucault we must recognise, asFraserdoes,thatFoucaultcallstoomanysortsofthingspowerandsimply leaves it at that. Granted, all cultural practices involve constraints- but these constraints are of a variety of different kinds and thus demand a variety of normative responses. Granted, there can be no social practices without power - but it does not follow that all forms of power are normatively equivalent nor that any social practices are as good as any other (1989:32). For me, Foucault's work provides a necessary but not sufficient addition to other accounts of management and society. It is necessary in that his account of power /knowledge, for example, opens up areas for debate that were all but closed. However it is not sufficient in that it does not provide an adequate guide as to 'what aspects of organisations we wish to change and what our intended outcome might be' (Parker 1992:652-653). As Said (1983)
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argues, 'Foucault takes a curiously passive and sterile view not so much of the uses of power, but of how and why power is obtained, used and held onto'. It is for these reasons that Foucault's debt to Marx should be acknowledged and in doing so recognise that in taking up Foucault we do not just find a new set of tools with which to ply our trade, but implicitly are furthering the emancipatory project.
References Armstrong, P. (1994). 'The influence of Michel Foucault on accounting research'.,Critical Perspectives on Accounting. 5, pp.25-55. Ball, S. J. (1990). 'Management as moral technology: a Luddite analysis', inS. J. Ball (ed.). Foucault and education: disciplines and knowledge, London: Routledge, pp.153-166. Braverman, H. (1974). Labor and monopoly capital: the degradation ofwork in the twentieth century, New York: Monthly Review Press. Burrell, G. (1988). 'Modernism, postmodemism and organisational analysis 2: The contribution of Michel Foucault', Organization Studies, 9(2):221-35. Caputo, J and Yount, M. (1993). 'Institutions, normalization, and power', in Caputo and Yount (eds) (1993). Foucault and the critique of institutions, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State, pp.3-26. Deetz, S. A. (1992). Democracy in an age of corporate colonization, New York: State University of New York. Du Gay, P. and G. Salaman. (1992). 'The cult[ure] of the customer', Journal of Management Studies, 29(5):615-633. Ferguson, K. (1984). The feminist case against bureaucracy, Philadelphia: Temple. Foucault, M. (1988). 'The ethic of the care for the self as a practice of freedom', in J. Bernauer and D. Rasmassen (eds), The Final Foucault, Massachusetts: MIT. __ _, (1984). The use of pleasure: The history of sexuality Vol. 2, Middlesex: Penguin. __ _, (1982). 'The subject and power', in H. L. Dreyfus and Rabinow Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Brighton: Harvester, pp.208-26. __ _, (1980). Power/Knowledge, C. Gordon (ed.), Brighton: Harvester. __ _, (1979). Discipline and punish: the birth of the prison, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Fox, S. (1989). 'The Panopticon: from Bentham's obsession to the revolution in management/learning', Human Relations. 42(8):717-39. Fraser, N. (1989). Unruly practices: power, discourse and gender in contemporary social theory, Cambridge: Polity Press. Jacques, T.C. (1991). 'Whence does the critic speak? A study of Foucault's genealogy'.,Philosophy and social criticism. 17(4):325-45. Keohane, K. (1993). 'Central problems in the philosophy of the social sciences and postmodernism: reconciling consensus and hegemonic theories of epistemology and political ethics', Philosophy and social criticism, 19(2):145-169. Murray, F. (1991). 'Technical rationality and the IS specialist: power, discourse and identity', Critical Perspectives in Accounting, 2, pp.59-81. Neimark, M.K. (1994). 'Regicide revisited- Marx, Foucault and Accounting', Critical Perspectives on Accounting, 5, pp.87-108. Parker, M. (1992). 'Getting down off the fence: a reply to Haridimos Tsoukas', Organization Studies, 13(4):651-3.
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Poster, M. (1989). Critical theory and poststructuralism: in search of a context, Ithaca: Cornell University. Said, E. (1992). 'Representations ofthe intellectual'. Lecture series. Said, E. (1983). The world, the text, and the critic, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Sewell, G. and B. Wilkinson. (1992). "Someone to watch over me': surveillance, discipline and the just-in-time labour process', Sociology, 26(2):271-89. Smart, B. (1986). 'The politics of truth and the problem of hegemony', in Hoy, D.C. (ed.), Foucault: a critical reader, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, pp.157-73. Townley, B. (1993). 'Foucault, power/knowledge, and its relevance for human resource management', Academy of Management Review, 18(3);518-45. Webster, F. and Robins, K. (1993). ''I'll be watching you': comment on Sewell and Wilkinson', Sociology, 27(2):243-52.
Part Ten Public Relations
Constructing Publics: Foucault's Power/ Knowledge Matrix and the Genealogy of Public Relations and Press Agentry P. tJJavitf Marsfta{[ There are two concerns that I want to address. Those concerns are the conception of the public and the conception of the private in contemporary culture. By contemporary, I mean to implicate an historical period that covers at least 150 years, a period that is often described as modern. And instead of thinking of these concerns in an antithetical Hegelian fashion, I want to draw on Foucault's methodological insights that can be traced most clearly from History of Sexuality which I am using here as a parallel construction. There is essentially a great deal of discursive work on defining the realm of the private and the realm of the public in contemporary culture. The discursive intensity is on the boundaries, which make the boundaries the site and the location for elaborate and shifting determinations of the realm of the public and the private. What can be discerned from these discursive border distinctions is the general way of categorising, cataloguing and situating the public and the private. The private and the intimate are then, in a sense, essential parts of the discourse of the public sphere, because they establish its reach and its significance, but more specifically because they are the way in which the public sphere is in fact defined. Foucault has identified thehistoricalcontinuityaroundsexandsexualitythatidentifiesacontinuity of discourse between the Victorian repressive hypothesis and the discourses of truth through sexuality in the twentieth century. Indeed, Foucault argues that the confessional, which represented the way that sex was organized as a form of truth was wedded to a scientific discourse of truth, to produce what hecallsascientiasexualis(Foucault1980:53-72).InparallelfashiontoFoucault's genealogical development of sexuality as a discourse, the realm of the private has been and is an essential discourse of the public sphere: the intimate and the unseen become forms of revelatory discourse, a discourse that parallels the deployment of sexuality which Foucault labels 'biopower' (Foucault 1980:141-4). Biopower identifies the technologies that surround and regulate the body itself in contemporary culture, that have moved to a regulation of the self to the norm and have produced forms of knowledge which allow for the proliferation of this power on a microlevel of regulation and at a macrolevel of the social and the species. The peculiar organisation of the public domain is also situated on a power /knowledge matrix that invests heavily into the meaning of the self and specifically the truth of the self in public. There are certain locations which are intense sites for this negotiation of the boundary between public and private. In this paper, I am going to deal with public relations. Public relations is an industrial/institutional site for
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the production of a discourse of what constitutes the public and thereby services, patrols, constructs and shifts the boundaries between the public and the private. In its official form, public relations reworks the messy nature of events, incidents and people to structure them into a coherence for easier consumption, a consumption principally modelled on the maintenance of existing authority (but not exclusively). However, this reading of public relations overlooks its less honourable role in the shaping of the personal and the notorious for public promulgation. Public relations, in its genealogy is both a satin sheet that re-presents institutions in discourses and source for the expanding discourse of the self through public personalities. Although I will look at both halves of public relations, I will be giving greater emphasis to public relations' role in the proselytisation of the personal in the public sphere. There have been certain historical studies of the public sphere that have claimed that simultaneously with the bourgeois revolution and the enfranchisement of the populace, there was a decline in active involvement in the public sphere. Sennett has called this the decline of the public man, the gradual silencing of engagement in the public sphere by the newly enfranchised (Sennett 1974). Habermas has linked this new public sphere with its bourgeois base and has examined its limitations and how they worked to promote certain interests (Habermas 1992). Since the relatively recent translation of Habermas' work, there has been considerable use of his models of representative publicness in papers and articles. However, both Habermas' approach and Sennett's (which appears to be primarily based on Habermas without acknowledgement), have missed certain developments in the framing of this new modem culture, this new public sphere. One of the key points of this new public sphere is its obsession with the private and personal while simultaneously presenting a new public. Public relations is designed to reproduce the public world; but it is also designed to represent the domain of the private in the public sphere. In the development of public relations, the idea of the public self is ever present, it is a term which invades the private for public consumption. The origins of public relations predate the nineteenth century in other guises; but public relations does not really achieve its name, its location and its title within government, industry and advocacy groups until the twentieth century. And the reasons relate to the development of this new public sphere whichisconstantlyproducingformsofpublicpersonathatintersectwithan enfranchised democratic culture. The developing terminology and the consolidation of a disciplined practice of public relations emerges roughly in the 1920s when Edward L. Bemays, an early practitioner, coined the term (Kelley 1958:21). What predated this nomination of a practice that was part of modernity was press agentry. Where the term public relations by the mid-twentieth century had become a kind of legitimate form of mediation of the representations of corporations and governments, the term press agent described a less professionalised construction, a more entrepreneurial relationship to attracting the public's attention. The press agent represented an intuitive understanding of the new public sphere. The great practitioner of press
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agentry in the nineteenth century was P.T. Barnum. Through his museums and circuses, Barnum was able to attract the attention of the populace. He stitched together a theatre of the notorious, a combination of artifacts embellished with an unverifiable history and a collection of human specimens that in the scientific discourse that surrounded their presence transformed the freak show into something that was protomodern. In reading backwards and establishing historical continuities, Barnum had developed the media event. The constitutive features of the media event identify the privileged position of the press agent in constructing the public of modernity. Barnum produced moments that attracted the press. And in the press's transformation from politically defined entities to something that provided regular moments of common ground among a dispersed populace - which was the precursor of a more generalised consumer subjectivity - the capacity to produce audiences in seriality across geographical spaces became a highly valued skill. The media event predated the event itself and created a desire to know more in the audience. The public then was constructed by impresarios like Barnum who could provide physical manifestations of the presence of the public. The serial nature of that production of audiences, again across geographical spaces established an organised entertainment culture. The media event and Barnum's showmanship represented the promise. The actual shows, the museums and curios established a protomodern version of constructing public figures. The public sphere constructed by entertainment culture was not a glorification of war achievements, nor a mythological building of historical figures. The much more controlled public sphere was fabricated by more official historians, by school curricula and by what was saved for posterity. Press agentry was not involved in this idea of archives of official culture. Rather it was engaged in the expanding public collective association with ephemera. Ephemera was the continuing everyday discourse that attached affect to events and personalities and that stitched together a connected, even a national, culture. The stitching together of collective sentiments, of establishing not so much distant historical figures but of personalities that were colourful and vibrant was the work of press agents in their production of audiences. Barnum's production of freaks and odd artifacts from history, brought the possibility of the spectacle of seeing something that is normally hidden (with the freaks). With the curios, Barnum presented the possibility of seeing what was normally thought of as part of the private world, the personal world of the famous under the public gaze. As I have said before , the work of Barnum, was protomodern. Many of the elements of his construction of this unseen world and the audience's desire to see were preliminary forays into the way that the public sphere was being made to reflect democratic sentiments. Instead of wandering museums, the spectacle of politics and entertainment was being transformed into a kind of stage management situation: public personalities were handled by agents. By the 1880s, American political parties were already importing political consultants as agents to manage election campaigns (Jamieson 1992). The separating role in entertainment culture of the talent agent, quite
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uniquely divided from the threatre or troupe manager was also in ascendancy by the latter half of the nineteenth century. Further permutations of this role in organising public sentiment were developed in the early twentieth century with the publicity agent, a position often seen to be connected to the rise of the film industry and the system of stardom that transformed it by the second decade into a legitimate entertainment form. Generally, the trajectory I am charting here of how the public is being constructed is focussed on the development of not an official culture, but an incredible proliferation of positions, tasks, articles, information and knowledge about personalities. The information produced is background to the actions of these public figures. It is not specifically about their actions and roles; it is an expanding discourse that identifies these people in a more personal way. Thus, developing with this new public sphere is an burgeoning discourse on the constructed private world- the private construction of the public sphere is part of the new conception of the public. It is articulated through an institution of publicity and press agency that is defined increasingly by its capacity for revelations about the personal/ personality of public figures. The transitional figures in this investment in the personal are film stars of the teens and twenties. De Cordova has done an excellent job describing their depictions in the publicity agent-driven magazines like Moving Picture World (De Cordova 1990). Walker, among others, has identified the specific moment of the Biograph Girl publicity scandal around Florence Lawrence as she moved from one studio to another in 1912. A faked death, released to the media, followed by an exclusive interview with the star and her personal habits and interests launched the era of the film star profile. Fatty Arbuckle's scandalous manslaughter trial of the 1920s describes the other side of this same campaign of public revelation of the private (De Cordova 1990:98-105). This publicity, in its movement from nineteenth century press agentry to twentieth century publicity machines for public personalities, defines the centrality of the personal in the contemporary public sphere. It can be linked to what Graumann has called the psychologisation of the social, where meaning, truth and resolution is reduced to individual psychological problems (Graumann 1986:98-106). Publicity then was the site for the revelation about the private for its presentation in public. It was a controlled discourse which shaped the private lives of personalities and celebrities for this public consumption. Knowledge, for instance, about the sumptuous lifestyles of the 20s movie stars was readily available. The private world of stars was seen to be revelatory. 'Secrets' about their humble pasts, their unpretentiousness were central to the public presentation of self in the era of studios. The maintenance of a continuity between the screen presence and the real life star was vigilantly maintained. In this organisation of the personal in the public sphere, there were clearly moments of transgression that can be identified which worked to shift the meaning of the public personality. The transgressions appear on the surface to be moments where the organisation of the public personality is breaking down; however, it is more accurate to identify the public display of trans-
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gressions as the continuation and intensification of the public defined by the private. In film culture, the transgressions of marriage, which were scandalous in the early decades of the twentieth century, by the middle of the twentieth century became media events, actively orchestrated for public consumption by representative agents. Not only did it indicate there was a continuing expansion of a discourse of the private and personal into the public sphere, it also articulated the emergence of the celebrity as a separate entity, a form of agency in entertainment culture. The studio system was superseded by an agent-actor, agent-director system through the 1950s; the power of the star was modalised around the management of publicity and value quite separately from the studio. Charlton Heston, Elizabeth Taylor, Tony Curtis, Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas were the first generation (1950s and early sixties) where their public presence as personalities allowed them to control many productions outside of direct studio control. An entire ancillary industry developed throughout the twentieth century to catch and pass on further information about these celebrities. Gossip and rumour formed the basis of reportage of Hollywood syndicated columnists like Heda Hopper and Louella Parsons. The paparazzi epitomised the efforts to catch the star personality in more private moments. Again one sees that this search functioned as a will for truth, an attempt to uncover the real underneath the veneer of the constructed persona. And once again, it expresses the proliferation of the discourse of the self and the personal in the public sphere. On the other side of this constructed discourse of the private revealed through the public is public relations. As I mentioned earlier, public relations possesses a slightly different pedigree. I do not have the space to deal with that genealogy completely here; but I want to emphasize a couple of points that help complete the concept of the constructed nature of this discourse on the public. Public relations, born out of the communications departments of the first and second Wrld Wars in the United States describes a different practice than press agentry. Public relations attempts to replicate official discourse. In a sense, the practice of shaping the propaganda machines during theW ar identifies the kind of rewriting for release that is part of the development of public relations. ThekeyfiguresofearlypublicrelationssuchasivyLee,and George Creel, and Edward Bernays were heavily influenced by these war experiences and they translated the style of discourse to American corporate culture. In an early example of this translation, Ivy Lee handled the Pennsylvania Railroad disaster of 1906 by corraling reporters to the wreckage site with company funds in order to establish the reality of the event (Kelley 1958:17-18). Thetechniquesareremarkablysimilartothoseemployedbythe Pentagon for controlling information about the Grenada invasion and the Persian Gulf War. There is much more that can be said about public relations and the way inwhichitconstructsadiscourseofthepublic. Thereisagreatdealmorethat can be said about how this shaping of reality for media and public consumption has expanded beyond government and industry to advocacy groups that have framed their various campaigns to speak the same kinds of language of press agentry and public relations. It is clear that public relations
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and press agentry identify the establishment of a form of knowledge about the public. Press agentry, with its origins in the entertainment industry and its migration into politics and political spindoctoring, developed a knowledge of the operation of the media and equally a knowledge of the means and methods of attracting the public's attention. The publicists of the entertainment world were seen to have an intuitive knowledge of their audience and how to affect that audience (in later years, massive amounts were spent to quantify this knowledge for both its sell to advertisers and to legitimise the practices of the television industry). Also, publicists' efforts were part of proliferating discourse on defining the public in the most private and personal way. Their growth in power, in their clear connection to politics, identifies the kind of public sphere that is part of modernity- that is, a public sphere that defines its truth through the supposed hidden recesses of the personal and the intimate. In American politics, the town meeting becomes the new confessional according to Clinton. In Canadian politics, the talkshow becomes the new moment of movement where the public is defined by the leader's private life (VanderZalm and tulips). In Australia, Keating appears on a bizarre interview show where he tries to reveal a more personal side to his undertaker good looks. And the blending of the personal with the public knits together the various public personalities. Michael Jackson's constructed confessional with Oprah and Liz Taylor resembles Hilary's defense of herself over Whitewater. Roseanne's confession to Oprah on a prime time interview special in 1994 that she suffered from a multiple personality disease signals the further legitimation of the public defined by the private revelation. To end with vignettes of the public sphere defined in terms of the personal is beautiful and fitting; the minutae of the personal (the public personal) has enveloped the meaning of the public sphere. The public personal confessional, in all its detail, orchestrates the frame of a political culture whose boundaries are defined by the intense search for norms through public personalities. historical to identify continuities of discourse has been essential to this work in progress. To understand the organisation of power as not oppositional, but possibly relational in terms of discourse: the personal becomes a site for the expression of a kind of agency within contemporary culture that proliferates in manner that is indescribable in classic oppositional frameworks of power and repression of power. Finally, Although this discussion of the private in the public does not directly speak to the body in discourse, it allows for that inscription.
References De Cordova, Richard (1990). Picture Personalities: The Emergence of the Star System in America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Foucault, Michel (1980). The History ofSexuality I: An Introduction. New York: Pantheon. Graumann,CarlF.(1986).'ThelndividualizationoftheSocialandtheDesocialization of the Individual: Floyd H. Allport's Contribution to Social Psychology', in Graumann and Moscovici (eds). Changing Conceptions of the Crowd, pp.97-116.
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Habermas, Jurgen (1992). The Structural Transformation of the Public Spheres, trans. Thomas Burger, Cambridge Ma.: MIT Press. Jamieson, Kathleen Hall (1992). Packaging the Presidency: a History and Criticism of Presidential Politics. New York: Oxford University Press. Kelley Jr., Stanley (1958). Professional Public Relations and Political Power. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. Sennett, Richard (1974). The Fall of Public Man: On the Social Psychology of Capitalism. New York: Random House.
The Role of Public Relations in Empowering Groups and Institutions: A Study l££i.za6etli Logan Introduction The study of power is certainly not new, however, the tentative hypotheses provided by Foucault are ones in which modern-day society can be viewed and studied. Little research to date has looked at the role of public relations in empowering certain groups or institutions in society and Foucault provides a useful framework from which to begin a broader study. According to Paolini (1992:106-9) Foucault's ideas, while at the risk of oversimplification, can be divided into five main observations: (1) Power and knowledge are linked. There is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations; (2) Power is not simply a negative phenomenon. Foucault emphasises the 'empowering' possibilities of power relations rather than merely excluding, repressing, censoring, abstracting, masking or concealing; (3) Foucault advocates a 'nominalist' view of power. It is not just something concrete it is neither an institution, a structure nor a possession. Power is everywhere: not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere. Foucault refers to it as a 'strategy' in which the dominated are as much a part of the network of power relations as the dominating. The intention is not to tell us where power is, but merely where to look; (4) As power is everywhere it is not manifested centrally or monolithically. Rather, power is located in a complex network of power strategies operative at every level of society. Power is not to be identified with the state, as the state is merely a composite of 'micro-powers' wherein power is located in its varied institutions (factories, schools and families); (5) Power is never possessed but exercised from multiple shifting points. It will therefore never be overthrown or acquired once and for all. We can never be ensnared by power: we can always modify its grip in determinate conditions and according to a precise strategy. 'Much of the work of public relations is in empowering institutions, individuals and/ or ideas within society. The ways in which practitioners do this can be viewed in terms of the five observations, noted earlier. For example, public relations practitioners aim to manipulate knowledge within society, whether it is in suppressing some information about an organisation and its works or, by establishing forums to publicise or promote that corporation through channels such as the media. Certainly while public relations practices aim to empower groups this is not to suggest that others will be directly affected in
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a negative way. As an example, by publicising certain events or issues others are then made aware of them and can respond accordingly. Practitioners of public relations can lay claim to empowering specific groups but are aware that nothing occurs in isolation, rather as a part of a network of interacting groups within society. In public relations, terminology such as 'publics' refers to those groups who will be influenced by, and have an influence on, an organisation or individual. Similarly the concept of opinion leaders suggests that power is held by those who are not in the traditional positions of power and that they hold these positions on a temporary basis only. Powerful people will be determined as such depending on the broad circumstances. As power has no true essence there are no individuals or groups who will always exert influence as they may well be merely the vehicles for it. Power is not a tangible asset and the use of public relations strategies does not guarantee to place it in the hands of specific groups but rather to create more avenues from which it can be manipulated. This paper will endeavour to explore some of Foucault's ideas and use them to discuss the role of public relations in society. While Foucault did not write about public relations as such, this exploration should be viewed as just that, another way of using his writings to view contemporary society and the forces that operate within it.
Public Relations and Capillary Power Foucault tells us that power is not the result of one homogeneous group's domination over others. It is not possessed exclusively by some: 'power must be analysed as something which circulates, or rather something which only functions in the form of a chain. It is never localised here or there, never in anybody's hands, never appropriated as a commodity or a piece of wealth' (Foucault 1986:234). Instead power is exercised through loose associations with others. In public relations we distinguish publics as loose groups brought together on issues. Pressure groups, for example, may be active and 'powerful' at a specific time or in one situation and then disperse. Active publics on one issue may be visible and employ a certain degree of influence over others but may well be subjected to external forces by those groups opposing their stance. In this way people are 'in the position of simultaneously undergoing and exercising this power' (1986:234). The individuals who make up the group do not have access to power until they form a unit and a vehicle for this power. Lobbyists for instance can be transitory in their ability to exert influence on others. 'Public opinion is thus expressed in the decisions flowing from the interactions within and among integrated groups making up the power structure that revolves around a particular issue' (Cutlip et al. 1985:157). Foucault states that it is incorrect to study power from a central point. Instead it needs to be viewed from the lower echelons and up: 'an ascending analysisofpower,starting,thatis,fromitsinfinitesimalmechanisms,which each have their own history, their own trajectory, their own techniques and tactics' (Foucault 1986:234). Thus, groups form when there is a cause, an issue or problem that brings them together. Techniques are employed to address the problem and out of this quite often develops a discourse. The activist group, Greenpeace in its demonstrations against whale hunting
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starts with an issue then forms protest groups whose aim it is to gain media exposure for their cause. Greenpeace may exercise power in order to sway government opinion and legislation, and then it moves on to another issue. During this time, however, the seat of power may be negotiated between Greenpeace and other groups, such as the Japanese fishermen who will use their influence to maintain their control over government policies. Public relations theorists such as Grunig and Hunt (1984:160) show patternsofpublics. 'Formostofthemajorprogramsofpublicrelations, these types of publics emerge: (1) Publics that are active on all of the issues; (2) Publics that are apathetic on all issues; (3) Publics that are active only on issues that involve nearly everyone in the population; and (4) Single-issue publics'. The influence that a group exerts for a time is not tied to traditional concepts of power being held by a particular social class in society or those who possess wealth. As noted in public relations research there are groups who develop for a reason. Some of them disband while others move on to new issues aiming to influence different people. Power is not isolated or static, according to Foucault. It is part of a series of forces and a network of influences. The concept of crime cannot be explained by simply noting that certain groups such as judges, lawyers or the wealthy exert power over the poor. It is a question of the regulation of an individual's actions, the belief system that is common within society, the cultural codes imposing order upon behaviour and experience. Public relations practitioners work in tandem with influential groups in society in trying to establish 'norms'. 'In communicating with influentials in the various power structures to influence their behaviour, (public relations) practitioners need to take into account the new concept of networking' (Cutlip et al. 1985:257). Traditionally public relations techniques have been employed to justify the actions of large organisations and to create a discourse that supports them. 'It is only if we grasp these techniques of power and demonstrate the economic advantages or political utility that derives from them in a given context for specific reasons, that we can understand how these mechanisms come to be effectively incorporated into the social whole' (Foucault 1986:236). Large organisations have used public relations strategies for economic and political gain. For example, in cleaning up parks and rivers industrial organisations try to influence public opinion in an effort to persuade the public that they are socially responsible and a benefit to the community. Here the organisation is not directly exerting dominance but using techniques which will develop a support network amongst its publics so that it is perceived to be 'responsible to maintain the freedom to behave in the way it wants, which it must do in order to be profitable or achieve other goals' (Grunig and Hunt 1984:52). In explanation, groups of influential people develop channels of communication which act as a way of exchanging ideas and information that can then be a catalyst for change or a substantiation of the status quo. All of this points to the public relations concept of'systems'. A systems perspective according to Cutlip et al. (1985) suggests that successful organisations operate within a group of interacting units which must respond and adjust to pressures in the environment. Foucault talks about systems of relations. As one of his critics sug-
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gests, 'no one designed the whole, and no one controls it; but as if by an invisible hand, all its parts are somehow fitted together' 0Nalzer 1986:57). Public relations theorists agree that in understanding how power is disseminated a system of controls is the key ingredient. Power does not originate nor reside in isolated individuals or groups, it is part of a broader structure. An organisation is 'a sub-system of a larger 'suprasystem', or a system in an environment that consists of other systems. Those systems include the government, publics, and other organisations. Because the organisation is part of a larger suprasystem, all the other systems affect its behaviour' (Grunig and Hunt 1984:52). At times the organisation will'hold' the position of power but this will only be transitory, it must evolve and adapt to the changes which occur in the wider environment. In other words, organisations interpenetrate with other forces which they never completely control nor which control them, power is a phenomenon which circulates. Foucault does not view power as a property, possession or privilege of a particular section of the community. As Hoy remarks, in Foucault's terms power 'is a strategy and the dominated are as much a part of the network of power relations and the particular social matrix as the dominating' (Hoy 1986:134). As Foucault suggests it is important to realise that individuals are the 'vehicles of power', rather than 'its points of application', and it is these individuals who form publics that create networks which operate within systems (Foucault 1986:234). Hoy uses the game of chess as an analogy to explain Foucault's viewpoint. Power is exercised in the effect of one action on another action. In the game of chess, power is not just held by those pieces capturing, or threatening to capture, others but by all the pieces on a side, as a strategy to win the game overall. Even the pieces which can capture others but are not used to take this action, are creating an effect: 'opportunities are sometimes deliberately delayed for larger future gains' (Hoy 1986:136). Therefore it is not possible to view power relations in isolation or as a static occurrence.
The Concept of Opinion Leaders If Foucault's ideas are to be understood, the concept of 'decision-makers' (Lemert and Gillan 1982: 103) needs to be explored. It is not always the same people or groups who possess power all the time, as discussed previously. Foucault talks about decision-makers who exercise power and make decisions on behalf of others: in public relations those people are called 'opinion leaders'. They are the people who make decisions from time to time but are not necessarily the political leaders or those who it might be expected to hold the power in a community or society. 'Opinion leadership is not static. It moves with issues. In modern times you cannot rely on the traditional biases: rich versus poor, conservative versus liberal, generation versus generation, and so on ... Each issue or proposal attracts leadership to push for and against' (Cutlip et al. 1985:395). So with the rise of specificissues, leaders become apparent both supporting and opposing one another. 'The Mayor or City Manager may not be the political leader. He or she may be a puppet placed in a referee position by the real leaders ... ' (1985:395). For Foucault it is not who the leaders are which is important, but why and how it happens that needs to be addressed. The concept of opinion leaders
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may well be the key to answering these last two questions. The reasons why leaders change is attached to the rise and fall of significant issues and how leaders are elected can be answered by looking at who opposes and supports the issues. An example of this was demonstrated when prominent business men joined in their support in regards to the bid for the contract to build a casino in Melbourne. The Lord Mayor, directors of Coles Myer and BHP all voiced their support for one consortium consisting of a prominent building company, semi-government gambling agency and hotel chain to win the tender. On another issue, however, these groups may be opposed to one another or some might sidestep leadership and concede their power to others during that time. 'Foucault views power not as a privilege to be defended, but as a contract governing exchange. The model Foucault prefers is that of a "network of relations, constantly in tension" and "a perpetual battle"' (Lemert and Gillan 1982:74). This network uses primary and secondary sources of communication. This means that the exchange can be direct from person to person or can be passed on via secondary sources, much the same as Katz and Lazarsfeld's two-step flow theory. Contemporary communication theories are concerned with the significance of peers and associates in any relationship. Rather than suggesting the media is all powerful, these theorists have studied the effects of interpersonal discussion and the role of reinforcement of messages which occurs when other individuals are consulted. Hence power should not be viewed merely as that which one individual, such as an opinion leader, or one source of information, such as the media, possesses but something which can be created from secondary sources as well.
Public Relations and The Media A fundamental part of Foucault's writing has concentrated on the issue of discourse, how language shapes beliefs and norms. In Western society today themediaplaysasignificantroleincreatingdiscourse.Forinstance,withthe proliferation of American sitcoms and video clips has come new slang and a new way of thinking that has been adopted from the black American culture.Poster(1984:165)discussestheroleofthemedia,inlightofFoucault's mode of information, by stating: 'Still further removed from the traditional communication is the television" conversation". Superficially a monologue, television communication contains many of the features of dialogue in that the viewer-listener is changed by the experience: he or she has consumed meanings'. Poster proposes this idea as a suggestion for future studies in critical social theory. How is a democratic society altered by the existence of the new mixture of communication forms? Certainly the media could be said to 'frame' our beliefs. Public relations practice has the capacity to open up the channels of communication to and from organisations. In the past it has been the wealthier organisations or ones who have had greater access to the media who have been better equipped to gain the most positive publicity. In order to access 'the truth' about people, organisations or structures in society Foucault suggests 'we mustn't adopt a protectionist attitude, to stop ''bad" information from invading and stifling the" good". We must rather increase the possibility for movement backwards and forwards' (1988:328).
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Even though it is often argued there is an oligopoly of the media in Western society which has led to a uniformity and levelling down of discourse, public relations texts such as that by Grunig and Hunt (1984) support a 'two-way symmetric' model of communication with organisational publics. In other words, not merely one-way dissemination of information or propaganda through the media, but a two-way dialogue whereby the feedback an organisation gains from its publics is used to alter its way of conducting business. 'The public should be just as likely to persuade the organisation's management to change attitudes or behaviour as the organisation is likely to change the publics' attitudes or behaviour' (1984:23). In this way the conversation between the organisation and its publics, whether it is through the media or other sources, encourages all parties in the exchange to effect an influence on one another. Foucault believes that there is an abundant curiosity and thirst for knowledge in society, 'what we are suffering from is not a void, but inadequate means for thinking about everything that is happening' (Foucault 1988:327). Perhaps the public relations area is able to provide a means of dissemination of some information to meet this inadequacy. While public relations practitioners are self-serving, in many instances, they are also aware that the mass media is a powerful device. If the media 'zero in on a particular individual or institution, the results can be devastating. Recent US history is studded with examples of people and agencies whose power and influence have been cut short as a result of their attracting extensive, critical media attention,' according to Seitel (1989:361). In this way public relations practice is held accountable but it also provides a medium by which information is circulated. By increasing the amount of information, people can 'throw off familiar ways of thought and look at the same things in a different way' perhaps this will lead to 'a lack of respect for the traditional hierarchies of what is important and fundamental' (Foucault 1988:328). If the example of Greenpeace is used again, the aim of this organisation has certainly been to challenge the customary ways of thinking about environmental issues. It has adopted public relations strategies and used the media as a way of voicing its concerns. Sheridan following Foucault concedes that 'closed societies are rare today, but discourse is still communicated within a structure that, while more diffuse, is nevertheless constricting' (Sheridan 1984:127) as there is a ritualisation of thought and speech. So while society is more able to observe organisations, institutions and individuals through the media there are still underlying agendas which constrain true 'honesty'. Information which we receive from the media is perceived to be 'real' and credible, particularly that which appears on television. However, what is often presented is packaged in a way so that it appears to be the truth. Foucault (in Hoy 1991:93) states: each society has its regime of truth, its 'general politics' of truth; that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and processes accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true.
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What is publicised in the media is believed to be 'true', few people question the abilities of journalists, 'those who are charged with saying what countsastrue'(1991:93)topresenttherealsituationinanyarticle.Themedia has set itself up as the mechanism of disseminating knowledge about society and public relations practitioners work in tandem with the media in giving credibility to organisations and their actions. The media are one important part of the network of structures operating in society, and they certainly assist in distributing knowledge about other sources or locations of power, such as hospitals, prisons, schools and so on.
Modes of Information In Foucault's theories 'the object of control has shifted from the body to the
mind' (Poster 1984:81) and in this information age, extensive computerisation and technologies assist in monitoring people, thereby leading to institutionalised discourses and power. 'Eventually, the population can be put under surveillance and observed almost continuously, like an amoeba under a microscope' (1984:82). The role that public relations has played in society has complemented this institutionalised discourse. Banks and financial institutions have utilised the techniques of promotion in developing a social system in Australia that advocates using the services of banks as an integral part oflife. To do this individuals' personal financial details (as well as other information, such as marital status, profession, income and so on) are entered into computers and filed for later use if necessary. In this way, a credit history is calculated and customers can be observed whenever the need arises. A whole discourse has evolved relating to financial liquidity and a change has occurred in how Western society views money. The use of A1Ms, credit cards and EFTPOS, for example, are new facilities which have enabled people to reconsider methods of communication with their bank. According to Poster (1984:166) 'Machine conversations are part of our linguistic community: they constitute an increasing portion of our social interactions'. Being computer literate is taken as a matter of course particularly in the business world. Accompanying the age of computers has come the opportunity to increase the amount of information an individual can easily access, either for business or pleasure. Advertising, as a case in point, has created a discourse within society so that consumers are encouraged to buy all sorts of products and services. Capitalist society is concerned today with selling products which have a perceived value or use. The new need, according to Poster (1984:30) is emotional and social rather than practical. 'Qualities that are desired by the population (sexiness, self-confidence) are attributed to commodities irrespective of their functionality or material utility' (1984:29) and it is the various forms of promotion and advertising which have created this demand. Not only the media but computer technology such as electronic billboards in cities and in-store television screens, encouraging people to purchase specific items, have produced fashions and fads. Foucault discusses how power normalises as well as controls, and in this way fashion, as promoted to individuals has the same effect. Western society is disciplined by these processes in that individuals, who wear clothes that are not deemed fashionable are seen as' outsiders'. Individuals are not truly free to choose how they
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will dress or can make informed decisions about products they will buy just as they are constrained in regards to moral and legal norms. While public relations techniques assist in the selling of images, so too do they provide an avenue for others to influence the marketing process. Criticism over the labelling of food and consumable products, for instance, is the result of specific people enforcing their rights to know the ingredients contained in products. Similarly the anti-smoking lobby has been influential in banning cigarette advertising and promotion as well, and legislation was altered so that warnings of the risks of smoking could be placed on all cigarette packets. Hence it has been demonstrated that, at least in some instances, consumers do have power over producers. If the environment is divided into sections according to power structures it is not merely individuals but a range of factors including economic factors, technology, the legal and political environment as well as competitive groups who will be influenced by and exert influence on producers. Just about every 'social relation does lend itself to be seen in terms of power' (Merquior 1985:115). Modes of information therefore are not necessarily communicated verbally or in writing but can take on forms which might be symbolic or technologically created.
Organisational Culture and Discourse Poster is critical of the Marxist mode of production as being irrelevant in modern-day society, as 'more than half of the working population is engaged neither in the primary sector (agriculture) nor the secondary (service) sector' (1984:53). Therefore people no longer act on the environment but on other people in their jobs. Today the manipulation of information tends to characterise human activity. In large institutions many of the day-to-day activities centre on reading messages and responding to them in an acceptable format. In the business world, certain formalities of language and custom are adopted so as to assist employees in understanding their role in the overall structure. Public relations techniques are employed to increase communication throughout organisations and ensure employees adhere to the principles and formalities as established. Foucault notes that power 'seeps into the very grain of individuals, reaches right into their bodies, permeates their gestures, their posture, what they say, how they learn to live and work with other people' (Foucault in Sheridan 1984:217). It might be suggested that individuals are socialised in the workplace by processes such as those espoused by public relations. For instance, public relations practitioners are aware of 'dominant coalitions' within organisations. These groups are the power-base in and outside of organisations and are therefore seen to be important in the communication process. According to Grunig and Hunt (1984:119) 'each of these constituencies has a say in determining what the organisation's goals should be, but some constituencies have more power than others in making that decision'. For public relations to take on a significant role, it must understand the discourse of the other coalitions or constituencies. For example, for public relations managers to work effectively with the finance department of an organisation, an understanding of their terms and approach to business would need to be formed.
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If an organisation is viewed as a micro-society then the networks of relations and underlying structures to which Foucault refers, can be seen. Just as in the wider context individuals adopt certain practices and actions so they do in specific organisations. Lemert and Gillan (1982:39) note: 'In simple terms, society does not just rule out certain practices. It works because actors accept and maintain, in their actions, what is known to be acceptable action. Or, in different terms, power excludes what is not said; and it selects what is said'. As a crude example of this, employees' behaviour can be shaped and determined in the process of assimilation into an organisation by co-workers, so that it becomes understood, in some instances, that subordinates do not tell their superiors everything about the workplace. In this way it is not what is said, but what is not said that determines who holds the power in that relationship. What have been determined as acceptable modes of behaviour are questioned by public relations practitioners whose function it is to open the lines of communication between employees at all levels. By doing so, everyone has greater access to the negotiation process and consequently more opportunity to exchange ideas and influence one another's thoughts. 'Access to discourse as knowledge is also an object of control,' states Merquior (1985:84) and in regulating or excluding certain individuals from the discourse, power can be attained. Merquior (1985:84) continues: 'rules classifying discourses maintain borders between disciplines stifling vital questions in the process'. Foucault was critical of what he termed the' closedshop' customs of certain professionals such as doctors and educators as it provided a political means of excluding certain people and in so doing preserving their domination byway of'appropriation of discourse' (1985:84). The medical, legal and academic professions have all developed customs and language which are foreign to the layman. In not being able to use the discourse of these professions, individuals are shut out from the power process. As an example, recent media reports have suggested that medical specialists are rorting the system. Patients are not able to prove or disprove this as they have no access to the knowledge of what is acceptable practice by a physician. Therefore they have no means of questioning the treatment and less power to take action. The nurses who witness the treatment are also disempowered by the inherent rules which govern the entire medical profession, that fellow medical staff should be supported, and subsequently are loathe to speak out against the specialists. The trust placed in doctors has been usurped by these types of 'malpractices'. Whether it has been the media or changing attitudes in society from other sources, about such 'closed-shop' customs, the result has been that public relations has come to the fore by making these professionals more accountable to individuals. For instance, public relations has assisted lobby groups in stirring the debate in relation to the writing of plain English legal documents, and encouraging more research into certain diseases. The use of public relations techniques in promoting the need for wider public discussion about AIDS or multiple sclerosis or SIDS are illustrations of the increase in knowledge and subsequent discourse about medical phenomena. Today most people know what the acronym AIDS represents as well as how it is
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transmitted and so on. In understanding more about medicine, individuals are able to be more critical of the profession and/ or demand improved treatment, and are thus empowered. The class system based on economics, as described by previous social theorists, is no longer relevant and a re-analysis is required which will take into account a new breed of managers, professionals and intellectuals. In whose interest has it been to increase the amount of information to a wider public? Public relations practitioners neither work solely in the interests of the 'ruling class' as their purpose is to increase communication and information so that everyone has the ability to comment and have the power to make decisions based on knowledge gained through multiple sources. In countries like Australia where 'class' structures are said to be non-existent it is useful to look at Foucault's ideas as a basis for study, most notably of organisations.
Conclusion The intention in this document has not been to condone or condemn public relations and its role in society today. The aim has been merely to try to demonstrate how some of Foucault's theories are relevant when matched with those used in the application of public relations. His ideas are an invitation to discussion and this has been the purpose of the paper, which has taken liberties with the writings of Foucault. Obviously there is no simple answer when presented with the question of power in society. As Holsti (in Paolini 1993:114) remarks the world is becoming more complex and it is unlikely that one theory will explain it adequately: 'an increasingly fragmenting world of difference and constant change, a Foucauldian notion of power will better enable us to make sense of the "multiple realities"'.
References Armstrong, T.J. (1992). Michel Foucault Philosopher, Brighton: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Cohen, S. (1985). Visions of Social Control, Cambridge: Polity Press. Cutlip, S.M., Center, A.H. and Broom, G.M. (1985). Effective Public Relations, 6th edn, Englewood Clifs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall International. Diamond, F. and Quinby, L. (eds) (1988). Feminism and Foucault, Reflections on Resistance, Boston: Northeastern University Press. Foucault, M. (1986). 'Disciplinary Power and Subjection', in Lukes (ed.) pp.229-42. __ _, (1988). 'The Masked Philosopher', in Foucault, M. Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977-1984, L.D. Kritzman (ed.), New York and London: Routledge. Grunig, J.E. and Hunt, T. (1984). Managing Public Relations, New York: Rinehart and Winston Inc. Hoy, D.C. (ed.) (1986). Foucault, A Critical Reader, Oxford: Blackwell. __ _, (1986). 'Power, Repression, Progress: Foucault, Lukes and the Frankfurt School', in Hoy, D.C. (ed.) Foucault, A Critical Reader, Oxford: Blackwell, pp.123-47 Jablin, F.M. and Krone, K.J. (1987). 'Organisational Assimilation', in C. Berger and S.H. Chaffee (eds), Handbook of Communication Science, Beverly Hills: Sage.
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Kearins, K.N. (1992). 'A Case Study in Communication and Power: Municipal Government in Palmerston North 1877- 1992', Australian Journal of Communication, 19(2). Lemert, C.C. and Gillan, G. (1982). Michel Foucault, Social Theory and Transgression, New York: Colombia University Press. Lukes, S. (ed.) (1986). Power, London: Basil Blackwell. McColl-Kennedy, J.R., Kiel, G., Lusch, R.F. and Lusch, V.N. (1992). Marketing: Concepts and Strategies, South Melbourne: Nelson. Merquior, J.G. (1985). Foucault, London: Fontana Press. Paolini, A.J. (1993). 'Foucault, Realism and The Power of Discourse in International Relations', Australian Journal of Political Science, 28:98-117. Poster, M. (1984). Foucault, Marxism and History, Cambridge: Polity Press. Seitel, F.P. (1989). The Practice of Public Relations, London: Macmillan. Sheridan, A. (1984). Michel Foucault: The Will to Truth, New York: Tavistock. Walzer, M. (1986). 'The Politics of Michel Foucault', in Hoy, D.C. (ed.) Foucault, A Crticial Reader, Oxford: Blackwell, pp.51-68.
Women Politicians: Media Objects or Political Subjects?
Juay Motion 'Visibility is a trap' (Foucault 1977:200).
In this paper a public relations perspective will be developed on how New
Zealand women politicians are trapped by the media surveillance of their public image. I will examine how the politicians are constituted as particular kinds of subjects in the media discourse which creates tensions for the women as they try to position themselves within public relations and political discourses. Using a Foucauldian discursive analysis approach, I argue that the media has a panopticising effect which functions as disciplinary power. Bentham's Panopticon provided for continuous observation of prison inmates. It acted as a form of disciplinary power normalising individual behaviour. 'The Panopticon was accompanied by, and found its support in, a variety of training techniques which Foucault calls 'disciplines' (McHoul and Grace 1993:68). Media surveillance may be likened to the Panopticonpoliticians are constituted as knowledge objects through media frames and representation. Foucault describes the major effect of the Panopticon as being 'to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power' (1977:201). The media maintains surveillance and thus creates a controlling gaze over the politician's public image and role. This surveillance determines what may be talked about, who is allowed to speak, how things are spoken, what is accepted as knowledge, and what rules govern the generation of knowledge (Foucault 1981). Instances of transformation from a traditional media discourse to a public relations discourse become sites of contestation. Another element of panopticism and training techniques is the role of public relations in the discursive formation of the public image in politics. Public relations has been described by Grunig (1992) as 'communication management'. The public relations function of managing communication has the potential to either complement or conflict with media practices. Public relations practitioners assist in creating a professional image for women politicians, that is, how the women try to constitute or transform themselves as knowledge objects. Image can be considered part of the commodification process of the politicians. Within public relations literature there has been a move to discredit the use of the word 'image'. Image production and consumption are considered problematic because there are so many meanings that a positivist theorist cannot 'define, measure or observe it' (Grunig 1993:124). On what Grunig refers to as a 'more emotional
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level' image negatively connotes 'the opposite of reality' (1993:124). What I argue is that because the word image not only represents the real but also has elements of the unreal it is an ideal term for analysing the discursive framing of women politicians, either by the media, public relations practitioners and the politicians themselves. I propose that the term 'image' does not denote self. Rather, image is a shifting, dynamic effect of the intersection between politics, public relations and media relations which discursively constitute and position the subject, in this case the woman politician. According to Foucault, 'there are two meanings of the word subject: subject to someone else by control and dependence, and tied to his own identity by a conscience or self knowledge. Both meanings suggest a form of power which subjugates and makes subject to' (1982:212). The image of women politicians represents how others perceive the subject as being discursively positioned; whereas their identity is a technology of the self, how women politician's position themselves within multiple discourses. The challenge that arises for the women is resolving the tension between image and identity. Image and identity interact as part of a multiple, dynamic self. Butler suggests that 'representation serves as the operative term within a political process that seeks to extend visibility and legitimacy to women as political subjects; on the other hand, representation is the normative function of a language which is said either to reveal or distort what is assumed to be true about the category of women' (1990:1). The category women politicians is a gendered construction which is discursively created and represented. It is the discursive contestation of meaning, of representation of this subject 'woman politician' that is at stake in the interface between the media normative practices and the legitimating public relations practices. The identities of women politicians are not unitary or stable, rather they are representations of multiple discursive positions and performances. The process of image creation is a dimension of the discursive process in which the individuals become knowledge objects through 'dividing practices' (Foucault in Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982:208). These dividing practices are both external and internal: how the individual is divided from others and how the individual is divided within herself. This paper focuses on the externaldividingpractices:whatFoucault(1977)terms'themeansofcorrect training' which comprise surveillance, normalising judgement, and examination. Surveillance is the continuous gaze of the media on women politicians. Normalising judgement and examination function to control prescribed gender roles. Transgressions in terms of resistance or repositioning outside media discursive boundaries are subject to discipline. Power and relations of power, are central aspects of the means of correct training which create the technologies of self. Tensions arise because individuals are both targets of power and willing vehicles or subjects of power. Women politicians need to subject themselves to media surveillance in order to gain a public profile, in order to get elected. Yet for Foucault power is also positive and productive; 'it produces reality, it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him [in this case her] belong to this production' (Foucault 1977:194). The indi-
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vidual is an effect of power, a reality constituted through a technique of power which Foucault describes as discipline. To identify articles about the current New Zealand women members of parliament a media audit was conducted using a news index. I analysed articles that focused on the identity and image of the women politicians. The analysis drew on a Foucauldian conceptual framework in order to analyse the competing discourses. Panopticism, corporeality and public versus private regulation were the media dividing practices identified that constituted the women as gendered knowledge objects, regulating the public relations representations and discursive practices. Resistance, the power wielded by the women politicians, was also examined.
Panopticism Helen Clark, the leader of the opposition Labour party provides an example of the controlling role that the media plays. When recalling a standard sort of public relations practice, Clark is quoted as being seething about a 'scathing' newspaper editorial, which wonders why a person of 'cerebral interests' and refined tastes was mixing with the yachties during the visit of the Whitbread fleet. Two days later that same newspaper carried a front page photograph of Prime Minister Jim Bolger and Grant Dalton perched high up the mast of Endeavour. Clark says 'There was no editorial on why was Bolger climbing up a mast. .. everyone knows he's a King Country farmer who's never been near a yacht'. She continues, 'I mean, there's a total double standard, anything I do is picked at, while for men ... well, that is what politicians do, isn't it?' (Munro 1994). While these comments can be read as part of a public relations exercise, Clark is also highlighting and trying to resist an instance of media discursive relations which position her as a knowledge object. Women politicians are expected to conform to one stereotype; in this case Clark has been positioned bythemediaasrefinedandcerebralsothatiswhatmaybespokenabouther. What is accepted as knowledge is that men may indulge in public relations discursive practices that are for 'show' but that women may not try to use the media in the same way in order to gain political capital. Clark's observation that politics is what men do supports a view that the media is constructing or maintaining rules about politics being a masculine discourse. Clark stepped outside the boundaries of the 'refined' and 'intellectual' image set by the media which governs which public relations exercises she may credibly be seen to do in an attempt to enter the male sporting arena. Clearly Clark is caught in a tension between surveillance and the need to maintain a public profile. The media disciplined her by exposing the anomaly between what they perceived as her image and action. Ann Batten, in her discussion of media coverage of Helen Clark, cites further examples of this treatment of Clark and states, 'It is true that Helen Clark had made a statement to the effect that she is repositioning herself, but again, one would expect this in her new role' (1994:13). The media would seem to have fixed ideas as to what a female leader can be and acts as a normalising force, reifying and protecting the constraints which limit the public image and discursive position of a female political leader.
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From her early political career Helen Clark has been the subject of intense surveillance and speculation, and has been positioned by her sexuality. When Helen Clark had entered Parliament she overcame potentially damaging claims that she was a lesbian, by marrying Dr Peter Davis who she had been living with for five years, saying 'the only reason was that she was tired of the personal innuendo'(Laugesen 1993:12). Now Clark is still positioned within a sexual discourse and subject to intense media surveillance. A photo captioned 'Leadership passion' which the Dominion published has been the focus of public disapproval. Helen Clark and her husband, medical sociologist Dr Peter Davis are posed, he with mouth open and she leaning back in a position of sexual desire. Ralston referred to the article as telling 'an ugly story of a couple ill at ease with each other, unused to physical familiarity, a strangely disturbing flashback to painful, bumbling, pre-adolescent petting (1994:60). When asked why the photo was published, Clark replied 'Anti-women, anti- Labour, anti-Clark. I don't know. I do know that the photographer submitted a beautiful photo because I have a copy of it'. The photo was sent anonymously to Clark with a note on Dominion letterhead paper which said 'Dear Helen Clark, Thought you might appreciate the photo the Dominion didn't use. Some of us here thought the front page deeply offensive. And you undeserving! Good luck'. As Clark says: 'Very interesting' (Ralston 1994:61). As a female politician Clark has been positioned as 'lover' not 'politician'. Rather than positioned as an organisational or occupation subject which Clark has attempted to construct through public relations practices, she has been positioned by the media within traditional media discursive frames as gendered, as feminine. Being positioned as gendered means female, for male is treated as neutral, as the 'normal' subject. The positioning of women politicians in feminine roles is further exemplified by newly elected Gisborne M.P., Janet Mackey's statement, 'I'm sure we all come into Parliament bright eyed and bushy tailed, but you have to develop some defences. The local rag's headline when I won was 'Mackey goes off DPB' [Domestic Purposes Benefit]. Anything that can be used negatively will be' (McLoughlin 1994:68). Mackey is being positioned as a solo parent who has relied on state assistance. The negative connotation is that she has been a benefit bludger. Such a position is only possible for a woman. Fraser pointed out that whereas men are positioned as 'rights bearers' and 'purchasing consumers' of welfare aid, women are positioned as 'dependent clients' and 'clients of public charity' (1989:152-154). Mackey has been positioned as a subject of a failed family which depended on societal largesse. Attempts to resist the discursive positioning by the media are disregarded. When Ruth Richardson refused to co-operate with journalist Bruce Ansley she was told that he would writeanarticleanyway. The mechanisms of observation are invasive and function without consent. Richardson's press secretary, Anna Symmans, explained that Richardson believed she would be 'minced' in the article. Journalist, Bruce Ansley, stated that he considered that 'Richardson was more user- friendly before Symmans and the posse of image-makers got their mitts on her. The cosmetic-free Richardson
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with the severe collegiate cut was at least honest' (Ansley 1993:23). The assumption that a change in image is dishonest means that women repositioning themselves will be scrutinised and critiqued. The media position is one of censure- transgressions outside media discourse are reprimanded. Foucault claimed that 'there are no relations of power without resistances' (1980:142). The women politicians try to resist the surveillance and media control of representation. The women know they are being abused yet are regulated and disciplined in their attempts to resist that abuse. The media act as victimisers of the female image and, hence, restrict their discursive possibilities.
Corporeality A primary focus of the media in its regime of surveillance is on the body, not policy. Butler suggests that bodies 'only appear, only endure, only live within the productive constraints of certain highly gendered regulatory schema' (1993:xi). The focus on women politician's bodies, in particular their appearance, serves to position them as different. The diversity and complexity of women politicians is glossed over in the focus on the physical. The women politicians are only as good as they look. Helen Clark, who revamped her fashion style last year is described in the following terms: despite last year's much-analysed image remake, which has made the Labour leader fair game for comment from anyone who knows the difference between a skirt and a frock (today for the record, she's wearing the former, a flared skirt in natural linen, teamed with a plaid jacket and a plain silk Tshirt- very much an example of casual elegance). But a new hairdo and an arrangement with an Auckland fashion house do not, it seems, a fashion junkie make (Nichol1994:10).
All this is included in an article discussing Clark's return from London with books that rethink social democracy. The body is privileged, the mind ignored. The objectivisation of women politicians' appearance constituted the body as a knowledge objectwhichhas become a site for political struggle. Petersen stated that 'the body of the gendered subject has become a focal point for struggles around issues of representation' (1994:33). The women try to draw attention to the restricted discursive position they are framed within by the media. Clark states that 'the contribution of women to politics has been trivialised by comments on appearance' (Rapson 1994:22). Clark believes that women are marginalised by the focus on how they look rather than what women say. Clark stated that 'well meaning critics had a way of getting inside our personal space in a way which ends up being destructive, not constructive' (Rapson 1994:22). Appearance is part of Clark's personal discursive sphere. For Clark the concentration on the private sphere detracts from her desire for discursive positioning as a professional within a political discourse. Becoming a gendered subject, 'woman politician', is antithetical to the parliamentarysubjectwhichisconstructedasmale.Clarkstatedthatshehas 'no desire to be one of the boys - nor do I believe it is either necessary or desirable for women to adapt male role models' (Rapson 1994:22). Clark is aware she has few role models on which to base her performance but resists
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the 'regulatory ideal', that is male. The fact that Clark is one of the few women in the world leading a political party adds a complex dimension to her new role: the media, who are predominantly male, are perplexed by how to portray women politicians without using male standards. Each appearance change the women make is scrutinised and evaluated in terms of a masculine viewer. The women are the objects of the media gaze which sets women up as a group different from men. Annette King's is described as previously having' an owlish appearance, her eyes blinking out from behind large coloured spectacles. That image is no more. Now contact lenses are de rigueur for the new and improved, revamped and recharged Annette Fay King ... ' (Lewis 1993:10). The 'revamping' of the politician's image is considered news worthy. The women's physical appearances have become political commodities to be evaluated as part of the women's performance.
Public versus private The conflict for women politicians is in being a woman (private) whilst giving something of that gender stance as a contribution in a male-dominated world (public). There are clearer guides to the private self of womanhood than there are to the public self of woman acting in a traditionally male discourse. Although feminists such as Nancy Fraser (1989) may rail against the dichotomisation of public and private lives, women politicians are expected to keep public and private life separate. They are constituted as being in the public sphere, that is, not the private or domestic sphere. To constitute themselves as mothers or lovers negates their 'professional' identity as politicians. Ruth Richardson was criticised by colleagues for 'mixing breastfeeding and politics'. Richardson successfully defended Vicky Buck, a Christchurch Mayor, when it was argued that Buck could not hold office and look after her baby at the same time (Ansley 1993:26). Surveillance that divides the subject politician by gender is resisted. Because politics is what men do, women politician are subject to rituals of exclusion when the private or domestic sphere and the body intrude on the public sphere. By reporting on women professionals who breast feed at work the media perpetuates the tension between the discursive boundaries of the political sphere being public and male and the domestic sphere being private and therefore female. Positioning as professional and mother becomes an instance for possible transformation of the traditional discursive boundary of politics. Another dimension of politics being discursively constructed as male work is that the women are positioned as masculine. Clark, Shipley and Richardson' all stand accused of becoming more male than the men around them in their efforts to master the hostile environment of politics' (Laugesen 1993:12). The notion of women becoming more male than their male colleagues, whilenonsensicat is clearly marginalising these women as females. Because the women work in a male discursive sphere, their behaviour is interpreted according to male standards. One has to wonder if male politicians will ever be referred to as more female than their women colleagues. Annette King, a Labour politician, for example, is described as' a politician's
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politician, revelling in the hurly-burly and machinations that mark a successful operator' (Lewis 1993:10). Interestingly, the saying a man's man has been adapted to describe King's political style. The question to be asked is what does the media perceive a 'politician's politician' to be? Is it a male, female or occupational subject? Ruth Richardson once recalled an incident where she had learnt that Miss Mexico had made a financial observation and then Richardson commented that she would have concentrated on debt reduction. The journalist reporting Richardson's remarks commented 'Ruth Richardson in Miss Mexico's position? After all, Richardson is successor to Arnold Nordmeyer, Robert Muldoon, Roger Douglas and David Caygill (she even emulates Caygill's croak between words). Face it, our ministers of finance are unlikely to do well in the Miss Mexico contest' (Ansley 1993:24). Richardson has been positioned as male because all the other holders of the position of Minister of Finance are male and then judged as a possible male candidate in the beauty contest. Richardson is both judged by her appearance, a female standard and then compared with her predecessors - a male standard. Richardson is in a no-win situation. What was, presumably, a humorous quip by Richardson, a public relations ploy to establish rapport, was reascribed as a discursive transgression. We are informed that she will not win a beauty contest, a prized female attribute (a measure of femininity) and we are reminded that Minister of Finance is really a man's job so any woman who undertakes the job is masquerading as a man, invading male discursive spaces. Richardson, Shipley and Clark are described as having succeeded 'by exerting a degree of discipline and self control which has submerged most of the outward signs of emotion' (Laugesen 1993:12). Foucault (1977) describes the major effect of the Panopticon as inducing a state of conscious and permanentvisibilitysothatpowerfunctionsautomatically. The surveillance becomes permanent in its effects because those under surveillance become caught in the web of power and exercise that power and surveillance over themselves. All three women are depicted as having found that 'showing emotion is the quickest way to be condemned by male colleagues alert for any signs of female vulnerability' (Laugesen 1993:12). The discursive rules differ. Showing emotion is a positive, newsworthy trait for male politicians but results in negative news coverage for women politicians. The discourses that construct the women's images are often contradictory. Shipley is analysed as a paradoxical figure with a quite forbidding public image. 'The pain/ guilt of "neglecting" family. The Presbyterian ethic of individualism. The fear, for a woman in public life, of showing too much emotion' (Campbell 1994:18). Such observations by the media work as controlling and normalising techniques. Women politicians are portrayed as neglecting their families, working as individuals and not showing emotion. But compliance with the normalising discourse would also be criticised - the women are trapped by a panopticising gaze which does not accept difference or diversity. The women are positioned as 'other'. They are criticised for not being men and they are criticised for being insufficiently female. This schizoid positioning by the media renders women politicians
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powerless to achieve the positive media image which they desire. It leaves them trapped as women in 'no-mans land' - there is no discursive space. Shipley is aware of the continual surveillance: 'You can't help but sense more people are waiting for you to trip than [is the case with] your colleagues'. When Shipley got the post of Social Welfare, it appeared that the intention was to link her indelibly with the politics of extremism, as the advocate for the most unpopular policies on the government agenda (Campbell1994:19). Thisisarolewhichdemandsgreaterinputthannormal to gain success with higher risks than normal, thus contributing to the rhetoric that women lose because they seek to overachieve. Another interpretation is that is that caring for the poor, sick and aged is a 'feminine', domestic role. The position and policies Shipley promoted were perceived as 'non-caring', 'non-feminine' and by stepping outside her traditional discursive role she was judging twice as harshly. Richardson considers that she has been a casualty of myth, of the boys club that prevails in the media. She characterises the male journalists as 'caught up in their own myths and they can't actually connect with the real world'. In reply TVNZ political reporter, Richard Harman, states 'her image is not a product of my journalism. She can take all the responsibility for it herself' (Ansley 1993:23). Rather than deal with the substantive issue Harman chose to marginalise the issue by diverting attention to her public relations image. The allegation that a boys' club prevails in the media is supported by the analysis of this paper which points to the masculinising of rhetoric about parliamentary subjects. Physically the women must conform to female norms but as workers they are evaluated on a male scale- often set by journalists. Women politicians are constructed as gendered knowledge objects. Richardson suggested that she and Shipley are 'carrying the can because they're women, not because of anything they may have done in the jobs. You talk to women and you get , 'wait a minute, why were women given the tough patches?' Could it be coincidence that the women were having to carry all this can for the government?' Bruce Ansley, the journalist observed 'Now it seems, they are not taking the blame because they are ardent, articulate, exponents of highly unpopular economic measures, but because they are women' (1993:26). A Foucauldian perspective of the women's position would suggest that the women are rendered useful through the act of'carrying the can'. The women have been placed in a position where they must be 'docile bodies' if they wish to remain within cabinet. The notion of Shipley as docile is not an argument many would buy but the women act as agents of power and undergo power at the same time. As agents of power implementing unpopular policy, the women acquire negative images. For Ruth Richardson the penalty for implementing unpopular government policy was removal from office. It is difficult to know whether her removal was a symbolic cleansing and disassociation from the economic decisions she made or an exercise of power. By removing the spectre of Ruth's dirty deeds the government was able to be associated with a surplus, rather than the deficit that became Richardson's catch cry. An explanation provided for Richardson's demise was that' deficits aren't sexy' (McLoughlin
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1994:41). When it was time for 'sexy' surpluses, Richardson was removed and a man positioned as Minister of Finance. The irony is that the women are discursively positioned within the media by sex, by the body, but when the news is positive they are removed. The media framing of women politicians as sex objects I gendered subjects is contradicted by the political practice which removed Richardson from power when something 'sexy' was happening. A positive image or representation within media discourse was reserved for a male. Richardson was denied the opportunity for positive interdiscursive framing in media and public relations discourses.
Conclusion This paper has examined the discursive practices of the media which constitute and position women politicians. The surveillance of the media acts as a disciplinary technique to control the representation of women politicians. For women politicians the need for a public relations profile creates a trap whereby the women must be visible and subject to surveillance. Public relations discourses contest and are contested by media discourses. The notion of image is used to construct the women as gendered subjects. In particular, appearance is used as a 'dividing practice' to distinguish the women as different from men. This paper has mapped some of the discursive media restrictions for women in the production of self as a political commodity. Mediated political discourse is a gendered space which positions women as sexual subject, maternal subject, or transgressing subject, stepping outside prescribed gender roles. The challenge for the media is to portray women politicians not as submerged into the male subject but as occupational subjects.
References Ansley, B. (1993). 'The other face of Ruth Richardson'. Listener, May 8, pp.22-6. Batten, A. (1994). 'What's the media up to with Helen Clark?'. Broadsheet, Spring, pp.12-15. Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge. __ _, (1993). Bodies that matter. New York: Routledge. Campbell, G. (1994). 'The Shipley option'. Listener, Spring, pp.17-19. Dreyfus, H. and Rabinow, P. (1982). Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and hermeneutics. Chicago: University of Chicago. Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish. Harmondsworth: Penguin. __ _, (1980). Power/Knowledge. Colin Gordon (ed.). New York: Pantheon. __ _, (1981 ). The History of sexuality. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Fraser, N. (1989). Unruly practices. Cambridge: Polity. Grunig, J. (1993). 'Image and substance: From symbolic to behavioural relationships'. Public relations Review, 19(2):121-39. Lewis, D.(1993). 'Annette King wants to beanMP again'. The Dominion,April8, p.10. Laugesen, R. (1993). 'The Prime of Ms Helen Clark'. The Dominion, December 2, p.12. McHoul, A and Grace, W. (1993). A Foucault Primer. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.
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McLoughlin, D, (1994). 'Blue skies: the political path ahead'. North and South, p.5868. __ _, (1994). 'Hail Ruth'. North and South, January, pp.40-l. Munro, M. (1994). 'Can Helen last?' The Dominion, May 7, p.13. Nichol, R. (1994). 'A suitable difference'. The Dominion, February 5, p.10. Petersen, A. (1994). 'Governing images: media constructions of the 'normal', 'healthy' subject'. Media Information Australia, 72:32-40. Ralston, B. (1994). 'In from the cold'. North and South, February, pp.58-67. Rapson, B. (1994). 'Clark weary of image war against women'. New Zealand Herald, June 21, p.22.
Part Eleven Policing the Environment
Governing the Environment: the Programs and Politics of Environmental Discourse J2l.tfe Peace The environment has assumed a status equivalent to the economy and the welfare system as an issue of concern in contemporary society. It is by now a problem about which there are abundant theories, models, paradigms and perspectives which both the print and electronic media relay endlessly to their audiences in the form of news bulletins, documentaries, journals and popular television series. The environment has become, in short, a subject of unceasing interrogation. The many sources and avenues of knowledge about the environment encourage the conceptualisation of its problematic character in a diversity of ways. Whether it is the destruction of the ozone layer, the rate of domestic recycling, the politics of the woodchip industry, or the destruction of indigenous lifestyles, each can be interpreted from a series of contrasting vantage points. Yet no mentalite is more pervasive than the idea that the environment can be governed; and this is to culturally constitute it in a distinctive way indeed. The environment is comprehended as a thing which can be managed and manipulated, disciplined and governed, by politicians and economists, bureaucrats and bankers, provided that they follow the directions provided by scientific investigation and analysis. The significance of this central consideration has become lost as environmentalism has been taken over by sociologists concerned to bracket it with other social movements. Along with the peace movement, feminism, antiracism, the human rights movement, and so on, environmentalism has been interpreted as the product of extensive structural and cultural transformations to late capitalist society (Laclau and Mouffe 1985). But this line of interpretation has been floundering for some time as evidenced by its reworking some well-trodden issues (the 'middle class' character of movement ideology), the posing of somewhat futile questions ('what is a social movement?' (Diani 1992)), the erection of essentially artificial distinctions ('organizational practice' as distinct from' symbolic considerations' (Melucci 1989)), as well as the (at least imaginative) claim that environmentalism (Eyerman and Jamison 1992) and other social movements are over and done with. There are three sound reasons why the analysis of environmentalism should be uncoupled from the sociology of social movements (cf. Escobar 1992), the first of which is that the latter has failed to be adequately grounded in ethnography. Anecdotal and casual observation flourish, but the sustained anthropological study of the networks, groups, and institutions from which all such movements are ultimately constructed is nowhere to be seen. Second, neither the local nor regional conflicts in which environmentalists
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are unavoidably and invariably involved have been thoroughly described and interpreted. This cannot be other than analytically debilitating since it is precisely in such conflicts that issues are clarified, policies are formulated, and identities are established and embellished. The failure to penetrate conflict situations has entailed missing out on precisely those encounters from which a movement like environmentalism has had its direction defined and its raison d'etre made clear. Third, and most important here, social movement analysts have failed to recognise and then problematise the extent to which the political discourse of environmentalism has been by now substantially appropriated, colonised even, by the powerful institutions and agencies in opposition to which it was elaborated in the first instance. This is a recurrent property of social movements. The early, somewhat radical, discourses of the anti-nuclear movement, feminism, anti-racism and so forth, have been incorporated and coopted into the ways of thinking and modes of representation of the institutional structures of contemporary power and government. But it would appear to apply with special force to environmentalist discourse. Its concerns and emphases most especially are to be encountered in circulation from the many and varied institutions and structures from which neo liberal government is somehow assembled. Environmental politics are no longer the product of select and marginal groups in society. They are emergent from, and are thus constitutive of, the broad range of institutions, collectivities, assemblies and agencies which Foucault refers to as 'this general form of management' (1991:94), 'this governmentality, which is at once internal and external to the state' (1991:103). In this light, the concern in this paper is to locate the discursive problematic of the environment, not in the hands of a select group within contemporary society, but rather in the very fabric, the weft and warp, of governmental activity where it belongs. More specifically, I aim to examine how the discourse of environmentalism has become part of, and expressive of, 'the will to govern' by a broad range of institutional forces; and since my discipline is that of social anthropology, this means drawing on Foucault's ethos in order to explore particular political processes, including (however briefly) local conflictual ones. As an anthropologist, I am less interested in the exploration of his texts as in, to use Courtine's tidy expression, 'putting Foucault's perspective to work' (1981:40). This requires looking at the discourse of environmental concern, in the first place, in rather broad terms, before, in the second, examining the processes of normalisation and routinisation which are integral to how this contemporary governmentality influences regional and local environmental concerns. Miller and Rose summarise the general theme which I wish to purloin from Foucault as follows: 'Governmentisthehistoricallyconstitutedmatrixwithinwhichare articulated all those dreams, schemes, strategies and manoeuvres of authorities that seek to shape the beliefs and conducts of others in desired directions by acting upon their will, their circumstances or their environment' (1992:175). But how exactly is the environment conceptualised and represented in order to achieve this, and with what local effects?
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The Calculable Environment and the Elements of Discourse An extensive and diverse range of institutions, groups and collectivities currently lay claim to a concern for the environment, and control over the privileged scientific knowledge with which to comprehend its ills and correct them. By contrast with the situation a mere two to three decades ago, the institutional arrangements are profoundly different. When the initial parameters of environmental debate (as we would now loosely recognise it) were being laid down, it was established intellectuals working within liberal institutions and loosely ordered interpersonal networks who defined some appropriately critical ways of seeing environmental issues. And what is common to key texts such as Rachel Carsons's Silent Spring, Charles Reich's The Greening ofAmerica, or Murray Bookchin's Our Synthetic Environment is the extent to which their analyses required an intense critique of advanced capitalism and the compliance of the state in its destruction of nature (to use a term widely deployed back then, but now no longer). By contrast nowadays it is the institutions of the state which chiefly set the environmental agenda and it is their claim to be the environment's chief protector around which much else revolves. The Department of the Environment in most Western nation-states characteristically exceeds in its access to environmental knowledge what is available to most other bodies. Most especially in its control over data relating to natural resources and the uses to which they are put, the DoE has no equal in historical depth and contemporary range. Considering the recency with which the DoE has customarily come into being as an arm of formal government, its resources are characteristically impressive. Moreover, the data, knowledge, information which it generates on its own account are greatly supplemented by the ease with which access can be realised to a Department of Agriculture or the Marine, a Bureau for Population Studies or the Department of Industry. Statistics on economic growth, population decline, agricultural land usage, areas of urban industrial expansion, and so forth, are all readily available to the DoE. It is the unrivalled centre of calculation for drawing up the environmental ledger and thus the constant point of reference for most on-going environmental agendas of any magnitude. That the great bulk of its stock of knowledge is the work of professional scientists goes without saying. Those institutions and agencies which are semi-dependent on official government departments are nevertheless amongst the more privileged beneficiaries of these stocks of knowledge. Especially amongst those many organisations accorded' quango' status from the 1970s onwards, the relation to the state is broadly determinate of their standing in the wider political arena. To a notable extent, this is a function of their ability to translate access over knowledge and funds into politically viable programs of regional and national consequence: accessible data on cancer rates, urban sprawl, pollution of the ambient atmosphere, or the range of 'green products' on supermarket shelves are all illustrative of the practical knowledge which such bodies produce and interpret for action plans. Centres for Environmental Research and Institutes for Environmental Studies need also serve as points of linkage between centralised official departments and more regionally-
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focussed institutions such as county councils or city departments. The latter require environmental programs geared to more specific needs than centralised bodies are able to supply. It is this knowledge, tailored to specific needs, which research centres connected to the state are increasingly expected to supply. The third major element in the production of routine environmental discourse is the non-governmental organisation, which means for most Western societies such bodies as Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, variants of the Wilderness Society, and the like, as well as heritage and conservationist associations organised on specifically national lines. Whilst such groups generate considerable stocks of knowledge on their own account, they also characteristically monitor and process much of that which issues from government and quasi-government departments. So too do the research departments of the major transnational corporations as well as national conglomerates, which is why when such groups come together in an adversarial setting, they are frequently working with much the same basic data. Particularly since each is equally attentive to, if not bound by, internationallaws pertaining to environmental issues, this very much predetermines the kinds of information base which must be regularly built on. The internationally-based NGOs are necessarily most prominent in defining the 'oppositional' side of environmental discourse at this level: it is invariably pointed out in popular articles on Greenpeace that their Amsterdam headquarters houses one of the most sophisticated computer data bases in the world. But it is equally important to acknowledge that most NGOs involved in matters environmental are of a smaller scale than these international corporations. They too, frequently accumulate substantial banks of information on events, disputes, processes and issues which are of potentially substantial consequence, and they not only access but put to immediate practical use information from more elevated sources, including that derived from research establishments. The academic focus on politically prominent environmental organisations is a partial one (Yearley 1992): the knowledge pyramid is much deeper and broader than is usually recognised, and there is a complex, subtle and often conflictual series of exchange processes going on between different levels of this broadly-oppositional hierarchy. These are not pedestrian concerns. They introduce and highlight the critical point that the political production of environmental discourse is the collective achievement of varied institutions and agencies: nowadays, the environmental movement has no especial purchase over its content. Equally important, by contrast with the situation two to three decades ago, is the inherently expansive nature of environmental discourse as well as the ready compartmentalisation of environmental problematics which has followed in its wake. The drawing of a conceptual boundary around the environment and environmental issues has throughout been an uncertain exercise: some of the undoubtedly more substantial slippages have been in the direction of conservation and heritage matters. And to these, most significantly, has to be added the full scale commercialisation and commodification of environmental issues as these relate to mass consumption. Relatively little, it would
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seem, cannot be shown to have an environmental dimension by ingenious advertising merchants, and there can be no denying that these make substantial contribution to popular environmental discourse (the question of motivation of course being quite irrelevant here). The end product of this expansiveness is that whilst there may be (and probably is) little to connect, let us say, the preservation of megalithic sites with saving on electricity bills, refusing to buy Norwegian fish products and vacationing on an eco-tour, all this stands as testimony to the elasticity of environmentalism as a cultural construction. The marked compartmentalisation of environmental problematics evidently goes hand in hand with this cultural expansiveness. The result is an exceptional and refined division of intellectual labour and technological expertise, a broad array of scientific specialists who consistently constitute distinctions between the technical subjects of which they speak. Only the social ecologists now frequently bemoan this compartmentalisation, since for them it is the interdependence between the natural and the social which is of paramount consequence. The rejoinder from their critics, however, is a telling one: the practice of repair and reform can only begin with the demarcation of manageable- which is to say, neatly bounded- issues. And it is in relation to precisely these that environmental discourse achieves its fullest cultural elaboration. Whether the specific issue is coastal erosion, the disposal of toxic waste, the threat posed by El Nino, or the difficulties of imposing a carbon tax, upon each is focussed the attention of scientific specialists who are able to function effectively without reference to others beyond the narrowest of parameters. It is upon such specific scientific terrains that the technologies for environmental reform are continually being devised, as well as the stratagems which need accompany them. Environmental research institutes in their division of labour frequently reflect this tension-ridden distinction between devising what is technologically necessary to solve an environmental problem and the ordering of political priorities. The crucial consideration upon which all others are dependent is that, in these narrowly construed terms, the environment and its problems are eminently calculable. The common intensity of the heterogeneous scientific gaze is such as to present an environment which is mensurable and assessable, measurable and computable; in short, the environment is a preeminently calculable thing. Whether the specific issue is soil erosion, water pollution, toxic discharge or pig slurry, all become the target for statistical interpretation; and accordingly agencies and institutions which exhibit different degrees of formality, funding, and contrasting rhetorics, nevertheless find much of their legitimacy in the production of an avalanche of statistical interpretation. They build up stocks of environmental knowledge, historically and comparatively, in order that regional specifics can be accorded meaning in relative terms. How We are faring by comparison with Our past and Their present become the standards whereby improvements can be evaluated. Such is the authority whereby statistics speak that even minor variations become the subject of institutional elaboration. Whether it is nuclear power production, the percentage of GNP devoted to environmen-
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tal management, the culling of feral animals or the importation of valuable hardwoods, political meaning can be lodged in the finest of distinctions between times and between locales. Quite unlike the discourse of the social movements with which it is linked, these cultural constructions of environmental issues are elaborated from specialist scientific sources through numerous relay points to the public at large. Summarised in the slogans and enthymemes to which all have become accustomed- Earth First, Stop the Slaughter, Only One World, Save the Whale - popular magazines translate the culture of scientists into a culture for the people; but this is merely part of a deluge of newspaper columns, television programs, educational instruction materials, and leaflets which explain and elaborate the interpretations of the specialists. It is notable that in newspapers and journals it is 'environmental correspondents' and 'science editors' who effect such translations; distinctive skills are seemingly required to draw out the nuances of scientific research. It is also significant that over several weeks narratives are constructed to chart the course of struggles to halt a chemical plant, save a butterfly habitat, or oppose a freeway extension. These texts are important in giving foundation to the belief that something is being done with the privileged information which is at the core of all environmental concerns. The most politically consequential dimension to this avalanche of statistical and evaluative knowledge is its incorporation into the formal programs and official policies of governing institutions. For it is in these documents above all that the idea of government as 'this imbrication between men and things' (Foucault 1991:93) is enshrined. The sustained inscription of calculable knowledge into briefing documents, working papers, green papers and white papers, stands as tangible testament to the mastery of environmental issues through sustained scientific endeavour. These documents are about technologies of repair, rectification and renewal. Having constructed the environment as damaged, sick, ill or exhausted, and now that- as with any other diseased corporeal form - the appropriate tests and inspections have been done, remedial work has been ingeniously devised. The significance of working papers, white papers and the like, is to assemble visions of viable futures which can progressively and logically build on one another. Unlike the disorganised, even anarchic, environmental past, a new and linear order can be set in motion: and this finds its embodiment, as well as its articulation, in statistical tables, pi-charts, maps, and projections which, having detailed a past of default, deterioration and decay, detail its reversal. The repeatedly encountered imagery is that, given the right kind of science, the marshalling of appropriate technologies, and the proper collective commitment ('the vision thing') to a better - which is to say carefully contrived and constructed- future, the environment can be indeed properly governed, effectively ruled. The important skill in the authoring of such texts is the positing of grand rhetorics ('Sustainable Development') within symbolically rich time frames ('Beyond 2001 ') at one level, whilst at another establishing seemingly short term policies ('a ban on all fishing') and mid term programs ('better land management practices') which those at the grass roots might incline to identify with.
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In sum, the discourse of environmental concern has distilled within it the essence of 'the will to govern': the environment is culturally constituted as a subject for reform, renewal and rejuvenation; and a range of programs for advancement are appropriately devised. This exercise in a micro physics of power is in no sense attached to a particular institution or distinctive locale. It is rather the product of a grid of formal institutions, independent agencies and loosely ordered collectivities, as well a force field of rules, laws, regulations, and norms, which adhere to or express the political rationality that the environment can be governed. The environment is understood to be amenable, indeed answerable, to the schemes and stratagems, the dictates and dreams of human agency: 'the will to govern' takes the environment fully in its stride and thus, as we shall see, readily accommodates dispute and routinely manages conflict with virtuoso displays of scientific authority.
The Politics of Environmental Spectacle It is not just the regular and routine concerns of environmental discourse which display this governmental mentalite. It is in evidence at the interna-
tional or global level so that there are processes of articulation and reinforcement constantly at work. A culture of global governing upholds the political rationality which is embedded elsewhere. If we accept with Debord (1983) that we live in societies constructed out of spectacle, it is the international summit, conference and convention which must be considered as discursive sites for the expression of governmentality. They are significant, not least, since their ambitious agenda establish at a global level many of the programs and policies which will be developed in regional contexts via the agencies of the nation state. The source of such authority lies in the torrent of evaluative knowledge which characterises such spectacles, whether under the auspices of the World Bank, the IMF, or as part of the apparatus of the United Nations, for these are invariably outstanding sessions for the stock taking of available knowledge. The synthesis and evaluation of prodigious amounts of accumulated data and technical know-how, is always the prerequisite, indeed rationale, for global summitry, and its display before the assembled media is an essential element in the legitimation of such activity. So too with the elaboration of political narratives which relate together the experience of more modest assemblies whose limited achievements have made the current effort at global governance the more necessary. It is significant that on such occasions, there is an outpouring of images and symbols of the planet as facilitated by satellite technology, surely the late twentieth century equivalent of Bentham's Panopticon? Not only can pictorial representations of ozone layer depletion, global warming, the shrinking of the rain forests and the extent of desertification, be imposed upon the images of 'Spaceship Earth'. The very nature of the diminished image lends marked credence to the idea that the planet is a manageable resource, a subject essentially amenable to technological control and political calculation. What was unknown has become fully knowable: what was mysterious is now readily imaginable; and the whole has become eminently
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governable. What is most telling about these cultural constructions is that they render entirely credible the notion of government at any distance, whether spatial or conceptual. Whether the environmental problem is in a distant location (the Gobi Desert) or on another conceptual plane (the greenhouse effect), these become the more readily manageable as the vastness of the planet is shrunk to a tractable sphere. The outpouring of scientific and technical 'progress (sic) reports' on the occasion of an international conference is an essential part of establishing a manageable hierarchy of environmental problems. Since up-to-date ledgers are the prerequisite of all 'good governance', this is what summitry must deliver in the first place. But the major discursive contributions concern the outline of the appropriate political technologies for tackling priorities in an orderly, rational and concerted fashion, the now classic instance being, of course, Agenda 21, the product of the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. This was the 800-page, 43-chapter, blueprint for action for an environmentally sound world order, the answer in other words to the (splendidly revealing) Time magazine headline 'Rio: Can theW orld Save the Earth?' Despite the fact that governing the environment to date has proved an inherently ineffectual and inefficient operation, the collective achievement of Rio was to definitively conceptualise the entire planet as a governable environment, and to assure that both scientific and political technologies were available to repair and renew the global whole. From the perspective of political discourse analysis, whilst much was made of the divisions and oppositions on the lines of the Earth Summit versus the Alternative Summit, the 'haves' versus the 'have nots', the North versus the South, and nation state governments versus the NGOs, the terrain of common discursive issues far outstretched the differences being rhetorically constructed. The conspicuous absence was any sustained suggestion that the problem of the environment was such as to exceed the bounds of governmental possibility. Thus Greenpeace, in drawing the Alternative Summit to a close, proposed 'a broadly-based global movement to save the planet (sic) from the destruction that is being rubberstamped at the Earth Summit'. The significance of global summitry as a continuous process lies in the emergence and consolidation of a new elite of specialists whose cultural competence combines scientific skills and technological know-how with a proper command of prevalent environmental discourse. For it is in the contextofsummitrythatnewdirections(fromRio'TowardsSustainability'), newfundings (from Rio, 'the Earthlncrementfund'),newinstitutions (from Rio 'The Sustainable Development Commission') and new alliances (from Rio, legally binding treaties vis-a-vis global warming), can be strategically negotiated and manufactured by the new elite. Various anthropologists have drawn attention to the growing significance of cosmopolitans in the contemporary global order (for example, Hannerz 1989; Appadurai 1990; Featherstone 1993). What is distinctive about the specialists in environmental discourse is their occupational diversity: these new guardians of the global condition are inter alia bankers, politicians, development officers, independent consultants, and the directors of NGOs as well as environmental specialists from the research institutes of transnational corporations.
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Occupationally heterogeneous as they may be, it is these cosmopolitans who have the influence to formulate new directions and set in motion novel programs of economic change. Whether from the Business Council for Sustainable Development, Greenpeace International, the environmental departments of the European Community, or the DuPont Corporation, the common stock of environmental knowledge (as well as information about one another) is vast; and much of it is derived from conferences and conventions which serve as junction boxes for the trade and exchange in specialised information. The most influential of this concerns international law: it is the legal profession which commands most authority within this new elite of global guardians. The international spectacle is not then just a means whereby powerful institutions legitimise the breadth of their influence. It is much more importantly one of the key sites in which particular ways of thinking about the environment as governable are being imposed and elaborated. The other form of spectacle which has a reinforcing effect is the environmental catastrophe, for whilst on the one hand the inclination of the electronic media is to present each as a 'worst case' scenario, on the other the rapid unfolding of institutionalised and routinised procedures demonstrates that its control is eminently manageable. Even a less than accomplished effort can be justified in terms of acquiring experience, for the art of governing is equally a matter of turning past failure into future success. In the first week of January 1993, quite a few of the processes mentioned thus far were much in evidence when the oil tanker The Braer was grounded and holed off the Shetland Isles. Immediately the catastrophe was made known, a program for routinising the crisis swung into operation. Within hours of the tanker floundering, it was the focus of discursive diagnosis by multiple specialists helicoptered in from far afield, or linked up by telephone and fax to a mainland'command post' from which numerous relays could be set in motion. Oil company spokespersons, tanker specialists, weather forecasters, insurance assessors, and representatives from environmental organisations were assembled to contribute to a common discourse of interpretation and prediction: how had this happened, what would likely transpire next, how could this be prevented from happening again? The specialist discourse initially focussed on the threat to wildlife, especially seabird and otter colonies, and then the immensely valuable salmon farms to the northwest of the wreck. Whilst helicopters provided intermittent surveillance when winter weather allowed, the major response was the feeding of statistical information into advanced computer technology. From this variously assembled data base, predictions were made about the quantity of oil being discharged below the water line, likely changes in those rates as the tanker broke up, the directions of oil pollution given prevalent weather conditions, and when - given continuously up-dated predictions from weather centres- the discharged oil would reach the salmon farms, and with what effect. Points of comparison were continually made with past events, notably the Amoco Cadiz which over a decade previously had sunk in the English Channel and polluted the beaches of northwest France, and the Exxon Valdez which had gone down more recently in Prince William
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Sound, Alaska. From the enormous quantity of data fed into the computer system, and the endless series of charts, tables, maps and timetables which issued forth, it was variously but unequivocally established that the situation was in hand, that all necessary expertise had been marshalled. Moreover, this process of normalisation was flexible. As increasingly powerful winds whipped oil from the sea, it became possible that the land, the cattle and the Islanders themselves were more at hazard than the salmon farms had ever been. Accordingly, an entirely new body of statistical information was marshalled, new predictive techniques were brought into play, and the already extensive specialist gaze was substantially supplemented by authoritative voices drawn from the Department of Agriculture and the ranks of medical practitioners.
The Routinisation of Environmental Dispute: Specialist Discourse Versus Local Knowledge Governing the environment is then, first, a range of political processes constituted by a wide range of institutional forces in contemporary society, and second, the product of an exceptional stock of complex knowledges which are variously deployed in order to address and then repair particular problematic areas. There is a common set of understandings about the environment as a governable subject: knowledge about it has to be rendered into forms which will eliminate speculation and guesswork; and revised, up-dated stocks of knowledge have to be incorporated into programs for the future which are culturally identifiable as ordered and rational, as well as desirable. In all this, it is of course the scientists who hold full sway. It is in the work of agronomists and climatologists, marine scientists and bio chemists, agricultural scientists and chemical engineers, as well as statisticians and computer specialists, that the environment is rendered into a culturally comprehensible form, constituted in other words as amenable to repair, renewal, and rejuvenation- and thus some further form of domination. In the light of all this, when local level populations articulate emphases and beliefs which are not wholly circumscribed by these limited cultural assumptions, it is unlikely that their voice will be readily heard. Indeed they seem destined to receive, as one might put it, rather short shrift from those institutions in which this governmentmentalit_is embedded and ingrained. There are at least two processes on-going within late capitalist societies which push anthropological analysis towards detailing this point, the first of which is abundant evidence that local level activity in defence of specific environments is on the rise (see Ireland for example Allen and Jones 1990; and Allen 1992). At the same time that international environmental corporations are finding it increasingly difficult to maintain past levels of popular support, the volume of activity generated at the grass roots in protection of the environment is at a peak. The second process is that the contemporary state in most Western societies purports to provision a broader range of institutions geared towards environmental protection than ever before. The most prominent of these are Environmental Protection Agencies, yet another dimension of present day governmentalism; and these, universally,
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claim to be independent, impartial, and apolitical in charter and in character. Their declared aim is characteristically to defend the environment from undue exploitation whilst dealing evenhandedly with groups and institutions which might differ over how to interpret such an admirable purpose. In the event, this is an extremely problematic goal, if not an impossible one, and this is one of the further reasons why, when local populations relate to, and interpret, their environments in ways which contrast with governmental institutions, they encounter marked difficulties in getting heard. In short, new strategies of containment and novel styles of domination come to the fore. I can provide two examples of these processes, drawn from much the same research location in southern Ireland but separated by a period of five years. In the first case study, the conflict was set in motion in early 1988 when a branch of the Dow Chemical corporation, Merrell Dow, announced that it proposed to build a large chemical factory in the dairy farming region of County Cork known as the Womanagh Valley. The scale of this transnational expansion was enormous: the chemical factory represented an investment of approximately 30 million pounds, and the proposal was fully supported by the Irish government. For several decades, successive governments had sought to industrialise Ireland by attracting in foreign investment: a considerable number of international corporations had established factories in the country; and so the advent of Merrell Dow, with the prospect of further interest from the parent company, was strongly supported at all levels of the Irish State, including the powerful Cork County Council. At the local level, the response was quite different. Although the prospect of new employment opportunities and an injection of substantial investment capital into the area attracted a minority of the population, many residents in this rural locale were deeply apprehensive about the proposed development. There were many causes for concern, ranging from the depressing of agricultural property values through to the prospect of new cleavages being introduced into the local social structure. But the major concern was that the area surrounding the plant would be polluted by the massive quantities of waste matter resulting from the continuous production process, and that the way of life which Womanagh Valley folk had enjoyed over the generations would be irretrievably lost. A huge industrial plant would not only threaten the livelihoods of those farm families with properties adjacent to the factory site: it would destroy the ambience of the area. What particularly angered residents was the way in which their rights were being ignored by the American corporation and Cork County Council. The people had not been asked as to whether they favoured an industrial plant being built. They had not been consulted in advance of the Council approving it: and did they not have the rightto be left alone rather than being imposed upon by a foreign company whose interest in the area was solely the generation of profit? In defence of their properties and their rights, a small group of local families set about mobilising the wider rural and coastal populations; over the space of several months, using both their local knowledge and expertise recruited from outside, they had a good deal of success. The national
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planning review board, An Bord Pleanala, finally announced that it would conduct an open inquiry into the Merrell Dow proposal, a breakthrough which the local objectors greeted with satisfaction By now they had amassed an enormous amount of material on the transnational corporation: a good deal of this detailed that pollution had been a consistent result of the company's operations elsewhere; and it was a far from ideal employer on many other counts. The leading objectors felt they had a number of strong arguments to put before the Board. In the event, they scarcely had the opportunity to do this for the course of the inquiry was almost exclusively geared to whether or not pollution was a possibility once the factory entered into full production. Whenever local people tried to raise issues relating to their way of life, the ambience which they wished to preserve, their rights as long established residents to the area, and other such intangible but, to them, deeply significant issues, the response of the Inspectors conducting the inquiry was wholly negative. Moreover, when the substantial two volume report which found in favour of the transnational corporation's development came out, there was scarcely any mention of such issues. They were clearly being set aside as rather trivial and inconsequential matters, certainly not ones which might stand in the way of industrial development which was assumed, as a matter of course, to be desirable and advantageous. So despite the claim of the national review board to being an independent and impartial institution of government, it proved in the event to favour those lines of argument and the assumptions underpinning them which unambiguously worked in the interest of the transnational corporation and the Irish State. Above all else, it was concerned with scientific knowledge and both the inquiry and its outcome rested near-exclusively on the evaluation of that knowledge. Certainly, those who opposed the plant had their own scientific experts in attendance: and on particular counts, these made significant inroads into Merrell Dow's case. To this extent, the presentation of the objectors too reinforced the privileging of science over other bodies of knowledge, other genres of experience. They however had no choice in the matter; those heading the inquiry imposed the terms on which it was runand on this count the supremacy of scientific knowledge was unqualified. Expressed the other way round, those planks of their challenge which the objectors to the development most strongly adhered to, were thoroughly disqualified from the inquiry. This being so, it was much as to be expected that after the event, those who had invested heavily in mounting the challenge to Merrell Dow considered that they had been cheated out of the opportunity of presenting their case in its strongest possible formulation (for a more detailed account, see Peace 1993). They had not been able to raise what were, in their own terms, the most important issues which underpinned their intransigent opposition. Five years later, in August 1993, a situation which was quite different in detail yet resulted in a somewhat parallel outcome eventuated some twenty five miles away. In this instance the source of conflict was a major explosion in a transnational chemical company on the edge of Cork Harbour where, in total but on two separate sites, some sixteen expatriate companies are
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engaged in industrial production. This concentration constitutes one of the major centres of chemical processing in Western Europe and it is a direct product of the long term government policy referred to previously. The power of these companies inside Ireland is considerable: at the local level, the County Council goes to extreme lengths to accommodate the transnational firms, and they, in turn, wield exceptional control over the somewhat dispersed, community-based, labour forces on which they draw. In an area of endemically high unemployment and seemingly endless economic instability, these companies utilise a heady combination of 'fear stuff, sweet stuff, and evil stuff' to use Donald Roy's brilliant expression (1980). The result is an essentially quiescent local population; but below the surface there is considerable concern and recurrent anxiety, particularly in regard to the dangers of pollution for a number of the production processes result in, amongst much else, toxic waste. For the most part, these latent concerns have only been articulated by well-organised but small pressure groups, notably the Cork Environmental Alliance (CEA) which has an office in Cork city a few miles to the north east of the major concentration of chemical plants, and comprises a mixture of activists from the city and rural County Cork. CEA is dependent on voluntary labour, but it is an intensely committed group, in substantial part a product of what they see to be the irresponsible behaviour of some companies and the lack of will within the County Council to control them. Some companies recurrently breach the terms of their licensing agreements, others pollute the air with foul smells, irregular discharges of waste matter into the harbour waters are known to happen, and there are many conversational topics of enormous concern - unexpected deaths, for example, of otherwise healthy individuals in the area. The spokespersons for CEA have repeatedly raised objections to this situation, arguing that residents' rights have been violated, that they have been misled both by the companies and the County Council, and that even basic information about the chemical plants has been withheld from public access. CEA has persistently maintained that the County Council has abrogated itself of its essential responsibilities-ithasbecometheclientofthetransnationalcompaniesratherthan being responsible to the electorate. As a result, the companies behave as best suits them, and if this means polluting the local environment, then they will do it - and get away with it. The level of political rhetoric between companies, the County Council, and the environmental activists is frequently pronounced; but the latter especially have become adept at realising considerable impact from their contacts within the mass media. The explosion which took place on August 6, shook to its foundations the plant of Hickson International, a UK based international chemical corporation. It could be heard twenty miles away, it shook houses within a several mile radius, hundreds of people were terrified by the sound, and it generated a vast black cloud which drifted across the harbour, and two outbreaks of fire, the second of which came under control a full four hours after the explosion proper. The level of mass media coverage was exceptional, and the incident immediately became a matter of national concern. At least potentially, the range of fundamental issues raised by the presence of the
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transnational companies and their impact on the environment and the residents living on it, could have been extensively and widely examined and debated in full public view. This at least was the chief aim of CEA and several other environmental groups to which it was customarily allied, especially Greenpeace Ireland which was based on Dublin (along with the bulk ofits membership) but had for several years worked hard to bring the level of industrial pollution in and around Cork Harbour to public attention. Accordingly, these groups demanded a full public inquiry into the conflagration at Hickson International. There should be (as their slogan became) 'no cover up', and anyone who wished to be heard on this catastrophic incident would have the opportunity tocontribute.Manyvoiceswereraisedinsupportofthis;butitwasclearthat the government would have none of it, and its manoeuvring was blatantly opportunistic. It was only the previous month that an Environmental Protection Agency had been established in Ireland. The full raft oflegislation connected with it had not yet been completed, and so the Minister for the Environment approved only the legislation which would allow the EPA to conduct an in-house inquiry, not a public one. The crass character of this manoeuvre generated widespread, adverse comment, even in the columns of Ireland's customarily staid press. Both CEA and Greenpeace voiced strident objection, and continued to call for an open inquiry through the newspapers and in interviews on radio and television. It was, however, the response of the EPA officers which was to prove most significant. Paying no evident attention to the furore surrounding them, they doggedly and unobtrusively went about their task, which essentially was to discover whether or not the explosion and its aftermath had resulted in notable pollution in the harbour area. Their techniques were exclusively those of the physical scientist; and their conclusion was that there had been no significant environmental damage. There were, in fact, a number of substantial difficulties with the research on which this conclusion was based: and the way in which the report was written also raised problems. But to all intents and purposes, the end result was that the scientists had pronounced that any damage to the environment had been insignificant, and it was this finding, of course, which was broadcast without qualification to the population at large. Evidently the two disputes, separated by some five years, are marked by numerous differences; a more extended account would simply underscore that point. The crucial consideration is, nevertheless, that in both instances not only were the two dominant institutions of government, An Board Pleanala and the Environmental Protection Agency, uncritically privileging the hegemony of science over all other types of knowledge and systems of meaning (notably local ones), they were doing so whilst proclaiming that they were independent, detached, impartial. The public commitment of those officers speaking for the Board and the Agency was to environmental protection: their public discourse was unambiguously environmentalist! But in line with the fundamental assumptions of the institutions which they represented, it was only through scientific inquiry that the environment could be protected: and it was through strict and unswerving adherence to
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this initial premise that the conflicts generated in 1988 and 1993 could be routinely and (to all intents and purposes) unproblematically be dealt with. As a result, the range of alternative constructions, the ensemble of contrasting meanings and interpretations, which could have been introduced and explored in order to explain the particular developments under investigation, were left wholly untapped. The result in each instance was the regularisation of dispute and the normalisation of conflict. Political order was secured in each instance. But for those who had alternative voices emanating from discourses which were locally constructed rather than circumscribed by the parameters of science, the results were profoundly unsatisfactory. Foucault, of course, had strong opinions about the importance of such institutions as I have been describing in the course of this paper. In the early 1970s, he expounded that 'the political task in a society such as ours is to criticise the working of institutions which appear to be both neutral and independent; to criticise them in such a manner that the political violence which has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight them' (in Elders 1974:171). In more prosaic order, as demanded by the mid 1990s, one important point to arise from this analysis is that in exploring the power /knowledge relation so central to contemporary social science, the microphysics of power is especially condensed in the capacity to privilege certain categories of knowledge over others, to arbitrarily insist that these command authority and respect. The reverse side of this process is to ensure that not only do others not do so, but that they can in effect be condemned to a consistently marginal position whilst significant discourse goes on elsewhere. This, I would suggest, is a recurrent and consistent dimension of the local level politics generated in contemporary society when women and men decide that the uses to which those with power intend to put the environment are not those with which they themselves concur. These grass roots developments cannot however be divorced from those broader constituents of a mentalit_ which unproblematically and routinely assumes that the environment in its many forms and its multiple levels can be subject to government like any other thing, any other commodity. When such a political rationality is normalised and prevails in naturalised fashion, governing the environment according to narrowly bounded cultural constructions becomes the means of governing also those who reside in it.
Bibliography Allen, Robert and Tara Jones (1990). Guests of the Nation: People of Ireland versus the Multinationals, Earthwatch. Allen, R. (1992). Waste Not, Want Not: the Production and Dumping of Toxic Waste, Earthwatch. Appadurai, A, (1990). 'Disjunction and Difference in the Global Economy', Public Culture 2 (2):1-24. Courtine, J.J. (1981 ). 'Analyse du discours politique (le discours communiste adresse aux chretiens)', Langages, 62. Debord, G. (1983). The Society of the Spectacle, Red and Black.
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Diani, M. (1992). 'The Concept of Social Movement', The Sociological Review, 40(1):125 Donald, R. (1980). 'Fear Stuff, Sweet Stuff and Evil Stuff: Management's Defenses against Unionism in the South', in Theo Nichols (ed. ), Capital and Labour: Studies in the Capitalist Labour Process, Athlone. Escobar, A. (1992). 'Culture, Practice and Politics: Anthropology and the Study of Social Movements', Critique of Anthropology 12(4):1-25 Featherstone, M. (1990). 'Global Culture: an Introduction', Theory, Culture and Society, 7:1-14. Elders, Fons (ed.) (1974). The Basic Concerns of Mankind, Souvenir Press Eyerman, R. and Jamison, A. (1991). Social Movements: a Cognitive Approach, Polity Press. Foucault, M. (1991 ). 'Governmentality',in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (eds), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, Harvester. Grove-White, R. (1993). 'Environmentalism: a New Moral Discourse?' in Kay Milton (ed.) Environmentalism: the View from Anthropology, Routledge. Laclau, E. and Mouffe, C. (1985). Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, Verso. Hannerz, U. (1990). 'Cosmopolitans and Locals in World Culture', Theory, Culture and Society, 7:237-51. Melucci, A. (1989). Nomads of the Present: Social Movements and Individual Needs in Contemporary Society, Hutchinson Radius. Miller, P. and Rose, N. (1990). 'Governing Economic Life', Economy and Society, 19(1):1-31. Peace, A. (1993). 'Environmental Protest, Bureaucratic Closure: the politics of discourse in rural Ireland', in Kay Milton (ed.) Environmentalism: the View from Anthropology, Routledge. Pepper, D. (1990). The Roots of Modern Environmentalism, Routledge. Rabinow, Paul (ed.) (1984). The Foucault Reader, Peregrine. Rose, N. and Miller, P. (1992). 'Political power beyond the state: problematics of government', British Journal of Sociology, 43(2):172-205. Rose, N. (1993). 'Government, authority and expertise in advanced liberalism', Economy and Society, 22(3):284-299. Yearley, S. (1992). The Green Case: A Sociology of Environmental Issues, Arguments and Politics, Routledge.
Policing Nature: Ecology, Natural Science and Biopolitics1
Paul!l(p,t/ierfort! Introduction This paper draws on Foucault in several ways to suggest a critical perspective for understanding the scientific and political problematisation of the natural environment evident in the contemporary concern with ecological crisis. I suggest, first, that the contemporary concern with ecological problems is an articulation of what Foucault describes as the biopolitics of the population. This has given rise to new technologies of government, which I term ecological govemmentality, which are directed at the management of human populations and their natural environment. Second, I argue that this new rationality of government is related to the extension and institutionalisation of new domains of scientific expertise, expressed in modem systems ecology. In proposing a broadly Foucauldian approach to environmental problems, any serious analysis immediately confronts the issue of the role of the natural sciences in the production and reproduction of relations of power I knowledge in advanced technological societies. This is a question that has received very little critical, post-structuralist attention. One reason for this may be the persistence of the attitude that there is a fundamental difference between the objects of study in the human and natural sciences. However, given Foucault's relentless unmasking of the naive emancipatory claims of the human sciences, its is perhaps timely to suggest that we subject the scientific understanding of environmental problems to the same critical attention Foucault directed at the 'dubious' human sciences. Clearly, the inference here is that the scientific construction of the natural environment is very much enmeshed in the same modes of power and knowledge pointed to by Foucault in the social sciences. Hence the third, and principal purpose of this paper is to consider Foucault's characterisation of the natural sciences, and, following on from this, to reconsider the significance of these sort of sciences in contemporary biopolitics.
Biopolitics and govemmentality In the first volume of The History of Sexuality Foucault describes the emer-
gence, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, of a modem form of power which is concerned with the 'task of administering life' and the general welfare of populations. 2 This biopower operates at two levels, the first of which disciplines the body of the individual, increasing its utility and manageability by integrating it into 'systems of efficient and economic controls'. Foucault calls this level of biopower an 'anatomo-politics' of the body. The second level ofbiopower involves the supervision of 'the species body', the collectivity of bodies constituted as a population and considered
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from the point of view of its general health and related matters forming 'the basis of the biological processes'. The species body is managed through a range of 'interventions and regulatory controls' Foucault calls 'a biopolitics of the population'. 3 Foucault argues that the human sciences developed to meet the specific demands of the administration of human populations, resources and the economic relations between them. 4 In Europe, the concept of 'population' thus emerges as an 'economic and political problem' in which it must be 'balanced between its own growth and the resources it commanded'. s Here we see the emergence of the population as a measurable reality and also the notion of the environment as the sum of the physical resources on which the health of the population depends.6 The 'population-riches problem' becomes both the target for new knowledges such as demography, public health, and geography, and the catalyst for new techniques of government concerned with the efficient management of the population, its health and its resources. 7 These concerns for enhancing the welfare and security of the population are also important in the birth of political economy as a 'new science of government'. s Biopolitics is therefore connected with a new relationship between technical knowledges and techniques of government that Foucault calls governmentality.9 From this perspective knowledge is fundamental both to the practices of government, and to constituting the characteristics of the objects of government, that is, individuals and populations. Government thus is inherently linked to the development, use and elaboration of various forms of expertise. One increasingly significant aspect of the regulation of the population has generally been overlooked: that knowledge and administration of human populations simultaneously requires the definition and management of the natural environment in which those populations exist and from which they draw their resources. Foucault of course does not develop this line of argument with regard to environmental problems. As I suggest below, this is probably due to his strong focus on the human sciences, as well as a reluctance to extend his analysis of the relation between power and knowledge to the natural sciences .to What ever the reasons, Foucault does not address how the political and economic problematisation of populations has also given rise to a similar problematisation of nature and the natural environment in the second half of the twentieth century. A key contention here is that the practices of modern ecology and environmental management should be seen as an articulation ofbiopolitics, as these practices originate in and are concerned with an underlying concern for managing the 'continuous and multiple relations' between the population and its resources. That is, the contemporary ecological discourse is an expression of what Foucault calls the 'population-riches problem'.11 While Foucault's work emphasises the emergence of a regulatory biopolitics in the eighteenth century linked to an expanding series of population discourses focusing on health, criminality, education, sexuality, etc, some key works on the history of ecology point out that it is during this same period we also find the beginnings of a recognisably modern discourse on environment prob-
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lems. 12 The 'population-resources' problem is a common theme of these nineteenth century discourses. This concern is also central to the contemporary debate about the 'ecological crisis', in which the notion of the Earth's biological carrying capacity and an inadequately regulated population growth and resource consumption are seen as threatening to human welfare.13 These discourses problematise the global environment as a new domain of social and political conflict14 and derive their claims to authority from within the framework of the global ecosystems approach of modern environmental science. Scientific expertise then is fundamental to the definition of contemporary environmental problems. 1s
Modem Ecology and the Industrialisation of Science Contemporary ecology emerged in the 1940s and 1950s16 and is based on an 'energy-economic model of the environment' .17 The bio-economic approach of systems ecology is a transnational phenomenon drawing upon European and U.S. national scientific traditions, but appearing in its contemporary form in the U.S. in the period immediately after WW2. 18 Modern scientific ecology from the 1940s came to see itself as 'the science of natural economics' in which nature became a 'a modernized economic system, ... a corporate state'. 19 This model of ecology provides the rationale behind a form of political economy concerned with the efficient management of natural resources and the ecological regulation of the population. The systems approach to ecology thus emerges in a specific historical and cultural context. In a general sense it appeared as the consequence of the industrialisation of science, that is, with the emergence of 'big science' during and after WW2 which saw the organisation of scientific research in the U.S. along large-scale, capital-intensive, corporate lines, where research output increasingly became an important contributor to economic growth and national power. 2oThis industrialisation of science had on strong influence on generating the view of ecology as 'a powerful technique of social engineering... (which could) ... regulate and control the flows of pollutants and other human interventions through large scale ecosystems'. 21 This was enhanced by the availability and popularity in the U.S. of powerful new computer technology which provided an unparalleled opportunity for mathematical modelling of complex natural processes,22 All of this occurred with the cultural context of an American tradition combining the influence of a utilitarian Progressive-era conservation philosophy with the legacy of pragmatic regional planning programs of the 1930s. The combined effect was to facilitate the development of a scientific ecology that lent itself to large-scale environmental control and management. 23 While the industrialisation of science started towards the end of WW2 and grew during the 1950s, environmental concerns throughout the 1950s and early 1960s often reflected the professional interests of scientists. 24 These professional research interests played a significant role in the development of a coherent, science-based environmentalism through the International Geophysical Year (1957-8) and particularly the International Biological Program (1964-74). 25 The IBP was a massive transnational enterprise involving research in 97 countries directed towards the understanding of
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the basis of biological productivity and human welfare, a task seen as urgent because of the rapid rate of environmental change around the world. The focus of the IBP was directed towards an ecological understanding of 'organic production ... and the potentialities and uses of new and existing natural resources,. .. (as well as) human adaptability to change'. 26 Across the world, and especially in the US, the IBP provided a major boost to the expanding scientific and political significance of environmental problems and ecological management. This led both to a significant growth in the institutional resources available for ecological research27 and provided a scientific basis for the institutionalisation of environmental regulation in the West. 28
Ecological govemmentality Since the early 1970s the advanced industrial countries have experienced a rapid growth in policy and state intervention directed at environmental regulation and planning. Ecological research has been and continues to be instrumental in providing the scientific foundations for formulating and legitimating policies of significant economic and political impact, particularly in terms of the regulation of industry.29 Yet the more traditional legaljuridical aspects of this intervention have been accompanied by the institutionalisation of new forms of governmentality in the Foucauldian sense. This 'ecological governmentality', brings together two important elements: the growth of what Jasanoff terms 'regulatory science', and the widespread adoption of procedures of environmental impact assessment (EIA). 30
Environmental Impact Assessment procedures EIA sets out statutory criteria for ecological assessment which government agencies and private corporations must take into account in their decision making. This typically requires the preparation of detailed environmental impact statements for major development projects which have the potential to have a 'significant' effect on the environment.31 It is not possible to detail the EIA processes here. What is important is that EIA is a mechanism that places scientific criteria and data at the centre of the decision-making process. In doing this EIA does not work by direct coercion, but rather through evoking a mentality of government which embodies norms and procedures for channelling problem-solving by administrative agencies and private corporations in an ecological direction. The particular strength of EIA, and that which separates it from the simple legislative imposition of controls such as mandating discharge levels for pollutants, is that it structures the institutional and normative field in which actions and governmental programs take place without specifying final outcomes. It is simultaneously a normalising strategy and a 'pastoral' practice, both a rationality and technology of government which puts in place a framework for rationalising actions in particular ways while problematising 'the environment' as the subject of scientific knowledge.32
Regulatory science The science-based character of EIA procedures is not an example of the triumph of the dream of a 'rational-comprehensive' approach to policy
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making. Nor is it unique, for the science-based practices of ecological governmentality occur within the institutional context of industrialised science mentioned earlier, in which scientific expertise has become indispensable to the modern practices of government. 33 The notion of 'regulatory science' points to the reliance in advanced industrial states on scientific 'advisory committees' which have become a key feature of government in areas such health and environmental policy.34 These expert advisory bodies not only provide an adjunct to the political legitimation of governmental policies and programs, but fulfil a more fundamental role of 'epistemic policing', both by framing the definition of ecological risks and by certifying what is to count as scientifically acceptable practical knowledge of the natural world. Attempts by global systems ecology to define societyenvironment inter-relationships are characterised by high levels of 'technical' uncertainty and potential social conflict.35 The rapid expansion of social regulation associated with the growth of the discourse on ecological problems from the 1970s onwards produced a whole new domain for the biopolitical administration of life. The population became the target for a new, ecologically defined form of security and welfare, in which environmental agencies and the professional disciplines required by them set about the task of protecting 'the public against hazardous and environmentally harmful technologies ... [requiring] ever more complex predictive analyses of the risks and benefits of regulation'. 36 The regulatory 'turn to science' was not only an attempt to provide greater stability and legitimacy in environmental policy, but 'also in important respects ... defined society, by tacitly defining the scope and nature of social intervention in public policy risk decisions',37 Regulatory science does not 'describe' the environment but both actively constitutes it as an object of knowledge and, through various modes of positive intervention, manages and polices it. The increasing importance of regulatory ecological science is therefore a particularly significant articulation of the biopolitical character of modern governmental rationality. This is clearly linked to the growth of 'big science'- indeed a notable feature of regulatory science is the role of the state and industrial interests (especially transnational corporations) in the 'production, negotiationandcertificationofknowledge', thatis, thecentralroletheseinstitutions play in the 'normative constitution' of ecological knowledge. 38
Foucault's characterisation of the natural sciences Earlier I commented that Foucault restricts his attention to the role of the human sciences in the development ofbiopower, and suggested that therefore he fails to adequately deal with the way in which the political and economic problematisation of population also gives rise to a similar problematisation of nature and the environment. As Rouse observes, any attempt to apply the insights of Foucault's analyses of the human sciences to the natural sciences must confront the apparent distinction he makes between the two,39 and the way in which he is willing to allow a less epistemologically problematic status to certain natural sciences (eg mathematics, chemistry) than the human sciences. As with his analysis of the emergence of the human sciences, Foucault sees the earlier development of the natural sciences as having their origin in tech-
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niques of discipline and social regulation. He suggests that the investigatory practices of the Inquisition provided both an 'operating model' and the 'technical matrix' for the nascent natural sciences. This 'terrible power of investigation' enabled the proliferation of that 'great empirical knowledge that covered the things of the world and transcribed them into the ordering of an infinite discourse that observes, describes and establishes the 'facts', a process he links to the beginnings of the West's economic and political conquest of the natural world. 40 Significantly however, Foucault goes on to suggest that while the objectifying techniques of the natural sciences were 'historically rooted' in a form of disciplinary power, these sciences have been able to detach themselves from the 'politico-juridical model'. 41 Foucault distinguishes four 'thresholds' or stages in the emergence of discursive formations. Perhaps most significant in considering the emergence of the natural sciences as largely autonomous bodies of knowledge removed from direct implication in disciplinary power, is what Foucault calls the 'threshold of scientificity'. This is when the basic 'archaeological rules' governing statements within a discursive formation are further supplemented by more specific laws or rules governing the construction of propositions in accordance with the accepted norms of a scientific methodology.42Foucault'sfocus,however,isonthehumansciences,those'dubious disciplines'thathavenotyetandmaynever,crossthethresholdofscientificity and detach themselves from relations of power. As Gutting notes, Foucault's work does not involve the critique of the natural sciences nor scientific rationality per se, butisexclusivelydirectedatspecificapplications ofbiology to human beings via medicine, psychiatry and the human sciences in general. 43 His critique is directed at particular historical applications of knowledge dealing with human beings as distinct from non-human nature. In this respectFoucaulttherefore appears to hold on to the idea of there being an important difference between the human and natural sciences. In the light of'constructivist' work in the sociology of science over the last 30 years,44 Foucault's distinction appears in some respects to be overly 'positivist'. The key insight from 'post-Kuhnian' sociology of science is that scientific knowledge of nature cannot be considered as supplying a representation of nature in any straightforward, realist sense. Rather it should be understood as a thoroughly 'socially constructed interpretation with an already constructed natural-technical object of inquiry'. 45 While Foucault's approach to the natural sciences is by no means that of naive realism,46 he nevertheless does not adequately provide us with any strong arguments for accepting that the natural sciences, as discursive constructs, should be regarded as anything other than deeply implicated in the same knowledge I power matrix as the human sciences. Foucault's work unquestionably develops very significant critical insights into the ways subjects are constituted in relations of power, but he nevertheless confines power to relations between active human subjects. This is most evident in the distinction he draws between power and 'capacities'. Power is a mode of action upon the action of others, while the technical capacities of bodies and instruments to manipulate things are not in themselves relations of power. 47 Thus Foucault differentiates capacity from power in the following terms:
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j'oucau{t: 'IFte Legacy As far as this power is concerned, it is first necessary to distinguish that which is exerted over things and gives the ability to modify, use, consume, or destroy them- a power which stems from aptitudes directly inherent in the body or relayed by external instruments. Let us say that here it is a question of 'capacity'. On the other hand, what characterizes the power we are analyzing is that it brings into play relations between individuals (or between groups). 48
Patton rightly indicates that for Foucault what distinguishes the forces or capacities of bodies and instruments from relations of power is that the latter treats human beings as acting subjects rather than merely docile bodies or 'things'. 49 Foucault therefore appears to preserve the long-standing tradition of accepting the existence of basic differences in the relations involving the instrumental manipulation of things and the actions of agents or subjects, although he does see these as forming 'blocks' which can 'constitute regulated and concerted systems' or disciplines. so In the light of Foucault's separation of the domain of agents from that of things, his argument that the natural sciences can rise above power relations proper is more understandable. In one sense, Foucault appears to regard the natural sciences as less problematic, from the point of view of their connection to social power, because these have become bodies of knowledge that have crossed the 'threshold of scientificity' to obey formal criteria in a way that gives rise to 'relatively stable practices and objects' in a manner somewhat similar to Kuhn's conception of normal science. 51 In another sense, these sciences are treated by Foucault as less problematic because the relationship between the 'formalised' sciences and relations of social power involves what he claims are 'excessively complicated' questions in which the 'threshold of possible explanations (is) impossibly high'. 52 Foucault thus seems to be saying that the interconnection between this type of scientific knowledge and the effects of power are extremely attenuated and not readily amenable to social analysis in a way that he finds politically interesting or important. Foucault's focus is thus on the human sciences, those 'dubious' disciplines such as medicine and psychiatry that are 'profoundly enmeshed in social structures'. What makes the human sciences both significant and interesting on this account is precisely the role these play in defining the historical conditions of emergence of particular modes of human subjectivity and the ways in which awareness of this historicity opens up possibilities for transforming these subjectivities.
Rouse's critique of Foucault and Ecological Problems How then does this relate to the analysis of ecological problems? The environmental sciences involve the application of the concepts derived from ecology to the relationships between human societies and broader ecological (bio-physical) processes. They could thus be seen as implicated in a direct way in the intermeshing of knowledge and social-political power. Not only do the environmental sciences have a status similar to these 'dubious' human sciences: the production and use of scientific knowledge is connected even more fundamentally to the formation and reproduction of power /knowledge in a sense similar to that attributed by Foucault to the human sciences. Rouse has recently argued that despite Foucault's own apparent reluctance to apply his approach to the established natural sci-
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ences, his genealogies, by problematising the notion of an essential human subjectivity, also challenge the traditional concepts of representation and action that ground the distinction between the natural and human sciences.53 Indeed, if the rather vague idea of the epistemological thresholds between non-scientific, positive knowledge and 'real', formalised scientific knowledge is put aside, Foucault's work on sexuality, medicine and so on clearly demonstrates the difficulty of separating the biological sciences from their actual applications in the human sciences. In any event, as Rouse aptly points out, a strong epistemic or political distinction between nature and society would clearly be subject to the central motivating question of Foucault's work: 'in what is given to us as universal, necessary, obligatory, what place is occupied by whatever is singular, contingent, and the product of arbitrary constraints?'.54
Rouse argues for a broadening of Foucault's notion of power beyond social interaction conceived simply as relations between agents, to one that encompasses the ways in which the configuration of technical practices and things sometimes resist and at other times facilitate specific alignments of power. 55 As with the human sciences, scientific knowledge of new phenomena in the natural world, including global warming and other ecological processes and entities, alters the strategic alignments of power. Both the natural and human sciences rely on developing historically new practices of surveillance which serve to describe, partition, measure, classify and refine the behaviour and properties of their objects of study. New domains of scientific expertise come into existence through postulating new objects of knowledge and by developing new techniques for measuring, manipulating and monitoring these new entities. The extension of knowledge and its associated material technologies acts to discipline and control the 'actionenvironment' of social agents. On this account natural scientific knowledge cannot be separated from power, for knowledge is embodied in the skills, techniques and machines which are integral to scientific activity. 56 Conceptual skills and material techniques, which arise from specific alignments of capacities and power at the local or micro-level of the laboratory and within particular technical discourses (such as computer models) are extended outside the laboratory and mediate the way in which the world is produced, reproduced and structured. 57 That is, 'power relations require not only keeping other human agents in line, but also a reliable alignment of the physical environment'.58 At least some of the key features Foucault identifies with power relations in the social field can also be found in the exercise of capacities over things. In particular the notion of surveillance with its practices of examination, recording and normalising classification is central to Foucault's understanding ofbiopower (both as anatomo-politics and as biopolitics), and this finds an obvious parallel in the objectifying practices of the natural sciences. However, this disciplinary moment in which people are treated as docile bodies is supplemented by Foucault with an emphasis on the productive character of power. This productive dimension is connected in Foucault, via the technique of the confession, to the self-constituting activities of speaking
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subjects compelled 'to speak the truth' of the self. 59 The production of the truth of the self depends on the 'decipherment of what is said' by the expert as confessor. Confession is a procedure in which particular sorts of signs are elicited from the subject and interpreted by experts, and it is only through such a process of interpretation that truth is 'scientifically validated'. In his discussion of the formation of modern sexuality Foucault points to the interdependence between procedures of confession and 'scientific discursivity', and argues that in making the 'truths' of the human sciences (particularly those of sexuality) into signs dependent on the 'hermeneutic function' of the expert, it became possible for the procedures of confession to become part of 'the regular formation of scientific discourse'. 60 Here Foucault restricts his comments to the human sciences. Rouse however argues that it is not just the speaking subject that is 'constrained to produce signs', but that the natural sciences also abound with countless ways in which things are also forced to 'speak', thatis,emitsigns. 61 Indeed, most if not all of the entities of the natural sciences are only accessible through signs produced by various techniques, equipment, methods and models, the 'disclosures' of which are taken as genuine or 'real' only within the 'authoritative interpretative constraints that distinguish data from artefacts or noise'. 62 What Rouse is arguing is that the signs we extract from things may be as important in producing political effects as those elicited from speaking subjects. 63 When this argument is considered in the context of the production of scientific 'truths' in ecological discourse its strength is more readily apparent. For example, some parallels can be drawn here with Beck's analysis of role of post-war science in the systemic production of ecological 'megahazards'.Beckdemonstratesthatwhatconstitutesanecologicalrisk,andthe way in which the consequent environmental and health hazards are distributed, are discursively defined. The sorts of global ecological hazards Beck is concerned with, such as radiation contamination and depletion of the stratospheric ozone layer, arenotreadilyvisible orperceptiblein unmediated every-day experience. Rather, ecological risks only come into existence through the objectifying medium of expert judgement, that is, these sorts of hazards are not things of simple experience but require the interpretation of scientific theories and intervention of measuring instruments 'in order to become visible or interpretable as hazards at all'. 64 Beck suggests that contemporary ecological and technological hazards are characterised by their invisibility to non-expert experience. Such risks are based on causal interpretations, and thus initially only exist in terms of the knowledge about them. They can thus be changed, magnified, dramatized or minimized within knowledge, and to that extent they are particularly open to social definition and construction'. 65 One consequence of this is that the victims of technologically produced hazards are rendered 'incompetent in matters of their own affliction', with the power to define hazards and judge exposure to risks increasingly restricted to expert 'external knowledge' producers. 66
Global climate modeling and biopolitics An illustration of these relations of power/knowledge in the natural sciences, expressed in the form of a biopolitics, can be found by examining the
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role played by the construction of knowledge of global environmental change, or the 'Greenhouse Effect'. Global environmental change has all of the characteristics of natural scientific knowledge pointed to by Rouse and Beck. Here, within the institutional context of a highly industrialised, transnational science, the extension of scientific knowledge to the world beyond the laboratory involves the expert interpretations of the signs produced by complex computer models of the global atmosphere (General Circulation Models), along with the application of techniques of surveillance, monitoring and standardisation in which knowledge is embodied. In addition, as Rouse suggests, the extension of knowledge outside the laboratory involves adjustment of 'nonscientific practices and situations' so as to make these 'amenable to the employment of scientific materials and practices'.67Suchanextensionofknowledgebringsaboutastrategicrealignment of power relations by disciplining and structuring the social and physical environment in which agents act. The specific consequences of this are illustrated by Taylor and Buttel, who argue that the largely uncritical acceptance by social scientists and political movements of the unproblematic 'reality' of the knowledge-constructs of the natural sciences is instrumental in the production of a complex set of hierarchical political and economic alignments.6s These alignments are shaped by the theories, techniques, and instruments of highly 'formalised' physical sciences and of systems ecology, which privilege 'global constructions of ecological knowledge' in ways that allow programs of environmental management to be 'grafted' onto a set of dominant 'geopolitical institutions'.69 In particular, the privileged status given to theories and models drawn from the physical sciences has meant the development of a strategic 'coincidence of interests' between environmental groups, scientists and institutions such as the World Bank, the IMF and international development agencies which each seek to discipline future development in the less developed States. 7o The scientific construction of knowledge of the global environment aggregates populations and resources in a way that obscures the differential impact of environmental problems and policies on different populations and groups within populations. Thus, Taylor and Buttel argue that such technical knowledge constructions function at the same time as a scientific concept and as an 'ideology' that facilitates the structuring of sociopolitical relations in particular ways 'to erect a new global regulatory order'. 71 Central to this is a reliance on complex computer modeling of the global environment that incorporates the systems approach to ecology referred to earlier in this paper. Since the 1970s there have been two major elements in such global modeling. The first involved the use of the concepts of system dynamics to make predictions about impact of future population growth, resource use and pollution on the world economy and environment. This resulted in the Limits to Growth report which used these computer simulations to argue that continued population growth would lead to the depletion of the world's stock of non-renewable natural resources and precipitate a global economic collapse, unless coordinated policies for a no-growth, 'steady-state' economy were implemented world-wide. 72 Limits to Growth
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was both widely criticised and defended, but regardless of the merits of the forecasts made in the report, it had a major influence in constructing the contemporary ecological representation of the world. The core of this representation is the concept of a single global system which problematises relations between population, resources and the natural environment. The report thus provided a coherent, popularised articulation of the themes of systems ecology that was embraced by environmental movements in the industrialised countries, which helped shape political support for new forms of environmental regulation. 73 The second element of global modeling, in the form of general circulation models of the atmosphere, came to prominence in the 1980s. These models were initially designed to predict the future course and impact of human induced changes to atmospheric chemistry, most notably increases in carbon dioxide levels. In the late 1980s, the modeling was further extended to develop scenarios of the impact of climate change on global agriculture and biodiversity, as well as economic and security consequences. 74 Unlike Limits to Growth, climate modeling is able to command substantial scientific and institutional influence and resources, both within the national sciencepolicy communities of the advanced industrial states and within international and transnational bodies such as the United Nations and OECD. 75
Conclusion The sorts of programs and policies that are initiated on the basis of the knowledge (or signs) produced by such scientific modeling significantly affect the alignment of social power relations. Systems ecology and the 'highly formalised' natural sciences of atmospheric chemistry and physics, thus powerfully influence the way in which policies across a wide area of social life, including agriculture, energy production, manufacturing, health, family planning, education, debt and economic development, North-South relations, etc are conceived and brought into play. Such scientific knowledge construction is therefore fundamental to the formation of biopolitics, which takes as its task the government of all aspects of the life of a population. In this sense systems ecology can be understood as an element of biopolitics: it both problematises new areas of life and elaborates programs of intervention. Crucial to both of these activities is the production and use of knowledge by experts. The contemporary notion of 'the environment' is constituted as a problem through the development of specialised scientific discourse on ecology, which provides the specific 'intellectual machinery for government' through which relations with nature are thematised and brought into the domain of'conscious political calculation' and normalising intervention. 76 The formation of ecological 'programs of government' occurs within the institutional context of regulatory science, in which scientific expertise manufactures 'technical' judgements that seek to be both scientifically authoritative and politically legitimate.77 Programs of government thus embody knowledgeable accounts of what are considered legitimate problems, and the goals and objectives to be pursued in addressing them. However, programs must be deployed on the population, brought to bear on the 'species body' through a range of interventions and regulatory instruments. The means for making programs operable can be considered
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the technologies of government.78 I have suggested that the procedure of Environmental Impact Assessment is an example of such a governmental technology, which expresses most clearly the sorts of productive relations of power Foucault calls biopolitics. At the same time I have argued that scientific models and instrumentation cannot be separated from relations of power /knowledge precisely because these fulfil a key normalising and disciplinary function in the strategic alignment of power relations. What then are the implications of understanding ecology and environmental problems in this way? First, it must be said that to see ecology and the natural sciences as thoroughly enmeshed in relations of power does not mean that the problems with which they are concerned somehow become less real, any more than one can say this about social problems. Nor does it imply that because ecological knowledge is a product of power that it is of necessity a force for domination. In keeping with Foucault's approach to the human sciences we need only reiterate that power is always present in social relations, and that science as an institutionalised set of activities is not 'above'societyorpower.Similarly,asFoucaultemphasises,tosaythatthere cannot be a society without power relations is not to say either that those which are established are necessary. Instead I would say that the analysis, elaboration, and bringing into question of power relations and the' agonism' between power relations and the intransitivity of freedom is a permanent political task inherent in all social existence. 79 A significant consequence of understanding environmental discourse as an extension of biopower is that ecological knowledge is denaturalised, making it impossible to appeal to universalised 'facts of nature' as the standard to which social relations must adjust in order to survive. In its place, the issue becomes not epistemological but political, that is, a questioning of particular institutions and technologies in terms of how these promote or block the sort of 'nature we want to exist'. so such a position cannot rely on any sovereign epistemological stand-point' outside the contested domain in which conflicting and heterogeneous knowledge claims circulate'. However, the claim that there is 'no privileged stand-point for legitimating knowledge' does not imply that all knowledge claims are 'equally valid'. Conflict over knowledge claims occurs in actual social contexts, within particular institutions and social networks which are not only tied to specific interests but also constrained by what can be counted as valid criteria for producing 'truth' within the field within which particular statements circulate. Viewed in this way, knowledge claims are inseparable from relations of power, for they define the possibility and scope of actions. 1
A revised version of this paper was published in The Australian Journal of Communication, 21(3), 1994, pp.40-55.
2
Foucault, The History ofSexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, New York: Pantheon, 1978, p.139.
3
Ibid.
4
M. Foucault, 'Governmentality', in G. Burchell, C. Gordon, and P. Miller (eds), The Foucault Effect, Studies in Governmentality, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester,
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j'oucau{t: 'IFte Legacy 1991, p.93. See also M. Foucault 'The Politics of Health in the Eighteenth Century', in C. Gordon (ed.), Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 19721977, London: Harvester, 1980,pp.171-2.
5
Foucault, History of Sexuality, Volume 1, p.25.
6
Foucault, 'The Political Technology of Individuals' in L. Martin et al. (eds), Technologies of the Self A Seminar with Michel Foucault, London: Tavistock, 1988, p.160. Here, as elsewhere, Foucault refers to the 'environment' as the totality of natural resources and physical living conditions of human populations.
7
Foucault, 'Governmentality', p.92.
8
Ibid, pp.100-21.
9
Foucault defines govemmentality as the 'ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, the calculations and tactics that allow the exercise ofthis very specific albeit complex form of power, which has as its target population, as its principal form of knowledge political economy and its essential technical means apparatuses of security.... (T)his type of power which may be termed government, (results) on the one hand, in the formation of a whole series of specific governmental apparatuses, and on the other, in the development of a whole complex of knowledges (savoirs)'. Foucault, 'Govemmentality', pp.102-3.
10 At least two of Foucault's biographers mention his personal distaste, even loathing of 'nature' although he is also said to have enjoyed long solitary walks in the woods during his time in Sweden. See D. Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault, London: Hutchinson, 1993, pp.60, 74, and D. Eribon, Michel Foucault. London: Faber and Faber, 1989. 11 M. Foucault, 'Foucault at the College de France. A Course Summary: "History of Systems of Thought, 1978"', Philosophy and Social Criticism, 8(2) 1981, p.241. 12 This is discussed in more detail in P. Rutherford, 'Foucault and Ecological Governmentality' paper to Foucault: Freedom and Politics Conference, University of Melbourne, April 1994. For historical accounts of the rise of ecological thought and its connection to the same sorts of biological and geographical ideas pointed to in Foucault's analyses, see D. Worster, 'The Vulnerable Earth: Toward a Planetary History', Environmental Review, 11(2), 1987, pp.87-103; D. Pepper, The Roots ofModern Environmentalism, London: Croom Helm, 1984; C. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore, Berkerley: University of California Press, 1967; D. Worster, Nature's Economy: A History ofEcological Ideas, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987; A. Bramwell, Ecology in the Twentieth Century: A History, New Haven: Yale University Press,1989. 13 Well known examples of these sorts of concerns with population/resources included G. Hardin, 'The Tragedy of the Commons', Science, 162, 1968, pp. 124348; P. Ehlrich, The Population Bomb, New York: Ballantine Books, 1970; D. Meadows, et al, The Limits to Growth, New York: Signet, 1972; E. Goldsmith, et al, A Blueprintfor Survival, London: Tom Stacey Ltd (& The Ecologist), 1972; and The Council on Environmental Quality, The Global2000 Report to the President of the United States, New York: Pergamon Press, 1981. Others placed less emphasis on population but focus on global pollution and the impact of new forms of technology. See R. Carson Silent Spring, London: Penguin, 1962; B. Commoner The Closing Circle, New York: Alfred Knopf, 1971 and M. Bookchin (aka L. Herber) Our Synthetic Environment, New York: Knopf, 1962. 14 J. Cramer, R. Eyerman and A. Jamison, 'The Knowledge Interests ofthe Environmental Movement and Its Potential for Influencing the Development of Science', inS. Blume et al (eds) The Social Direction of the Public Sciences- Sociology of the
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Sciences Yearbook, Vol XI, D. Reidel Publishing Co, 1987; See also U. Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, London: Sage, 1992 and K. Eder, 'The Cultural Code of Modernity and the Problem of Nature: A Critique of the Naturalistic Notion of Progress', in J. Alexander and P. Sztompka (eds) Rethinking Progress: Movements, Forces and Ideas at the End ofthe 20th Century, London: Unwin Hyman, 1990, pp. 67-85. 15 Complex mathematical modelling of the global environment popularised by The Limits to Growth, continues to be of importance. See F. Buttel and P. Taylor, 'Environmental Sociology and Global Environmental Change', Society and Natural Resources, 5,1992 pp. 218, 221-2; and P. Taylor and F. Buttel, 'How Do We Know We Have Global Environmental Problems? Science and the Globalization of Environmental Discourse', Geoforum, 23, No 3, 1992 pp. 405-416. 16 Worsters, Nature's Economy, pp.311, 339. 17 A. Jamison, 'National Political Cultures and the Exchange of Knowledge: The Case of Systems Ecology', in E. Crawford et al. (eds), Denationalising Science, Amsterdam: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993, p.193. 18 Worsters, Nature's Economy, pp.311, 313 19 SeeJarnison,'NationalPoliticalCultures'pp.194,196-7.Appliedsystemsecology in this period gained significant impetus from work conducted by the US Atomic Energy Commission, originating in the Manhattan Project, into the problems of nuclear waste and radiation ecology. For a detailed historical study of this see Chunglin Kwa, 'Radiation Ecology, Systems Ecology and the Management of the Environment', in M. Shortland (ed) Science and Nature: Essays in the History of the Environmental Sciences, London: BSHS, 1993, pp.213-49. 20 Jamieson, 'National Political Culture', pp.197-8. 21 Again, this was a direct extension of the cybernetic conceptualisation of ecological interactions as 'self-regulating, feedback systems' which had emerged originally from the use of computers in the Manhattan Project for the development of weapons guidance systems, See Jamison, 'National Political Cultures' pp.195, 198. 22 Jamison, 'National Political Culture', p.198; see also Worster, Nature's Economy, p.312. 23 See Cramer et al., 'The Knowledge Interests of the Environment Movement' pp.96-7. 24 L. Caldwell (1991). 'Globalizing Environmentalism', Society and Natural Resources, 4, 1991, p.261. 25 E. Worthington,The Ecological Century, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993, p.165. 26 Ibid. See also R. Mcintosh, The Background of Ecology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, especially pp. 234-241. For details of the IBP see also J. Egerton 'The History of Ecology: Achievements and Opportunities (Part 1), Journal of the History of Biology, 16 (2) 1983 pp 268-71, and F. Golley, A History of the Ecosystem Concept in Ecology, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993. 27 See R. Harris and S. Milkis, The Politics of Regulatory Change, New York: Oxford University Press, 1989, and A. Weale, The New Politics of Pollution Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992.
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28 See Rutherford, 'Foucault and Ecological Govemmentality'. 29 In financial terms alone the impact of this is significant. It is estimated that the direct cost of complying with US pollution control regulations exceeds US$100 billion per year. See S. Jasanoff, 'Science, Politics, and the Renegotiation of Expertise at EPA', Osiris Series, 2(7) 1992, p.195. 30 EIA was first developed in the US under theNational Environmental Policy Act, 1969, which has since, to use Foucault's evocative phrase 'swarmed' to other parts of the world. See A. Weale, The New Politics of Pollution, 1992 pp. 21-2; and R. Paehlke, 'Democracy, Bureaucracy and Environmentalism' Environmental Ethics, 10, 1988, pp. 296-298. 31 R. Bartlett, 'Ecological Reason in Administration: Environmental Impact Assessment and Administrative Theory', in R. Paehlke and D. Torgerson (eds) Managing Leviathan: Environmental Politics and the Administrative State, pp.91-2. 32 For an examination of the relationship of molecular biology and the medical sciences to the industrialisation of science in the US, see E. Yoxen 1981, 'Life as a Productive Force: Capitalizing the Science and Technology of Molecular Biology', in Levidow and Young, Science, Technology and the Labor Process pp.66-122. For consideration of the systemic link between the production of scientific knowledge and technologically-produced ecological 'mega' risks in late modem society see U. Beck 1992, Risk Society. 33 See S. Jasanoff ,1990, The Fifth Branch: Science Advisers as Policy makers; also U. Beck, 'From Industrial Society to Risk Society: Questions of Survival, Social Structure and Ecological Enlightenment' Theory, Culture and Society, 9, 1992 pp. 97-123. 34 See Beck, Risk Society and K. Eder, New Politics of Class: Social Movements and Cultural Dynamics in Advanced Societies. London: Sage, 1993. 35 Jasanoff, The Fifth Branch. See also Harris and Milkis, Politics ofRegulatory Change, (especially chapters 3 and 6) for an account of the rise of 'the new social regulation' in the U.S. in the 1970s. 36 B. Wynne, 'Carving Out Science (and Politics) in the Regulatory Jungle' Social Studies of Science, 22, 1992, pp.746-8. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid. p.754. 39 J. Rouse, 'Foucault and the Natural Sciences', 1993, pp.137-9. 40 M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, London: Tavistock, 1977, pp.224-6. 41 Ibid p.227. 42 M Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, London, Tavistock, 1972, pp. 186-7. Also G. Gutting, Michel Foucault's Archaeology of Scientific Reason, Cambridge University Press, 1989, pp. 252-3. 43 Gutting, Michel Foucault's Archaeology of Scientific Reason, p.255. 44 For one of the now classic examples of this approach see B. Latour and S. Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts, London: Sage, 1979. 45 E. Bird, 'The Social Construction of Nature: Theoretical Approaches to the History of Environmental Problems', Environmental Review, 11, No 4, 1987, p. 255.
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46 In particular see Foucault's treatment of the development of modern biology provided in The Order of Things. An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, London: Tavistock, 1971. This is definitely not a simple realist account, but, as Gutting demonstrates, is very much influenced by the work of French historians of science Bachelard and Canguilhem. Bachelard and Canguilhemintroduce themes such as the theory dependence of observation, 'paradigms', discontinuity and incommensurability, that 'preceded by two or three decades similar discussions by Anglo-American historians and philosophers of science such as Kuhn and Feyerabend'. Gutting, Foucault's Archaeology of Scientific Reason, pp.16, 33. 47 M. Foucault, 'The Subject and Power', in H Dreyfus and P. Rabinow, Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester, 1982, pp. 219-22; For discussion of this seeP. Patton, Taylor and Foucault on Power and Freedom', Political Studies, 37, 1989, pp. 260-276; and J. Rouse, 'Foucault and the Natural Sciences'. 48 Foucault, 'The Subject and Power', p.217. See also M. Foucault, 'What is Enlightenment?' in Rabinow (ed.) The Foucault Reader, New York, Pantheon, 1984, pp.479.
49 P. Patton ,Taylor and Foucault on Power and Freedom, 1989,p.271. 50 Foucault, The Subject and Power, pp.218-9. 51 See Dreyfus and Rabinow, Michel Foucault, p.l16. 52 M. Foucault, 'Truth and Power' in C. Gordon (ed) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, London: Harvester, pp.109-10. 53 Rouse, 'Foucault and the Natural Sciences', 1993, pp.138-9. 54 Ibid, p.139 55
J. Rouse 'The Dynamics of Power and Knowledge in Science', The Journal of Philosophy, 38, 1991, p. 660.
56 Ibid, pp 663-4. 57 Foucault suggests something similar when discussing the 'paradox of relations of capacity and power' he says that' control over things is mediated by relations with others' but he maintains the importance of analytically separating three axes or 'practical systems' of critique: those of knowledge, power and ethics. M. Foucault, 'What is Enlightenment?', pp.48-9. 58 Rouse, 'The Dynamics of Power and Knowledge in Science' p.659. See also Rouse, J. Knowledge and Power, p.211 59 Foucault, The Subject and Power, p.208. See also Rouse, Knowledge and Power, p.218. 60 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, pp.64-7. 61 Rouse, Knowledge and Power, p.220. 62 Rouse, 'Foucault and the Natural Sciences', p.141. Rouse cites as examples of techniques used to incite the production of signs such procedures as 'radioactive labelling, cloud and bubble chambers, x-ray crystallography, and various forms of chromatography, spectroscopy, microscopy, and telescopy'. To this could be added the techniques of the environmental sciences, such as general circulation models of the global atmosphere, and even concepts such as 'ecosystem' and 'biodiversity' as these are dependent on forces and entities such as trophic levels and genes which are themselves only accessible through the signs emitted by similar sorts of instruments and techniques referred to by Rouse.
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63 Rouse, Knowledge and Power, p.220. 64 Beck, Risk Society, p.27. 65 Ibid, pp.22-3 66 Ibid, pp.53-5. See also Beck, 'From Industrial Society to Risk Society', pp.97-123. 67 Rouse, Knowledge and Power, p.211. 68 Beck uses the concept of a 'sub-politics' of an automated scientific-economic development along similar lines to the argument developed by Taylor and Buttel. See Beck, Risk Society, pp.186-7, 202-3. 69 Butteland Taylor, 'Environmental Sociology and Global Environmental Change', p.226. 70 Taylor and Buttel, 'How Do We Know We Have Global Environmental Problems? Science and the Globalization of Environmental Discourse', p.412. 71 F. Buttel and P. Taylor, 'Environmental Sociology and Global Environmental Change', p.222. 72 D. Meadows et al. 1972, The Limits to Growth, see particularly Chapter 5, 'The State of Equilibrium'. 73 Taylor and Buttel, 'How Do We Know We Have Global Environmental Problems?', pp.409-10. 74 Climate modelling provided both the scientific rationale and technical tools for the work of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (under the auspices of the World Meteorological Organisation) which led to the establishment of a framework convention on climate change at the UN Conference on Environment and Development (the 'Earth Summit') in 1992. For a detailed historical study of the role of scientific elites in mediating between science and policy in the early years of climate change research see D. Hart and D. Victor, 'Scientific Elites and the Making of US Policy fro Climate Change Research, 1957-74', Social Studies of Science, 23, pp.643-80. 75 See N. Rose and P. Miller, 'Political Power Beyond the State: Problematics of Government', British Journal of Sociology, 43, No.2, 1992, p. 182. 76 Jasanoff labels these science-policy advisory bodies the 'fifth branch of government'. SeeS. Jasanoff, The Fifth Branch: Science Advisers as Policy Makers. 77 See Rose and Miller, 'Political Power Beyond the State', p.175. 78 Foucault, The Subject and Power, p.223. 79 E. Bird, 'The Social Construction of Nature: Theoretical Approaches to the History of Environmental Problems', Environmental Review, 11, No.4, 1987, p. 261. 80 Rouse, 'Foucault and the Natural Sciences', pp.157-9.
Part Twelve The 'Third World' and Postcolonialism
Pastoral Power: Foucault and the New Imperial Order1 Patricia Stamp The most insidious dangers of social oppression are not the horrors done to me against my will- though they are bad enough- but the horrors I am made to desire. 2
Foucault's work is furnished with a number of doors that can be opened to Third World analysis. It is axiomatic that his almost exclusive focus on Western institutions is no barrier to the application of his ideas to colonial and imperial contexts - the protestations of Marxists and pomophobes notwithstanding. If there was ever a doubt about the powerful possibilities ofFoucauldian applications, Edward Said with his famous work, Orientalism, long since laid them to rest. The door that I take is Foucault's concept of 'pastoral power', devised by him to characterise the power relations attendant upon the 'disciplining of societies in Europe since the eighteenth century'. I argue that Western relations with the Third World in the past and present can similarly be characterised as a secular version of 'pastoral power', and that this power, far from becoming more ecumenical in the postcolonial era, is in transformation to a more fundamentalist and orthodox form of discipline, surveillance, and control. In exploring this pastoral power, I use Foucault's concept of a "'local centre" of power-knowledge' to elucidate the relationship between aid expert (as scholar or practitioner, whether indigenous or foreign) and aid recipient (as individual or community). I first started the Foucauldian line of investigation five years ago in my book Technology, Gender and Power in Africa and have been pursuing it through investigations into themes of domination and resistance in contemporary African democratic struggles. My paper draws on the insights recently gained as well as the earlier enterprises to analyse the construction of Third World people as objects of knowledge and subjects ofimperial practices. I include in these practices not only the political actions of Western states and the economic practices of multinational corporations, but the whole 'aid' and 'development' enterprise. Indeed, I see the pastoral power of development agencies, nongovernmental organisations (NGOs), and above all, the IMF and World Bank, as constitutive of a new international political order, whereby the recently won sovereignty of Third World nations has been substantially eroded. It is the aid donors and agencies who are at one and the same time the missionaries for the new imperial order, the gatherers of the necessary intelligence by which imperial power can be exercised and the very engineers of the knowledge that underpins this power. I am particularly concerned with the current IMF crusade to convert dominated nations to the fundamentalisms of 'structural adjustment' and 'the market'. Structural adjustment in my view has consequences starker than any depredations of the slavery or colonial eras, and is the cornerstone
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of what I am compelled to call millennia! capitalism. My observations during my just-concluded travels of the culture and political economy of the present form of capitalism - with its particularly virulent strains of both primitive and surplus accumulation- have provoked me to such a cataclysmic designation. So unlike Foucault, I do not feel I can afford to refuse the Marxist banner: not when it comes to applying his analytical method to the new imperial order. The pastoral power of development operates through local centres of power /knowledge. By these 'local centres' I do not simply mean sites of development activity. I mean the Washington development policy seminar. I mean the disciplining head office of the Rockefeller Foundation. I mean the higher reaches of WHO decision-making in Geneva, and the dustfree Western offices, convention centres and university corridors where Third World scholars and practitioners lurk as petitioners, audiences, students or confessors. These are sites as much as the village visit by the church NGO, where the mud compound is swept and 'the project' is spruced up and displayed for the gratification of the donors, the villagers are turned out in their best Sunday clothes, all contradictions, failures and troubling sideeffects of 'the project' carefully hidden from view, until the Pageros and Rangerovers with their donor decals have departed for the five star hotel back in town. As a transfer point of both power and knowledge, these 'local centres', whether 'at headquarters' or 'in the field', produce the aid recipients as passive, problematic targets of aid activity; as 'resources' to be mobilised, harnessed and managed; and, indeed, as obstacles in the path of their own 'development'. In the development discourse thus generated, and reinforced throughout the cycle of evaluation, feedback and policy making, the recipient as an active (often female) subject, embedded in local relations of production and engaged in a dynamic relationship with the aid donor, often disappears from view. In this discourse, both the repressive effects of 'development aid' and the strategies of resistance by Third World individuals and groups are also invisible. Foucault gave examples of 'local centres of power-knowledge' in The History of Sexuality: the relations that obtain between penitents and confessors, or the faithful and their directors of conscience. Here, guided by the theme of the 'flesh' that must be mastered, different forms of discourse self-examination, questionings, admissions, interpretations, interviews were the vehicle of a kind of incessant back-and-forth movement of forms of subjugation and schemes of knowledge.3
I am suggesting that this 'back-and-forth movement' full of questionings, exhortations to master appetites and inclinations, inducements to confess inadequacy and commit to self-improvement, is precisely the microprocess that animates the relationship between aid donor and aid recipient- as individual or community. There is a certain sleazy intimacy to the posters tacked up in countless village community development offices, with their infantilising charts and graphics showing how to feed baby, how to wash yourself, how to plant corn
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and keep your yard tidy. How did it become routine and acceptable that the mundanities of daily hygiene, personal and family maintenance became poster subjects, fit material for didactic instruction by people from other continents? I cannot imagine a Canadian or an Australian accepting criticism and correction of their personal habits on the scale and intensity to which Third World people are regularly subjected. Once again, Foucault's words are prescient and transportable: If sexuality was constituted as an area of investigation, this was only because relations of power had established it as a possible object; and conversely, if power was able to take it as a target, this was because techniques of knowl-
edge and procedures of discourse were capable of investing it.4
To adapt this quotation, we can see that the recipient of development aid was constituted as an area of investigation' because 'relations of power had established it as a possible object'. Conversely, people and communities could become a target of power relations because 'techniques of knowledge' had developed which could construct them as 'aid recipients'. In other words. knowledge about Third World peoples as aid recipients constructed during the aid process in turn is used to inform, organise and expand aid both as a discourse of development and as a set of practices. A concrete example of this process can be found in the World Bank's late 1970s Land Development Program in Lilongwe, Malawi, described by Barbara Rogers in her book The Domestication of Women. 5 Here she shows how knowledge about matriliny was constructed out of the relationship between the aid expert the World Bank- and the aid recipient- matrilineal Malawians. The World Bank report named matriliny as 'socialistic' and 'matriarchal' and this knowledge was then used to shape appropriate (ie. antimatrilineal) policies; as well, it provided the' grid of intelligibility' into which any further information about kinship was inserted. The discourse and practice of development in the Lilongwe project thus both acted to suppress matriliny, a historical gender system of Africa, and seriously to undermine women's rights and control of resources. How the aid donor-aid recipient relationship operates as a local centre of power /knowledge can also be demonstrated through recourse to Foucault's own words in another context. His characterisation of the secular 'pastoral power' that emerged in Europe since the eighteenth century reads uncannily like a description of development aid activities, and demonstrates the applicability of the concept of pastoral power to the new imperial order. The new 'pastoral power' according to Foucault resides in the state and other modem institutions, and like the ecclesiastical power that it has replaced, is salvation-oriented: It was no longer a question of leading people to their salvation in the next world, but rather ensuring it in this world. And in this context, the word
salvation takes on different meanings: health, well-being (that is sufficient wealth, standard of living), security, protection against accidents. A series of 'worldly' aims took the place of the traditional pastorate... Sometimes the power was exercised by private ventures, welfare societies, benefactors and generally by philanthropists. But ancient institutions, for example the family, were also mobilized... to take on pastoral fractions ... Finally, the multiplica-
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tion of the aims and agents of pastoral power focused the development of knowledge of man around two roles: one, globalizing and quantitative, concerning the population; the other, analytical, concerning the individual.6
It is axiomatic in the planet's hegemonic discourses, whether popular, political or technical, that the majority of the world's people have a problem, need saving, and that their salvation is 'development', to help them escape from the purgatory of 'backwardness', 'tradition', or 'underdevelopment'. The government agencies, NGOs, international organisations, and do-good corporations who exercise power in the present dispensation are far more messianic, moreover, than the 'private ventures, welfare societies, benefactors and .. philanthropists' Foucault was identifying. Again the techniques of salvation described by Foucault - the concrete means by which he saw pastoral power exercised- could almost have provided the handbook to the World Bank aid International Monetary Fund as they figured out how to coerce citizens' compliance with Structural Adjustment across the Third World ('turn the firehoses on the people' as a colleague of mine put it): What is to be understood by the disciplining of societies in Europe since the eighteenth century is not, of course, that the individuals who are part of them become more and more obedient, nor that they set about assembling in barracks, schools, or prisons; rather that an increasingly better invigilated process of adjustment has been sought after - more and more rational and economic- between productive activities, resources of communication, and the play of power relations (emphasis mine)?
What distinguishes millennia! capitalism and its attendant imperial order is 'the increasingly better invigilated process of adjustment', the linking of culture, family, music, sports - indeed the panoply of civil society - to the development project. There is no aspect of Third World society that is exempt from formulation as a 'development problem' or a 'development opportunity'. And it is the more invasive and transformative because of the overt, intentional and massive nature of the enterprise. The White Man's Burden of the colonial era was never like this. How does this massive conversion of ordinary lives into a set of problems to be solved occur? To understand this, we must look at the institutional culture of aid. There is a whole bureaucratic language that converts the everyday field experiences and reports of aid workers into the 'project cycle' of objectives, funding, evaluation, and conclusion. The very idea of a 'concluded project' is problematic. To paraphrase Adele Mueller the concreteness and ambiguities of field reports are 'worked up' into a bureaucratic discourse that disciplines the unruliness of messy realities: it erases the ambiguities, elides cultural and historical specificity, and above all asserts the inevitability of closure on 'the project'.s If the project is evaluated as unsuccessful, a flaw is found in the project 'design', or more commonly, in the failure of the recipients to respond as predicted. The solution is to design a better project, or to devise means to retool the recipient. It is in this way that the very lives, habits, ways of being and doing of aid recipients become a problem for development, and a barrier to their own salvation. Active, centred agents become spectators of, or even problematic marginal figures in, their own existence.
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In this last part of my paper I want to give some brief impressions of how such pastoral power is being resisted, and how we should conceptualise such resistance, I want to suggest a way out of the rather quietist and static formulation Foucault presents us with. Given that it is life itself that the imperial pastoral power threatens, I find it appropriate to elaborate the concept of pastoral power via a Deleuzian 'Politics of life', to go beyond the power /knowledge 'grid of intelligibility' to a more dynamic conceptualisation of processes, macro- and micro, whereby the new imperialism is produced and resisted. As May says in his excellent elucidation of the concept, 'the two tasks of a politics of life are micropolitical analysis and micropolitical intervention? because 'it is not enough to engage in macropolitics alone. To change the grand social structures without releasing life from the micro-oppressions that sustain and in many cases give rise to them is to risk repeating the problem in another form',1° as the recent experience of the ex-Soviet Union all too well exemplifies. Specifically, I think we can take this theoretical synthesis as a set of tools for analysing both the 'the micro-oppressions that sustain and in many cases give rise to [grand social structures]' (such as the IMF structural adjustment crusade), and the 'lines of flight' by which the oppressed seek to subvert these 'microoppressions'. Foucault does tackle microoppressions through his concept of 'local centres of power-knowledge' but the means by which life is 'released' from them are hard to conceptualise within his framework. A remark from May encapsulates Deleuze and Guattari's notion of 'line of flight' as developed in A Thousand Plateaus. (The translator's note points out that this does not mean flight as in flying, but 'a flowing, leaking, disappearing into the distance' .11) In conceiving the line of escape, what are commonly called political struc-
tures must be understood not in the spatial metaphor of structure but in the temporal metaphor of coding or axiomatizing. Flows of life are coded, they are constrained into precise networks which act like gulleys to divert them along specific routes and in specific directions. Kinship rituals in primitive societies are ways of coding sexual production .... And 'overcoding', a state process, is a way of making the various codes in different sectors of a given society 'resonate' together. Finally, in capitalist societies, flows which are no longer subject to traditional forms of coding are axiomatized, administered by broad constraints that regulate whole areas of experience rather than specific flows.12
I would say that if we look at IMF SAPs not as structures, as the literature has done, but as such an' overcoding' of all the myriad cultural and regional specificities within and amongst Third World nations, on an overwhelming and heretofore unimagined scale, we can begin to understand the macrocontext in which Third World peoples, collectively and individually, are made to desire the micro-oppressions of pastoral power. But through this metaphor we can also see how pastoral power contains within it the possibilities of resistance against it. Again from May: Lines of flight are flows that break with both the axioms and the codes of a given society in order to create new forms of life that are subversive to the repressions of that society. They do not flow along regulated pathways, but
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are instead 'transversal' to them, cutting across them and using elements from them in the process of producing something new, different, and most important, alive. It would be a mistake to say that the productions of a line of flight are prohibited by the society it arises from; its productions have probably never been considered for prohibition by that society. Instead, a line of flight is subversive; it does not break rules so much as it breaks regulations, allowing life to flow in different directions, and, in doing so, subverting life's attachment to the negativity of repressive social constraints. A life of flight is not an escape from society.lt is an escape from the negativity of determinate social conditions within a society.13
I want to conclude with a concrete example from Ghana of the statement I have just read, to demonstrate, vividly I hope, precisely such a line of flight that is subverting the patriarchal, millennia! capitalist hegemony of the Ghanaian state- the IMP's present wonder-boy. In March 1994, I attended a workshop organised by a lecturer at the Ghana Institute of Public Administration and the Presbyterian church's first woman minister, at the women's conference centre built by and for Presbyterian women in Held for leaders from women's fellowships across Ghana, the Workshop on Empowerment: Taking Personal Responsibility for Change as it was called created the context for fostering collective strategies for women's rights on the one hand, and resistance to sexism and, inequality in Ghanaian society on the other. Using language from the Bible, development discourse, liberal political philosophy, and Ghanaian political treatises, singing hymns and creating skits to illustrate their oppression and what they should do about it (one participant playing a very fine Jesus), they broke with the' axioms and codes' of the contemporary IMP-dominated Ghanaian state, 'using elements from them in the process of producing something new, different, and most important, alive'. What they created was a way of being good citizens, mothers, and Presbyterians that is highly subversive of the patriarchal, millennia! capitalist order, yet that, in itscapturing of the very discourses used to oppress women and ordinary citizens, is irrepressible, reproducible, and under the right circumstances, potentially revolutionary. Overtly nonpolitical, the conference was a profoundly act of liberatory politics. What I observed was an amazing act of resistance against 'the negativity of determinate social conditions' (and there is nothing more apparently determinate in the world today thaniMF conditionalities and the hegemony of the contemporary patriarchal, capitalist state). Let me conclude with the suggestion that this example demonstrates the urgency of exploring imperialism no only on the macropoliticallevel, but at the level of local centres of power/knowledge, the transfer points of pastoral power, where one can examine both the micro-oppressions that Third World peoples, especially aid recipients, are made to desire, If the lines of flight that subvert those oppressions. Only in this way will we be able to grasp the optimistic possibilities for liberation- how, for instance, the events in South Africa and Rwanda in 1994 can be understood as occurring on the same planet. 1
A version ofthis paper was published in Arena Journal3 (new series), 1994, pp.ll22.
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2
Patricia Stamp, Technology, Gender and Power in Africa, Ottawa: International Development Research Centre, 1989, third printing 1993. Citations below from Foucault and the discussion of pastoral power and local centres of powerknowledge are adapted from passages in chapters 6 and 7 of this book.
3
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, New York: Random House, 1980,p.98.
4
Ibid.
5
Barbara Rogers, The Domestication of Women: Discrimination in Developing Societies, London: Tavistock Publications, 1980, pp.120-38.
6
Michel Foucault, 'Afterword', in H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd edn, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983, p.215.
7
Ibid, p.219.
8
Adele Mueller,'Peasants and Professionals: The Social Organization of Women in Development Knowledge', Doctoral Dissertation, University ofToronto, 1987.
9
Todd G. May. 'The Politics of Life in the Thought of Gilles Deleuze', Substance 66, vol. 20, no. 3, 1991, p.31.
10 Ibid, p.32. 11 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Brian Massumi trans. and foreword), Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1991, translation notes, p.xvi. 12 May, p.32. 13 lbid,pp.32-3.
The Colonial Legacy of Regulating 'Third World' Women as the Alluring 'Other'
Introduction Over recent years books and films produced by 'ethnic subjects' have become popular and progressively mainstreamed in the West. In the two year period 1992-1994 alone Western audiences have been captivated by ethnic films such as The Joy Luck Club, Farewell my Concubine, The Scent of the Green Papaya, Mississippi Marsala, Heaven and Earth, and The Wedding Banquet. In addition, novels produced by 'ethnic subjects' have become best sellers. I am referring here explicitly to books such as: Lee, L. (1993). Farewell to my concubine. London: Penguin. Rushdie, S. (1992). The satanic verses. Delaware: The Consortium. Seth, V. (1993). A suitable boy. London: Phoenix. Tan, A. (1989). The Joy Luck Club. London: Manderin. Tan, A. (1991). The Kitchen God's Wife. London: Flamingo. Xiaoqui, D. (1993). Maidenhome. Melbourne: Hyland House Fiction. At the same time extensive research on the construction and regulation of 'ethnic bodies' through discourses of the West and its 'Other'- West and the East, West and the' Asian dragons', the' Asian tigers'- has been undertaken. For example, Rey Chow (1994, 1991) and Edward Said (1989, 1986a) have examined how neo-oriental discourses produced by the West regulate the 'Other' (see also Spivak 1986). Homi Bhabha (1990, 1989, 1986) and Stuart Hall (1992, 1990) have analysed the ways in which postcolonial ruptures to discourses of the Empire are produced from the centre of former colonising powers (see also Spivak 1993). And Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1993, 1988, 1987) has analysed the ways in which subaltern discourses produced in 'Asian' 'Third World' countries, former colonies of Europe, depict the struggles of decolonisation and the construction of new identities and new nations. Few studies however, have examined how a popular cultural text produced in a former colony now a 'Third World' country such as India is read or interpreted in another colony now a First World nation such as Australia. I am using the concept of the 'Third World' here to signify nations which were former colonies and are now beginning to modernise, such as China, India and the nations of South East Asia. Although the Second World has collapsed and the First World is losing its power to define the globe's agenda, the 'Third World' remains a term used in the West for Asian nations which are rapidly entering the age of modernity- the legacy of the European Enlightenment (Geertz 1994). On this point Trinn T.Minh Ha (1986:31) argues:
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The Third World, belongs to a category apart, a 'special' one that is meant to be both complimentary and complementary, for First and Second went out of fashion, leaving a serious Lack behind to be filled. To survive, Third World must necessarily have both negative and positive connotations: negative when viewed in a vertical ranking system- 'undeveloped' compared to overindustrialized, 'under-privileged' within the already Second sex, - and positive when understood socio-politically as a subversive, 'non-aligned' force.
While there are differences in the discourses which regulate the space of the nation India and Australia- one is a 'Third World', predominantly nonAnglo nation, the other a First World Anglo nation - there are many similarities. Both nations are postcolonial formations. In the post-colonial world, subjects and nations are produced through cultural and historical hybridity (Bhabha 1988). Hybridity ... unsettles the mimetic or narcissistic demands of colonial power, but re-implicates its identifications in strategies of subversion that turn the gaze of the discriminated back upon the eye of power. For the colonial hybrid is the articulation of the ambivalent space where the rite of power is enacted onthesiteofdesire,makingitsobjectatoncedisciplinaryanddisseminatory.... If discriminatory effects enable the authorities to keep an eye on them, their proliferating effects evades that eye, escapes that surveillance (Horni Bhabha 1984:97).
It can be argued then, that discursive formations such as Australia and India are produced through processes of power-knowledge relations which regulate colonised populations through disciplinary techniques. At the same time power-knowledge relations can rupture the surveillance gaze of the coloniser. Power-knowledge relations can be disseminatory as well as disciplinary. In other words, discourses produced within the Indian nation mimic the West, the modernisation of the West, while at the same time creating a space of difference, that is alterity from the West. Mimesis registers both sameness and difference. It exemplifies the process of moving between the very same and the very different, of being like, and of being 'Other'. The formation of the Indian nation, of subject identity is a complex process of creating coherence from a mimetic process of instability. Mimesis then, is not simply the process of mimicking the coloniser but also involves the process of staying the same through alterity (Taussig 1993). In addition, colonial imitation signifies not only a process of mimicry but also a mocking of the practices of colonisation, the practices of the West. It is in this space between mimesis and mocking, between' almost the same but different' that colonial discourses are ruptured and thereby transformed so that the colonial subject is represented as a 'partial presence' - both reality and incomplete (Bhabha 1986:199). The circulation of cultures and the legacy of European colonialism means that subjects and nations are already contaminated by each other. In other words, the binarism of self and 'Other' cannot account for the complex national cultures and identities which are constructed and reconstructed under the conditions of postmodernity.
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The Discursive Context of the 'Third World' Novel Under the conditions of postmodernity there can be no discursive space of the authentic or organic intellectual or the 'true national culture'. The authentic voice is always marked by the ambivalence of the discursive process of emergence itself, the production of meanings that construct counter-knowledge within the terms of negotiation of oppositional and antagonistic elements (Bhabha 1988:8). Furthermore, not only is the social blocofthe'nationalculture'heterogenousbuttheworkofhegemonyisitself the process of iteration and differentiation. Hegemony depends on the production of alternative or antagonistic images that are always produced side by side and in competition with each other. It is this side-by-side nature, this partial presence or metonymy of antagonism, and its effective significations, that give meaning... to a politics of struggle as the struggle of identifications and the war of positions (Bhabha 1988:14).
Hegemony requires iteration and alterity to be effective, to be productive of politicised populations. Although iteration and alterity may be both necessary to the formation of the collective will, they do not easily follow from each other, for in each case the mode of representation and its temporality are different. The contribution of negotiation is to display the 'in-between' of this crucial argument, that is the intervention of the Third Space, which makes the structure of meaning and reference an ambivalent process. The ambivalence is captured in the space where repetition through mimesis is interrupted through the difference staged by alterity. Meaning is constantly deferred, rather than reiterated, through differance (Bhabha 1988; Hall1990). The term differance, with particular reference to ethnic differance, implies that difference is not fixed or naturalised (Hall 1992). Rather, identity is socially, historically and culturally produced and therefore is constantly being (re)produced. The term ethnic differance as opposed to the concept ethnic difference, suggests that the meaning of ethnic identity is constantly deferred, constantly in a state of change, multiple, fractured and conflicting. It means that ethnic differance should not be read as an ethnic difference, that is a negative difference in the binary opposition of Western identity and ethnic 'Other'. It also means that there is not one essential ethnic identity, but multiple and changing identities. From this perspective, postcolonial novels produced in 'Third World' nations do not occupy the space of authentic discourses written by organic intellectuals. Rather, these texts depict the postcolonial struggles of mimesis and alterity. Western sameness is produced through mimesis and Otherness through alterity in the temporal Third Space of negotiation. In the next section of the paper I analyse the postcolonial struggles depicted in a popular 'Third World' novel- Starry Nights. This section is followed by an analysis of how this particular 'Third World' novel is Othered in the First World media of The Australian Magazine.
A Popular 'Third World' Cultural Text- Starry Nights The novel Starry Nights by Shobha De depicts the story of a female actor's rise and fall within the Bombay film community. The hero of the book Aasha
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Rani is the 'illegitimate' daughter of a film production manager in Madras. Aasha Rani's father loses his business in a series of catastrophes and Aasha Rani, her sister and her mother have to earn a living amongst the poor in India. Aasha Rani's mother pushes her daughter into the patriarchal world of the Bombay film industry. In order to achieve success Aasha Rani is forced into having sex with film producers. The book is replete with explicit hetero sexual encounters. The hero, Aasha Rani is a sexually active woman and is involved in a series of relationships. Some of her relationships are with fellow actors, who marry 'respectable' that is sexually repressed women, but continue to have sexual relationships outside their marriage. While the men's sexual activity is celebrated, Aasha Rani is scorned and condemned by the Bombay community. The attacks on Aasha Rani escalate after her downfall in the film industry. Her house is broken into and set on fire and she is physically threatened. One of the intruders torments her with threats that he will spread open her legs and slash her vagina (Shobha De 1991:188). But the novel does not centre solely on patriarchal relationships and masculine violence. A lesbian sexual relationship which develops between Aasha Rani and Linda, a journalist who works for Showbiz magazine, is also described in detail in the novel. Aasha Rani is exhilarated by this relationship. She says 'I prefer girls. They are so sensitive and soft. This, only another woman can know- how to turn a woman on' (Shobha De 1991:128). However, despite Aasha Rani's success in the Bombay film industry she remainsavictim.Sheisexploitednotonlybythemenintheindustrybutalso by women, her mother, her sister and her lesbian lover. Her mother tries to make money by forcing her daughter into prostitution, her lesbian lover uses her relationship to get exclusive stories for her gossip magazine. The continuous victimisation of Aasha Rani is alleviated by a white male from a peripheral First World country, New Zealand. Almost on the verge of a nervous breakdown because of the pressures of the Bombay film industry Aasha Rani escapes to New Zealand with one of her married lovers. However, the couple are followed by the lover's father who returns his son to India and pays Aasha Rani to remain in New Zealand. While in New Zealand, Aasha Rani is approached by a white male suitor, Jay, whose grandfather spent time in India and who is himself fascinated by India and Hindi movies. Jay recognises Aashi Rani as the star of a number of Hindi films which he watched with his previous Indian girlfriend in London. Jay, the New Zealand white male farmer, becomes the symbol of the neocolonial gaze within the novel. It is Jay who rescues Aasha Rani by marrying her after she has been abandoned by her own people. It is the white male who forgives Aasha Rani for being a sexually active woman and waits patiently until she re-discovers herself. Jay, the First World male becomes the symbol of the colonial legacy- the embodiment of the neo-colonial fascination with the fantasy construction of Indian women as exotic, a neo-Enlightenment zeal to save Indian women from men of their own kind. Oh, come on, you make me sound like one those early missionaries out to convert the tribals and show them the light. Rubbish girl! I didn't marry you to 'save' you. I did it for myself. I find you impossibly sexy, and yes, exotic.
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was sick of bland white girls from proper English schools, speaking with proper English accents. I liked you thewayyou were with your funny IndianEnglish and sing-song accent. That's what attracted me in the first place .. your saris and all those fussy clothes. And all the rituals and pujas you used to perform in the beginning (Shobha De 1991:170). I
And although the neo-colonial white male desires the alluring 'Other', the object of his exotic sexual fantasy, he despises the 'native space' of the 'Other'. Unlike his missionary forefathers, the neo-colonial male has no desire to live among the natives and transform them, his interest is the individualistic, self-centred interest of postmodernity, the desire to possess the 'Other'. The neo-colonial male desires exotic difference, the difference of alterity as opposed to white sameness. 'I remember it from my early trips to India. Grandfather used to enjoy himself and join the natives. But my parents and I- not us. We hated getting all that muck on ourselves' (Shobha De 1991:140). And this difference is now available in the national space of the West, through information technology (ie. Hindi videos, cable television) and migration (ie. quick and inexpensive air travel). Women of the Asian diaspora, constructed as victims of patriarchy, arranged marriages, veils and clitoridectomy, have to be saved by middle class Western white men. These men, are not the type that go to the 'Third World' and sexually exploit. Rather, the 'Third World' comes to them in the form of the Asian diaspora asking to be 'saved'. But the white male gesture of saviour is dependent on colonial mimicry. The 'Third World' woman must become the 'white woman' with a difference. Colonial mimicry is the desire for a 'reformed recognizable Other, as a subject ofdifference that is almost the same, but not quite' (Bhabha 1986:99). The discourse of mimicry is constructed around an ambivalence, a desire to reproduce the self and simultaneously project a difference. The difference produced by the discourse of colonialism, represents the 'Other' of the Western fantasy, all that which must be suppressed in order to produce the fantasy of Western liberation, civilisation and Enlightenment. The representation of difference which emerges within colonial mimicry is a process of disavowal. In the text, Aasha Rani becomes the colonial subject who is regulated through mimicry. In the discursive context of a First World nation, New Zealand, Aasha Rani becomes the 'ethnic woman'- almost the same as the Western woman but different. And this difference from the norm of the Western woman is signified by her speech- 'funny Indian-English and singsong accent', her clothes-'saris and all those fussy clothes', and her customs -'all the rituals and pujas' (Shobha De 1991:170). The difference constructed in the discourse of the 'ethnic woman' is a visible difference, a corporeal difference- underneath this surface difference there is no real difference- we are all the same rational (read Western) human beings. Aasha Rani's regulation by discourses of colonial mimicry transform her physical appearance so that she becomes the 'ethnic Western woman'- the same as Western women but with a difference. 'She refused to watch Hindi films, read Indian magazines or even dress and eat Indian. She was practically unrecognizable with her bleached, permed hair, non-descript clothes
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and uncertain accent' (ShobhaDe 1991:132). Butthisattemptatassimilating, mimicking the West is destroying Aasha Rani, she puts on weight, refuses to go out and spends most of her time in front of the television watching soaps. Againitisherwhitehusband who must rescue her from this lethargy. It is her white husband who recognises that it seems 'unnatural' that Aasha Rani is so 'indifferent to the life she'd left behind' (Shobha De 1991:132). Colonial supremacy is produced in the moment of differentiation, in the production of cultural difference. Aasha Rani's process of assimilation must not only mimic the Western woman and produce sameness but it must simultaneously differentiate. And the moment of differentiation is signified in the name of tradition, where something is 'repeated, relocated and translated in the guise of a pastness that is not necessarily a faithful sign of historical memory but a strategy of representing authority in terms of the artifice of the archaic' (Bhabha 1988:19). Iteration negates the history of the origins of the struggle for the colonised. Iteration negates the politics of cultural struggle in the discourse of a 'naturalised traditional difference'. So it is the white male who both rescues Aasha Rani from Indian culture and returns her to 'her people', 'her customs', and 'her traditions' once she has found herself and is no longer afraid of herself. It is Aasha Rani's white Western husband who discovers her real cultural needs before she herself can discover them. Baby, I know you. I get the feeling you want to go back to India. More specifically to Madras. Your exile is over. You don't need to hide thousands of miles away any longer. You are ready to face India and your people .... I will provide all that is required to resettle you, get you back on the fast track (Shobha De 1991:202).
Colonial mimicry regulates through sameness and alterity. The colonised can never become the same as the 'master'. Rather, the colonised is regulated in the space of alterity, a discourse of difference constructed in the practices of colonisation. Furthermore, discourses of difference or alterity are never fixed or static but produced through the constant deferral of meaning about the norm and its 'Other'. So while Jay constructs Aasha Rani's difference as an exotic sexual difference, his relatives construct her difference as uncivilised. 'They find me weird- I know it. They think I'm some sort of savage you picked up. A coloured, who doesn't eat with a knife and fork. Who speaks English with a funny accent. Who wears strange clothes. They don't like me at all. They haven't accepted me' (Shobha De 1991:128). Furthermore, the construction of alterity is not fixed or static, but is negotiated and therefore changes. Consequently representations of the 'ethnic woman' are constructed and reconstructed in different spatial and temporal locations so that racialised identities are always in the process of negotiation and contestation. Within the novel, shifts in the representation of ethnic differance are signified by characterisations of the sari. The sari becomes a symbol of ambivalence - exotic beauty, the alluring 'Other' and also of traditional difference- primitive, uncivilised. In the early days of the relationship Aasha Rani's husband encourages her to wear a sari: 'Come on girl, I didn't marry a chi-chi farm hand. My bride was an exotic, oriental
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beauty. An absolute knock-out. How about wearing a sari for me tonight?' (Shobha De 1991:132). The sari signifies exotica, a sexually alluring 'Other'. The corporeality of the 'Other' woman marked by the sari signifies untamed, uncivilised sexuality. Having experienced sexual liberation, not only with men of her own kind, but now a Western man, Aasha Rani is constructed by her husband as 'animal like' in her sexual desire: ' ... you could try sheep- or dogs or something. Considering how lusty and insatiable you are, you'd probably enjoy the experience' (Shobha De 1991:128). Later in the marriage, as his family continues to reject Aasha Rani, both the husband and daughter try to dissuade her from wearing a sari. The husband's fascination with India has waned now that he has actually spent some time there, and simultaneously his desire and love for his exotic Indian woman fades. The sari which was once considered positively exotic now becomes an object with negative exotic connotations-' a bit too exotic for the locals ... all the tum-tum showing. And the sexy belly-button!' (Shobha De 1991:201). Her own daughter by her marriage to a Western male rejects Aasha Rani, her culture, and her traditions claiming that she does not want to be a 'bloody Indian ... a blackie' (Shobha De 1991:99). Aasha Rani is forced to leave her daughter behind in New Zealand in the custody of her Western husband and his new white girlfriend while she returns to India. She is unfit to be a mother and India is an unfit place to bring up an Anglo child. The sexually active exotic woman has to be punished. She has no career, no husband and no child. She must return to India and survive 'as if she were a male' in the ruthless world of the Bombay film industry. No longer an actress she takes on the role of film production with her sister and her father. This scene within the 'Third World' novel refers at once to the site of fantasy and desire and to the sight of subjectification and power. The 'racially mixed' child turns away from her 'black' race, fixated in her Indian mother, in her total identification with the positivity of whiteness which is at once colour and no colour. In the act of disavowal and fixation the colonial subject is returned to the narcissism of the Imaginary and its identification of an ideal ego that is white and whole (Bhabha 1983). However, the fate of the colonised, the black Indian mother, is not accepted without negotiation, without struggle. In the Third Space, beyond mimesis and alterity, Aasha Rani negotiates a space of talking back to the coloniser (hooks 1986-87). After spending some time in Western nations Aasha Rani tries to 'merge with the masses' by not wearing saris and other 'ethnic ensembles'. She found that when she did wear saris she was 'ogled at like some left-over exhibit from the Festival of India' (Shobha De 1991:205). However, after her husband tells her that their marriage is over because he is 'in love with' Alice, Aasha Rani fights back by mocking Western conceptions of the Indian woman. Aasha Rani reconstructs her ethnic identity in the image of the West's sari clad vamp which contrasts sharply with the representations of the white women in the novel- Alice the sweet, fresh young country girl and Jay's mother, the 'fashionable bag of bones'. Aasha Rani would dazzle and disarm them all tonight. She would show them she was not just a 'bloody native', some tribal woman from the back of the beyond.
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j'oucau{t the Legacy Aasha Rani went back to her room and choose a flashy sari - the sparkling pink one with sequins all over- ... She applied her make-up carefully, making sure to match the bindi with the tiny turquoise motifs embroidered over her sari. She did her eyes differently -lining them with kilajal, accenting them in a way that was a far cry from the way the haughty models in those Revlon/ Dior ads did (Shobha De 1991:203).
But this was not the first time that Aasha Rani talked back to the coloniser, micking the West's fantasy of the exotic Indian woman. While in London she made money from the rich socialite set by playing with the Western fantasy of the alluring 'Other'. In London she teamed with another Indian woman, Shonali who fabricated fantastic stories to captivate the Western imagination of exotic India. Signifiers such as Indian princesses, the Indian Raj, remote villages, child brides, rejection of daughters, movie stardom, heiress to fortunes after the spoilt male heir suicides, and exotic beauty were scattered through the stories. '"The Brits love these Far Pavilions" type of stories. They fall for yarns about the Raj, lap them up, we could sell your story for thousands of pounds. Maybe get a television series out of it' (Shobha De 1991:210). This process of mocking the representation of the 'ethnic woman' constructed by the centre, lays bare the fictionality of the Western construction of selfhood (Kamboureli 1991). The other of the self, the foreign of the Western self is disavowed and projected onto the 'Other'. Through this discursive process a unified image of the self and the 'Other'- the marginal, exotic, ethnic are constructed. Shobha De's mocking of the Western construction of the exotic 'Other' disrupts this discursive process of elision (Said 1986a).
Interpreting the 'Third World' text in the First World Having outlined the complexity of postcolonial struggles depicted in a 'Third World' novel I now move to an analysis of an article titled 'India's Empress of Erotica', authored by Dalrymple which describes Shobha De and her books Socialite Evenings and Starry Nights and appeared in The Australian Magazine on May 9-10, 1992. Through this analysis of the textl will show how the hybridity of postcolonial struggles, of mimesis, mocking and alterity are repressed in a First World media reading. I will show how sexual liberation and freedom of expression come to signify homogeneous Western norms. The 'Other' of the West is represented by the East- the place of orientalism, the dark side of repressed sexuality and speech. I propose, following Foucault (1990), that the discourse of Western sexual liberation can only be constructed as a regime of truth if its counter discourse, the discourse of sexual repression is associated through a complex net of powerknowledge relations with the East (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982). For Foucault, modern history in the West exemplifies the confinement and elision of marginal, oppositional and eccentric groups (Said 1986a:153). In other words, the East must be discursively constructed as marginal, as 'Other' in order for the West to be constituted as the norm. Through these power-knowledge relations the Western gaze can regulate the progress of the East towards the ideals of modernity and the Enlightenment. Foucault (1990) argues that the period of modernity within the West,
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often perceived as a period of sexual repression, was characterised by the proliferation of talk about sex. The last three centuries within the West have been characterised by a policing of statements and a control of enunciations -when and where it was possible to talk about sex, in what circumstances, among which speakers and within which social relationships. This constituted a restricted economy which was incorporated in the politics of language and speech between parents and children, teachers and pupils and masters and domestic servants. However, the opposite phenomenon occurred at the level of discourses and their domains. There emerged a steady proliferation of discourses concerned with sex which gathered momentum from the eighteenth century onwards. This multiplication of discourses about sex was within the field of power itself- a desire to know and produce knowledge about sexuality. Rather than the uniform concern to hide sex, to silence sex, what distinguishes the last three centuries is a proliferation of discourses, carefully tailored to the requirements of power; the solidification of the sexual mosaic and the construction of devices capable not only of isolating it but of stimulating and provoking it, of forming it into focuses of attention, discourse, and pleasure; the mandatory production of confessions and the subsequent establishment of a system of legitimate knowledge and of an economy of manifold pleasures (Foucault 1990:72).
For Western man this task of telling everything concerning his sex was meant to regulate sexual desire. Sex had to be spoken about in such a way that it was 'not simply condemned or tolerated but managed, inserted into systems of utility, regulated for the greater good of all, made to function accordingtoanoptimum'(Foucault1990:24).Duringthelastthreecenturies sexuality has been constituted as an object of investigation because relations of power have established it as a possible object; and conversely, techniques of knowledge and procedures of discourse have been capable of investing it with power (Foucault 1990:98). Similarly, during the latter part of the twentieth century ethnicity has been constituted as an object of investigation -the ethnic subject has been invested with the power to speak about ethnic issues (Chow in press). 'Third World' and 'colored' authors are primarily identified as targets of 'ethnic' information. The body or corporeality of the 'ethnic writer' comes to signify in the information networks of postrnodern institutions authentic information about 'Third World' conditions, AsianWestern experiences or Indigenous peoples' truths. Texts produced by 'minority writers' are linked directly to a representation of 'people of color' and the degree of'authenticity' of the text is judged by the corporeality of the author. This is not meant to imply that 'marginalised' people should not speak and write about their heritages. There is virtue in testimonials by members of 'Third World' and 'minority' groups in asserting their right of selfrepresentation within the total economy of discourse. Moreover, ethnic writers have been relatively successful in demonstrating how misrepresentations of power violate psychically and politically repressed inferiors in the name of an advanced culture. This is because, as Foucault argues, discourse is a site of struggle and sometimes it is of paramount importance not so much
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what is said, but who speaks (Said 1986a:152). However, within the context of struggles over the production of discourse it is imperative to account for the fact that not only is ethnicity spoken about, but to discover who does the speaking, the positions and viewpoints from which they speak, the institutions which prompt people to speak about it and which store and distribute the things that are said (Foucault 1990:11). What is at issue, is the over-all 'discursive fact', the way in which ethnicity is 'put into discourse' (Foucault 1990:11). Within the postmodern institutions of the West, the ethnic, minority, 'Third World' or subaltern writer is condemned never to lose their barbarity. It is the ethnic writer who is positioned to become the supplement of Australian national culture, the excess element to an otherwise bland white identity. In other words, ethnics become the foreignness by which Anglo otherness is measured. The ethnic as 'Other' tests the dynamics of Anglo identity (Kamboureli 1993). However, Otherness can only be tolerated and celebrated if it is regulated. Consequently, the two major narratives or discourses available to marginalised people are the stories of victimisation and success despite victimisation (Hal11993). This discursive positioning affirms the strategies of marginalisation. 'It recognizes only the difference it itself elicits' (Kamboureli 1993:146). In other words, ethnicity is a socialcultural construction, a 'system of representation' which assigns meaning to individuals. Moreover, ethnicity is constructed in a differential relation to the centre so that the ethnic is at once 'the product and process of its representation' (de Lauretis 1987:5). Within postmodern institutions the categorical distinction of the ethnic writer and the ethnic text has a pedagogical function, that is, to teach the West about these 'Others'. However, the discourses about these 'Others' are limited to the narratives of victimisation, suffering and success despite victimisation. As Rey Chow (in press:4) argues: In terms of the conventions of representation, the West and its 'others' are
thus implicitly divided in the following manner: the West is the place for language games, aesthetic fantasies, the fragmented subjectivities; the West's others, instead, offer us 'lessons' about history, reality and collective consciousness. This division has much to tell us about the ways 'ethnicity' functions to produce, organize, and cohere subjectivities in the 'multicultural' age.
In the latter part of the twentieth century we are witnessing the proliferation of discourses about ethnicity and race, intricately interwoven with discourses of sexuality. I am not implying that sexuality, race and ethnicity were not predominant themes during the age of European expansion, that is colonisation. Clearly, the project of colonisation produced discourses of racial and sexual difference in order to regulate the practices of 'Others'. By the nineteenth century race had become a set of institutionalised discourses based on sexual difference. The foundation of sexual difference lay in attitudes about black women (Giddings 1992:199). Writers such as Abbe Raynal, J.J. Virey, Georges Cuvier in the late eighteenth - and early nineteenth- century Europe depicted the black female as primitive and therefore more sexually intensive (Gilman 1992). In the late nineteenth
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century black women were seen as 'morally obtuse',' openly licentious', and had 'no immorality in doing what nature prompts' (Giddings 1992:44). Still in the mid twentieth century the presence of Afro-Americans and the construction of discourses about the dark side of sex, that is the sexuality of black women, was integral to the Western literary canon (Morrison 1992). But in the latter part of the twentieth century- a time of active decolonisation in former European colonies and the emergence of a politics of difference in postmodern institutions of the West- there is a difference in the way in which race, ethnicity and sex come together. There is a difference in the way in which race, sex and woman interweave in postmodern institutions to regulate the 'Other'. What I am implying is that 'colored' women live in a political vacuum of liberation and regulation. 'Colored women' are actively encouraged to speak, but the way in which they speak, what they speak about, to whom they speak is carefully monitored and regulated. So 'race' in the latter part of the twentieth century becomes the corporeal, visible marker not of biological difference but of cultural difference- a difference that must be celebrated, must be voiced and at the same time must be contained and regulated. As Toni Morrison (1992:63) argues: Race has become metaphorical- a way of referring to and disguising forces, events, classes, and expressions of social decay and economic division far more threatening to the body politic than biological 'race' ever was. Expensively kept, economically unsound, a spurious and useless political asset in election campaigns, racism is as healthy today as it was during the Enlightenment. It seems that it has a utility far beyond the economy, beyond the sequestering of classes from one another, and has assumed a metaphorical life so completely embedded in daily discourse that it is perhaps more necessary and more on display than ever before. It is in this context of the conditions of postmodernity, the age of both the liberation of colored women and their regulation, that I position my analysis. It is in the context of multiculturalism, the age of'celebrating difference'where institutions are busily incorporating within them various kinds of 'ethnic and racialised consciousness'- that I analyse the discursive regulation of a 'Third World' popular novel by the press in Australia through the Sydney based The Australian Magazine. In order to clarify the points that I have made about the discursive construction and regulation of the ethnic subject, I will firstly discuss the way in which the body of a 'Third World' author, Shobha De, is read in William Dalrymple's (1992) article titled 'India's Empress of Erotica' which appeared in The Australian Magazine.
The Authentic 'Third World' Body In describing Shobha De, Dalrymple draws the reader's attention to particular features of the body; height, hair, skin, eyes, and dress, that is, the sari. She is a very beautiful woman: far more attractive - and stylish - in person than she appears in photographs. She is tall and clear-skinned with a mane of fabulous dark hair which falls enticingly down the back of her sari. Her movements are graceful and languid, but she is alert, alley-cat eyes which seem to be constantly darting back and forth, ready to pick up anything interesting, controversial or scandalous (Dalrymple 1992:17).
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In particular, I want to focus on the eyes, for it is in the gaze that one difference between the Western and the 'Other' woman is constructed. The gaze of the 'Other', Shobha De is neither veiled or censored. Her gaze, like that of her female heroes, represents a woman who openly desires sex. She is no longer just the object of desire, but now, is constructed as also the subject of desire. The exotic, the different woman, is not only an alternative object of desire, but also a subject capable of desiring. How then, has this shift from exotic chaperoned virginity to the Empress of Erotica taken place? How has this shift from repressed to emancipated sexuality taken place? I propose that the shift in the construction of sexuality for women from the Indian subcontinent, from exotic virgin to erotic temptress, has been constructed through the juxtaposition of popular discourses constructed in India and Australia. So for example, Shobha De is a woman constructed in the Australian press, as a 'clever Indian lady who looks good, lives well and writes dirty' (Dalrymple 1992:17). In the Indian press however, Dalrymple (1992:17) argues, Shobha De is represented as 'a social climber, a vamp, a degenerate, an illiterate, a whore, and described by Indian headline writers (who are fond of alliteration), as 'the Maharani of Malice, the Empress of Erotica, the Princess of Pulp, the Pasha of Porn'. Within the text a distinction is constructed between Western discourses which separate the mind and body and Eastern discourses which cannot make such a rational, scientific demarcation. Within Western discourses, Shobha De does not live dirty, she only thinks and writes dirty words. Moreover, a mastery of economic rationality has enabled Shobha De to live well on the profits made from her books. However, the 'Other' of Western discourse, the Indian subcontinent, cannot separate the rational mind from the body. Shobha De's writings are constructed as her lived body experiences. Through her writing she becomes a 'whore, degenerate, and a vamp'. Within the text a strongly regulated boundary between the East and the West is constructed and then weakened. The site of the discursive transgression is where Western press (Time, The Australian Magazine) merges with the Indian press. The boundary between the East and the West is blurred, the construction of Shobha De as a vamp in the Indian press is recontextualised. So Dalrymple argues Shobha De's books are not pure fantasy, but a partial reflection of her life and the lives of her social companions. The books are, Dalrymple states, semi-autobiographical. Moreover, in a later passage Dalrymple (1992:18) after spending time with Shobha De and her socialite set, professes 'What I had taken to be Shobha De fantasy is actually horrible reality'. Through the text there is a constant blurring between the fantasy erotic books produced by Shobha De and her own lived practices. The erotica of the books merges with the exotica of Shobha De. For Shobha De is not only exotic, as the 'Other' of the Western woman, she is constructed as exotic within her own country. The discursive structure of the text regulates the ethnic 'Third World' woman through disciplinary power. According to Foucault (1977) disciplinary power works through normalisation and individualisation. The constant division between the normal and the abnormal through binary branding institutionalises a whole set of disciplinary tech-
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niques for measuring, supervising and correcting abnormal beings. Rather than the massive, binary division between one set of people and another, normalisation calls for multiple separations, individualising distributions, an organisation in depth of surveillance and control, an intensification and ramification of power (Foucault 1977:198). Disciplinary regulation of the 'Third World' woman is institutionalised through binary division and individualisation which not only constructs the East as the abnormal 'Other' of the West, but also constructs hierarchal categories of Eastern women by measuring degrees of sexual expression. If the West is the norm of sexual liberation then its 'Other', the abnormal, is the East, a place of sexual repression. However, the East cannot be left as a collective or mass of similar people. Individualisation works by separating Shobha De from other Indian women. If Shobha De is different from Indian women who are the 'Other' of the Western woman, can her novels be legitimate 'Third World' texts? Questions about the authenticity of 'Third World' texts are constantly raised in the First World review. Are the books that Shobha De writes authentic expressions of her sexuality? If so, then, how does this representation of a middle-class Indian woman living in Bombay fit with the repressed sexuality of 'chaperoned virgins, arranged marriages and double locked bedrooms'? The answer is provided in the text. Shobha De is no ordinary Indian woman. She is not like the homogenous construction of Asian women, particularly those from the Indian sub-continent, who are sexually repressed. Rather, Shobha De is represented as the superwoman- beautiful, glamorous, devoted wife, mother, and successful writer. Within the homogenous construction of Indian woman as repressed sexually, the chaste virgin, that is, the 'Other' of Western sexual freedom, Shobha De is represented as different. It is the exotic, erotic 'Other', Shobha De, not the homogenous repressed 'Other', the Indian woman, who is courted by the Western press- 'there are articles about her in Time magazine' -who represents the vehicle for the release of 'the frustrated Indian libido'. The text as colonial discourse produces the colonised as a fixed reality which is at once 'Other' and yet entirely knowable and visible. This fixation of the colonised operates despite the play of power /knowledge relations within discourse and the shifting positionalities of colonised subjects. The colonial subject is constructed as the effect of stereotypical discourse - the historical and fantasy (as the scene of desire). The history of India is known by the coloniser. India traditionally and historically signifies the site of ars erotica or sexual Enlightenment. Present day India signifies sexual repression- veiled virgins, desirable bodies in need of liberation by Western man. However, while the subject is primordially fixed in the power-knowledge relations of stereotype, the ambivalence of colonial power is manifested in a triple splitting between the incongruent knowledge of body, race, and ancestors (Bhabha 1983; Fanon 1963). This ambivalence in knowing the 'Other' allows for the possibility of simultaneously embracing two contradictory beliefs official and secret, archaic and progressive- 'one that allows the myth of origins, the other that articulates difference and division' (Bhabha 1983:32). So traditional India is mythically constructed as sexually Enlightened,
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present day India is constructed as different from the past and current world trends. Dalrymple (1992:18) argues 'India has for the past 30 years resisted the sexual revolution which has swept through the rest of the world .... The result is sexual repression on a massive scale, with millions of young Indians having no outlet for their secret drives and tensions'. Shobha De is constructed as the woman who can bring India into the age of sexual Enlightenment because she is simultaneously: beautiful, graceful, clever, brave, very nice, and a 'wonderful mother completely devoted to her screaming brood of six children' (Dalrymple 1992:22). However, Shobha De as a 'Third World' woman, (note her birth name was Anuradha Rajadhyaksa), cannot bring India from a state of 30 years of underdevelopment to the 'land of the Karma Sutra' (Dalrymple 1992:18). In order to bring about change she must become something other than the 'Third World' woman. That is, Shobha De must become the First World woman. More than this, she must become the First World superwoman to combat 'Third World' repression. For as Dalrymple (1992:18) argues' ... India is now oneofthemostbuttoned-upand prudish places on earth. Despite a dazzling variety of Sanskrit terms for every shade of sexual arousal, no modern Indian language has a word for orgasm'. A demarcation of procedures for producing truth about sex is discursively constructed within the text. India is constructed as the traditional society endowed with an ars erotica. In the erotic art, sexual truth is produced from pleasure itself, understand as practice and accumulated as experience. Sexual knowledge is deflected back into the practice itself, rather than spoken about in various institutions, in order to shape sex from within and amplify its effects. In this way, sexual knowledge remains secret, passed from master to disciple, in an esoteric manner through the art of initiation (Foucault 1990:58). Some Western societies prior to the last three centuries, such as Rome, also practiced an ars erotica. However, since the eighteenth century Western society has been described as the only civilisation to practice a scientia sexualis. Western modernity is the only civilisation to have developed over the centuries procedures for 'telling the truth of sex which are geared to a form of knowledge-power strictly opposed to the art of initiations and the masterful secret' (Foucault 1990:58). Western modernity is the only civilisation to invent the confession, or talk about sexuality, as a means of regulating sex by regulating desire. Dalrymple's text positions traditional India as a glorious society of ars erotica and contrasts this to the modern India of sexual repression. Within this discursive construction the postmodern West is the site of sexual liberation. Through stereotypical signification India becomes the sign articulating multiple beliefs, curiously mixed and split, polymorphous and perverse (Bhabha 1983:34). India signifies both progressive erotica and conservative repression, the embodiment of rampant sexuality and infantile innocence; mystical, primitive, simple-minded and yet the most worldly and accomplished in sexual knowledge. 'In each case what is being dramatised is a separation -between races, cultures, histories, within histories- a separation between before and after that repeats obsessively the mythical
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moment of disjunction' (Bhabha 1983:34). The colonial fantasy does not try to cover up that moment of separation. It is more ambivalent. On the one hand, it proposes the possibly of progressive reform guided by the conditions of colonial domination and control. On the other hand, it draws attention to the separation and difference between the coloniser, the West and the colonised, the East. In turn, this strongly regulated boundary denies the colonised the capacities for self-government and lends authority to the power and control of the colonial imperative. 'Colonial fantasy is the continual dramatisation of emergence - of difference, freedom - as the beginning of a history which is repetitively denied' (Bhabha 1983:35). Shobha De then, the Western reconstructed 'Third World' woman, is according to Dalrymple (1992:22) ' ... not just the Jackie Collins of India, she is also the Indian Linda Evangelista, the Indian Tina Brown, the Indian Ivana Trump'. Through the construction of the boundness of the margin, the 'Other', the power of the centre is maintained. That is, by constructing images of the 'Other', the 'Third World' woman, as sexually different (the veiled woman, chaste virgin), assumptions about Western women as secular, liberated and having control over their own lives are brought into sharper focus. This does not infer that Western women are secular and have control over their lives, but a discursive self-representation through the representation of the 'Other' constructs this ideological reality of the centre. In other words, the centre can only exist through the construction of the 'Other' as different. By focusing on the difference of the 'Other', the implicit self-representation of the centre is magnified (cf. Mohanty 1989; Spivak 1988): ' ... colonization almost invariably implies a relation of structural domination, and a discursive or political suppression of the heterogeneity of the subject(s) in question' (Mohanty 1988:66). That is, the power relationship of domination and subordination recognised as colonialism, undermines the self-sufficiency of either term. The West and the 'Third World' only come into existence through a discourse of difference. By colonising the lived material and historical heterogeneity of the lives of women in the 'Third World', the text in The Australian Magazine produces a single composite, average 'Third World' woman. This 'Third World' woman constructed through the discourses of the Western press signifies sexual constraint, ignorance, poverty, illiteracy, traditionbound, religious, domesticated, family-oriented and victimised. This is in contrast to the (implicit) self-representation of the Western woman as educated, modern, as having control over her own body and sexuality, and freedom to make her own decisions. This exercise of power through the use of difference, where difference is signified with sexual identity, justifies and conceals exploitation. The body, the most visible difference between men and women, and between racialised constructions of women, offers a secure ground for racist and sexist ideologies based on cultural essentialism. Furthermore, such an account of the homogeneous 'Third World' woman cloaks the pain of uncertainty, confusion and disorientation that is the mark of colonial subjectivity (Ram 1991; 1993).
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Shobha De's Female Characters The written review of Shobha De's books is accompanied by a photograph of the author dressed in a gold sari, lounging back on a pile of gold cushions. A golden tiger rug which still retains the head of the tiger rests at her feet. Shobha De is dressed in traditional sari and wears Indian gold slippers. Her facial make-up consists of a red and gold bindi and black kaajallines her eyes. Shobha De has constructed herself in the image of her female hero in 'Starry Nights' who talks back to the coloniser by mocking the West's fantasy construction of Indian women. As Foucault (1990) argues, this becomes a site for disrupting the workings of the text. The photograph of Shobha De plays with the Western fantasy of exotic Indian women dressed in a sari. But there is a difference. Shobha De's gaze is neither censored nor veiled. She is not positioned in the discourses of victimisation, the ethnic woman who needs to be rescued by the Western male. She is not represented as the sexually repressed exotic woman who needs to be liberated by the Western phallus. Rather, she has constructed herself within this text as the powerful sexual hero of her own novels. Moreover, Shobha De's discussion of her novels reported in The Australian Magazine play with the Western fantasy of exotic Indian women. On a rare occasion when Shobha De is given a voice in the text of The Australian Magazine we witness an authentic confession. This is not a 'perfectly formed designer quote slipping out as if by magic' (Dalrymple 1992:20). On this occasion 'the whole monologue has not been meticulously rehearsed' (Dalrymple 1992:20). Shobha De confesses that she writes the books to cater for small-town fantasies. The real Shobha De is now constructed for us. Shobha De argues The anguished little novels my critics churn out-about suffering women at the kitchen hearth- they all lie unsold and eventually get pulped. I've had it up to here with moaning, groaning, oppressed females .... I want to provide a tantalising peep into the lifestyle of the rich and famous (Dalrymple 1992:20).
Further she states: 'I don't think that the wrath of God descends on bad girls. No- I think bad girls have a ball and die having a ball. ... The life that my characters lead- having affairs, living from one party to the next ... and going shopping - this is their idea of a ball' (Dalrymple 1992:20). This discourse works in two ways. Shobha De positions herself outside of the dominant narratives which have consumed marginalised people, that is the narratives of victimisation. However, her discourse is now taken up by the Western press in The Australian Magazine, as a discourse which ignores the 'beggars who go to sleep on piles of discarded film magazines' (Dalrymple 1992:22). That is, while Shobha De consumes herself with female heroes who struggle to succeed in the Bombay film industry she ignores the masses who sleep on the refuse of this industry. The problems of poverty, illiteracy, and sexual exploitation in India are constructed as internal problems, that is, manifestations of under-developed ideologies rather than the legacy of Western neocolonialism. It is Shobha De's task as an ethnic writer to talk about poverty and victimisation and the gap between the rich and poor in India, as if these problems are internally constructed. In this way, the structures of
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oppression; the law, religion, kinship, poverty, and First/Third world power relations are dismissed. What The Australian Magazine effectively ignores or silences is that poverty, violence, colonial relations are discussed at length in Shobha De's books. Because she has refused to position herself as a 'moaning, groaning, oppressed female(s)' (Dalrymple 1992:20) the authenticity of her discourse, the authenticity of her material practices are questioned. As a 'Third World' writer Shobha De can only be authentic if she lives amongst the poor and writes of poverty.
Female Pleasure Centred on the Phallus Furthermore, the accounts ofShobha De's novels portrayed in The Australian Magazine focus on the women characters' sexual activity. However, it is only sexual activity centred around the phallus which is made visible. Although Shobha De describes lesbian sexual relationships in her novels these are effectively silenced in The Australian Magazine. The Western gaze of the 'Other' is phallocentric. According to The Australian Magazine, the women in Shobha De's novels are in search of the super phallus, 'a tiger in their bed' (Shobha De cited in Dalrymple 1992:18). Men without real masculinity serve instrumental ends for the female characters, that is access to a 'real man'. Dalrymple (1992:18) describes Shobha De's second book, Starry Nights, in the following way: 'The story follows the mango-breasted heroine, Aasha Rani, as she sleeps her way to stardom - and then makes her fatal mistake. She falls in love with India's number one hunk- a steely-eyed, smoothskinned, cast-iron lump of machismo called Akshay Arora'. He continues to describe the story:'In the same room a producer "hammers away, grunting like a pig', and another lays his masculinity out on the table where Aasha Rani's friend, Linda, mistakes it for a Havana cigar' (Dalrymple 1992:18). Within The Australian Magazine then, women's pleasure, that is exotic women's pleasure, is dependent on the male, and more particularly a specific type of male. The construction of female subjectivity, then, is within discourses of phallocentrism. Women's bodily representations, conscious and unconscious thoughts are tied to the pursuit of a 'cast iron lump of machismo' (Shobha De cited in Dalrymple 1992:18). Yet the very examples of sexuality used in The Australian Magazine to illustrate the westernisation of India, are episodes in which Aasha Rani and her lesbian lover Linda joke about the patriarchal culture of the Bombay film industry. What I am suggesting is that the authentic examples of sexual westernisation or liberation are those in which Shobha De subverts not only the discourses of patriarchy, but also colonisation. The discursive space in which the postcolonial subject mimics the voice of the coloniser is also the space for subversion and contestation of dominant discourses. Shobha De has appropriated this space. She has effectively mimicked the discourse of sexual liberation in the West and subverted this discourse not only through the voice of the postcolonial, but also the diasporic ethnic India subject and the lesbian voice. The colonial presence, here witnessed in the form of sexually explicit novels, is always ambivalent, split between its appearance as original and authoritative and its articulation as repetition and difference (Bhabha 1984:93).
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Discussion In this paper I have argued that the 'Third World' or ethnic text serves a particular function in postmodern institutions. I have proposed that the 'Third World' text has come to signify the authentic voice of oppression. The First World is positioned to learn about 'Third World' conditions from ethnic writers. I argue, however, that under the conditions of postmodernity there can be no space for the organic intellectual. Rather, the 'Third World' text depicts the struggles of modernism and postcolonialism through the discursive techniques of mimicry and alterity, that is, becoming like the West while retaining a difference. I also propose that the ethnic text mocks the West's construction of the colonised 'Other' and in the process ruptures master discourses. Within the postmodern media institutions of a peripheral First World nation, Australia, the 'Third World' text is stripped of its subversive elements. The 'Third World' or ethnic writer is discursively constructed as the 'Other' by which Western normality can be measured. The 'Third World' text signifies the authentic voice of the ethnic writer. The fantasy of the text must be lived as practice. This stereotypical signification of the 'Third World', this ambivalence in knowing the 'Other' allows for the possibility of simultaneously embracing two contradictory beliefs- India as site of sexual repression and a 'Third World' writer as sexually liberated. From this space of ambivalence in knowing the 'Other' emerges the colonised who talks back, who negotiates, who ruptures the master discourses so that they cannot be simply reproduced or repeated as the same. The colonised mocks the West's construction of the 'Other'. The Western fantasy of the 'Other' is lived out in practice but with an exaggerated difference, so that the fantasy of the West and the positionalities offered to its subjects are continually negotiated.
Works Cited Bhabha, Homi (1990). 'Dissemination: time, narrative, and the margins of the modem nation', in Homi Bhabha (ed.) Nation and narration. London: Routledge. Bhabha, Homi and Bhikhu, Parekh (1989). 'Identities on parade. A conversation'. Marxism Today, June, pp.24-9. Bhabha, Homi (1988). 'The commitment to theory'. New Formations, 5, pp.S-23. __ _, (1986). 'Of mimicry and man: The ambivalence of colonial discourse', in James Donald and Stuart Hall (eds) Politics and ideology. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. __ _, (1984). 'Signs taken for wonders: Questions of ambivalence and authority under a tree outside Delhi, May 1817', in Barker, F., Hulme, P., Iverson, M. and Lowley, D. (eds) Europe and its Others. Vol. 1. Colchester: University of Essex. __ _, (1983). 'The other question. Homi K. Bhabha reconsiders the stereotype and colonial discourse'. Screen, 24(6 ):18-36. Chow, Rey. 'Women in the Holocene- Ethnicity, fantasy and the film "The Joy Luck Club 111, in Carmen Luke (ed.) Feminisms and pedagogies of everyday life. Albany: State University of New York Press, in press. __ _, (1991 ). Woman and Chinese modernity. The politics ofreading between West and East. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Dalrymple, William (1992). 'India's empress of erotica'. The Australian Magazine, May9-10. de Lauretis, Teresa (1987). Technologies of gender: Essays on theory, film, and fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
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Dreyfus, Hubert and Rabinow, Paul (1982). Michel Foucault. Beyond structuralism and hermeneutics. Brighton: The Harvester Press. Fanon, Franz (1963). The wretched of the earth. London. Pelican. (1983 - reprint) Foucault, Michel (1990). The history of sexuality. An introduction. Volume One. New York: Vintage Books. __ _, (1977). Discipline and punish. The birth of the prison. London: Penguin. Geertz, Clifford (1994). 'Review: In the realm of the diamond queen: Marginality in an out-of-the-way place. by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing'. The New York Review of Books, xll 7:3-4. Giddings, Paula (1992). 'The last taboo', in Toni Morrison (ed.) Race-ing justice, En-
gendering power. Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas and the construction ofsocial reality. New York: Pantheon. Gilman, Sander (1992). 'Black bodies, white bodies: toward an iconography of female sexuality in late nineteenth-century art, medicine and literature', in James Donald and Ali Rattansi (eds), 'Race', culture and difference. London: The Open University Press. Hall,Stuart(1992). 'Newethnicities',in,JamesDonaldandAliRattansi(eds). 'Race', culture and difference. London: The Open University Press. __ _, (1990). 'Cultural identity and diaspora', in James Rutherford (ed.), Identity. Community, culture, difference. London: Lawrence and Wishart. hooks, bell (1986-7). 'Talking back'. Discourse 8, Fall-Winter, pp.123-28. Kamboureli, Smaro (1991). 'Of black angels and melancholy lovers: Ethnicity and writing in Canada', in Sneja Gunew and Anna Yeatman (eds), Feminism and the politics of difference. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Minh-ha, Trinh (1986-7). T. Difference: 'A special third world women issue'. Discourse, 8, Fall-Winter, pp.3-37. Mohanty, Chandra. 'Talpade. On race and voice: Challenges for liberal education in the 1990s'. Cultural Critique, Winter, 1989-90:179-208. __ _, (1988). 'Talpade. Under western eyes: Feminist scholarship and colonial discourses'. Feminist Review, 30:61-88. __ _, (1991). 'Talpade., Russo, Ann. and Torres, Lourdes'. Third world women and the politics offeminism. Bloomington Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Morrison, Toni (1990). Playing in the dark. Whiteness and the literary imagination. New York: Vintage Books. Ram, Kalpana (1991). "First' and 'Third World' feminisms. A new perspective'. Asian Studies Review 15(1):91-96. __ _, (1993). 'Too 'traditional' once again: Some poststructuralists on the aspirations of the immigrant/ third world female subject'. Australian Feminist Studies, 17:528. Said, Edward (1986a). 'Foucault and the imagination of power', in David Couzens Hoy (ed.), Foucault. A critical reader. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. __ _, (1986b). 'Knowing the oriental', in James Donald and Stuart Hall (eds),Politics and ideology. Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1986(b). Spivak, Gayatri (1993). Outside in the teaching machine. London: Routledge. __ _, (1988). 'Can the subaltern speak?', in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds) Marxism and the interpretation of culture. Chicago: University of lllinois Press. __ _, (1987). In other worlds. New York: Methuen. Taussig, Michael (1993). Mimesis and alterity. A particular history of the senses. New York: Routledge.
Part Thirteen Education
Personal Autonomy As An Aim of Education: a Foucauldian Critique James Marslia{[ Introduction Education has had a perennial association with the notion of freeing people from the authority of others -be it state, or church, or other forms of authority, domination and oppression. To be free it is often claimed, is to be personally autonomous. Such persons are said to be in charge of their own lives, because they can determine for themselves, by the use of reason, the nature and the content of their beliefs, attitudes and emotions, and the course of their actions. Persons of this kind, it is said, are freed from the dogma and/ or authority of others- they are independent. Hence the freeing of people through education has often been interpreted as positing autonomy (usually rational autonomy) as an aim, if not the aim of education. For Foucault the pursuit of personal autonomy in such Enlightenment terms, which are to found in liberal education, is destined to fail. In those terms it involves the pursuit of something- personal autonomy- which is fundamentally flawed and which in the hands of liberal educators does not lead to freedom. In liberal education, the notion of the personally autonomous person has become stripped of its political connotations and the pursuit of it as an educational aim masks the fact that any such persons have been constituted by political acts. Therefore the notion of freedom becomes problematic. Section I develops the argument against the accounts of personal autonomy that are to be found in liberal education. Section II unmasks the political aspects which underlie personal autonomy by looking at Foucault's notion of governmentality. Finally, section ill critiques neo-liberal educational principles and the version of personal autonomy to be found in the notion of the autonomous chooser.
Personal Autonomy as an Aim of Education Colin Lankshear (1982) argues cogently that many who wish to advance personal autonomy as an educational aim are also prepared to argue for considerable constraints upon the young. Somewhatparadoxicallyitwould seem, if they are to be free eventually, then considerable unfreedom must be imposed upon them in their formative years. Educational philosophers such as R.S. Peters, R.F. Dearden, P.H. Hirst and J.P. White, all of whom may be interpreted as supporting this aim for education, believe that states of unfreedom are necessary for the young. The main issue that prompts this conclusion is the inability of the young to reason, especially to make 'proper' choices about their own needs and interests, and for these reasons, until they become rational, they cannot either be seen as autonomous or permitted to
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act as if they were autonomous. But this position presupposes a link between being rational and being autonomous. It might be said to the contrary that autonomy was merely doing one's own thing, doing what one wants to do, being spontaneous and creative, as opposed to being confined to the calculations of (cold and hard?) reason. From this second point of view then there is no necessary link between being autonomous and being rational. One can be autonomous, that is independent, without being rational. Initially the concept of autonomy was applied in a political rather than in an ethical, or even educational context. It was city states that were said to be autonomous, or not, according to their independence from more powerful adjoining cities or kingdoms. But gradually this notion was applied to the individual person (if Plato's Crito (53c) may be taken as representative, but it certainly emerges clearly in Rousseau and Kant, and is an improper extension according to Baier 1973). There are two aspects or components to this concept: the autos and the nomos; that is the individual or the self, and the law or the laws which govern the individual or the self. Whilst Plato can be interpreted as extending the notion from city states to the individual (Dearden 1975), it is still the laws and institutions of the state which are held to govern the individual. Hence personal autonomy, though associated with virtue, was not a purely ethical notion as it retained its connections with the policies and institutions of the state. The subsequent major thrust, particularly in educational writing, has been to divest the concept of its political overtones and to represent it essentially as an ethical notion (Lankshear 1982). From Foucault's perspective this has led to the masking of the political, because the autos or self has itself been 'constructed' politically, post-Enlightenment, by what Foucault calls modern power (or power/knowledge). In other words, there are questions which need to be asked about the nature of the autos which sets or adopts the laws, in addition to questions about the nature of 'the laws' which are adopted or set thereby. Questions such as: are the autos and the nomos independent?; can a self, a private self, 'set' laws;iftheautos can set laws then does it have something like an essence? There is little doubt that the term 'autonomy' in ordinary usage, and even educational usage, is used in a wide variety of ways (Dearden 1972:453). At best, it has been said, it is used as a synonym for being independent (Lankshear 1982:96). But we can briefly list or summarise from the established literature (the tradition?) several possible positions on personal autonomy: (1) that autonomy and morality are necessarily connected in the Kantian sense; (2) that autonomy is independent but rational judgement, with no necessary links to morality as in Dearden (op.cit) and Hare (1975) (moral judgement is but one form of independent judgement); (3) that being personally autonomous is part of human nature; (4) that to be personally autonomous is the outcome or effect of some form of social 'construction'; (5) that the 'development' of autonomy is compatible with considerable unfreedom;
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that for the autos to 'accept' a nomos- to be an individual self governing in accordance with universal laws - is to be free; (7) thatto actmerelyin accordance with universallaws is to be unauthentic, or to act in bad faith, and not be free (Sartre 1946). If there were to be any such thing as an autonomous person, as outlined above, then for Foucault that person would be the effect of some form of social'construction'. He denies (3) and (6), as at best 'human nature' is a socially constructed entity: but he does not therefore fully endorse (4). There is something misconceived, and fundamentally false, about the post-Enlightenment conception of Man according to Foucault. What is constructed or constituted under (4) is not a free person but one who is not free under (6), and who is instead governable. Why does he see things this way? The 'development' of autonomy in this liberal Enlightenment sense does not presuppose freedom for Foucault because it has been infiltrated by the human sciences and power /knowledge. On the contrary, this development of personal autonomy which takes place through the human sciences is both a negation of freedom in the developmental processes themselves, and a denial of freedom as an aim or outcome of such processes, by those who bringpower/knowledgeintoexistence. Butif,inFoucault'searlierwritings, freedom is not presupposed as a necessary condition for the' developmental processes' to proceed, in his later work it is. Human beings can only be the bearers of power/knowledge if they are free agents, and able to resist (Foucault 1983). Thus the deterministic and fatalistic nature of Discipline and Punish (Foucault 1979a) becomes mellowed by notions of resistance, freedom and hope. Foucault denies that there is any such thing as personal autonomy, in so far as it involves the acceptance by an independent self or subject (Man) of external universal laws, be they moral or otherwise (Kant and Barrow as opposed to Dearden and Hare). One reason is that he does not believe in universal laws or totalisations from specific cases. Here the influences ofBachelard and Canguilhem are to be seen. Just as there is no one history or philosophy of science so there are no universal principles to be used in all cases of independent judgment. In other words for Foucault there is no nomos to be accepted, if by that is meant to accept universal laws. But if he attacks the nomos he also attacks the self and the notion of a self which is able, in principle, to accept the nomos. This is in itself a form of social 'construction'. The notion of a self able to deliberate upon and accept laws so as to act autonomously as opposed to following laws heteronomously is a fiction, foisted upon the Western world post Kant as the basis for moral action but, for Foucault it has been used in the cause of governmentality. Such a self regulating person is governable; laws are accepted even if they are not accepted uncritically. Here the traditional liberal distinction between morality and mores, and the notion that mores are always open to critical evaluation presupposes just another 'higher' level of generality to which appeal is to be made. But such general abstract higher level'laws' are also fictions. It is not just that Foucault is objecting to persons accepting the nomos, because there is something suspect about the nomos that either leads to subjection, or unfreedom but, rather, that accepting the very notion of the (6)
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autos, as being independent of the nomos, and thereby of some form of social construction, leads to unfreedom. It is not then a question of rejecting the nomos but that of entry into any notion of an autos which polarises the options in any such manner. It is not a question of an autos accepting lawsset X on sexuality, say- and then rejecting them. This would be too simplistic. It cannot be represented as either a person a accepting X or not X, but rather as an a, already contaminated by both X and not-X, accepting X or not-X. Here what Foucault had to say on freeing oneself from sexual repressions is very apposite; freedom was not to be gained la California by rejecting all that oppressed one. In summary then the pursuit of the morally autonomous person involves the social construction of something which is destined to fail. From the very outset this liberal and Enlightenment conception involves falsehoods. The particular falsehood to which Foucault objects mostis that such a conception implies the possibility of freedom. It does not, because stripped of its political connotations, it masks the fact that the constitution of such persons is a major political act. Consequently whilst we believe ourselves to be free, to be acting autonomously, in general, we are not. This is not to say that freedom does not exist for Foucault. Quite to the contrary for he should be interpreted as exploring this notion to the full (also personally, if we follow Miller 1993). But Foucault is not only arguing that the conception of the autonomous person involves falsehoods but, also, that this particular conception involves governmentality, which is hidden and masked. A
Govemmentality Foucault coined the term 'governmentality' (Foucault 1979b) but he also used a number of other closely related terms. These were; 'rationality of government'; 'art of government'; and, 'reason of state'. Colin Gordon (1991) defines 'governmentality' as 'the conduct of conduct', which he elaborates as being both in the wide sense of government of self and others, and in the narrower sense of self government. Governmentality was a constant theme in Foucault's work after the publication of 'On Governmentality' (1979b) and lectures given at the College de France between 1976-84 concentrate upon developing this notion. If the later books turned towards the government of the self, the later lectures continued on the theme of government in the wider 'political' sense. This later work on governmentality was a response to criticisms which had been made of his earlier work (Gordon 1991).1 Discipline and Punish is concerned with the microphysics of power, with technologies and techniques employing power knowledge at the capillary level. It ignores global issues of state power an 'omission' which attracted the criticism of both Marxists and liberals (eg. Walzer 1986). Another criticism was that Foucault had represented society as a network of omnipresent power relations which, in subjugating human beings, seemed to preclude the possibility of meaningful individual freedom. It was suggested that he presents us with a grim political scenario in which the grounds for resistance to oppression, even the very possibility of resistance, seem precluded. This amounts to a political philosophy of despair or nihilism.
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Governmental rationality (the rationality of state) appears to be reduced to techniques which are employed utilitarian fashion to produce individuals who will lead 'useful, docile and practical lives'. The College de France lectures on governmentality were designed to address these issues developed in the critique of his work. His position and the basis of his response was that there was no discontinuity between the micro and the macro but, in trying to make this relationship clear, there was to be no returning to the theory of the state/sovereignty in traditional Hobbesian or Marxist terms. In other words the relationship between the two was not to be analysed by any version of state theory or any return to traditional political philosophy. A major conceptual tool Foucault used in these later lectures was that of bio-power (Foucault 1980). As bio-power has addressed itself increasingly towards life, shaping and forming individuals so, also, has it generated a new form of counter-politics as individuals, so formed, have began to use that subjectivity as the basis for the formulation of needs and imperatives which are in effect counter political demands. Thus Foucault comes to see that power relations are strategically reversible, and in order to be strategically reversible, that power is in need of reformulation or redefinition. This leads to his 1983 reformulation, in which for power relations to exist the freedom of agents must be presupposed. Power cannot exist if the freedom of the subjects of power is annulled. Foucault began to respond to his critics in 1978 at a time when a phase of neo-liberalism was starting to sweep Europe. He conceptualised this neoliberalism as a version of governmentality and argued that seen in this manner, it presented an original and challenging phenomenon to which the Left was ill equipped to respond. In particular, he criticised socialism for not having possessed its own distinctive art of governing. Foucault believed that this neo-liberal challenge necessitated fresh acts of resistance and inventiveness. For example, in order to respond to the neo-liberal criticisms of the welfare state as reducing the autonomy and responsibility of individuals making them dependent upon the state or dole bludgers, what was needed from a logic of the Left was a reconceptualisation of individual autonomy along with an assurance of security. If the welfare state is part of Foucault's target for exercising techniques of subjugation, he also recognises its important role in ensuring security for individuals. According to Gordon (1991) Foucault's reading of early liberal thought was not to interpret it as an apology for modern capitalism; or to read it as the origins of modern economic science, that is in purely economic terms, but to see in it a unity of economic, social and governmental reflection. Liberal thought for him was to be interpreted as a critique of governmentality of the reason of state, of the Polizeiwissenschaft form introduced above. For Foucault, this represented a politico-epistemological revolution. The first stage in this 'revolution' was the rejection of the organised rational structure of the state offered by Leviathan, with the 'discovery' that the affairs of societyconstitutedaformofhumannatureoraquasi-nature.Societywould, therefore, need to be governed according to the laws of this nature. Liberalism, wedded to the notion of the autonomous individual, would also be
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wedded to the notion of the ability of this nature to be generated by society itself. Thus order, security and prosperity could, in principle, be generated by the autonomous activity of individuals. As it was still deemed possible to know all that was happening in society, the art of government then became the monitoring of the totality of activity. Adam Smith's notion of the hidden hand challenges this possibility. If Smith's notion was correct, it showed that it was impossible to monitor all of the activities of society and thus it represented a radical critique of the earlier version of liberalism. If government could not know everything, then the unity of knowing and governing was open to challenge. As a consequence, the form that rationality of state must take cannot be calculative and regulative of the totality, but instead must situate reason of state within a potentially unknowable and unstable politico-epistemological matrix. For Foucault, the subsequent governmental histories of Western societies are to be understood in terms of the complexities of the space opened up by the liberal'program'. We are left with a problem space within which there are numerous configurations and displacements. Critics of liberalism see it as riddled with contradictions, particularly in its search for a minimal state when states and state power seems to grow endlessly. Neo-Marxist critics of liberalism have postulated a harmony between the political and the economic wings of liberalism; thus Lockean property rights, and voluntary association of equals in the social contract, are aligned with economic doctrines such as laissez faire and the free market, to permit vast accumulations of capital. Foucault believed that this unity attributed byneo-Marxists was mistaken: the facets of liberalism are far less compatible and cohesive than this ideological critique would require. There is no one liberal doctrine, instead, there are many contradictory and competing strands which, for Foucault, provides us with a fertile problem space. For Foucault, liberalism introduced the notion that liberty is a condition of security. If Bentham had seen liberty as a branch of security, Foucault saw it as bringing a fundamental change to the notion of security. Liberty does not become something that is merely violated in an act of disrespect by the state but, rather, liberty in part constitutes the rationality of state. It becomes a condition for the security of the state and hence an integral aspect of reason of state. Failure to respect liberty is failure to govern correctly, and is not merely or only a violation of the rights of individuals. Foucault's thought undergoes a fundamental change. He moves away from the visible grids of communication of the police city where people both assemble and communicate visibly that populate his examples and dominate his thinking in Discipline and Punish, towards an opaque, autonomous, self regulating and self ordering view of population in which nevertheless security must obtain. The geometrically explicit spaces of the Panopticon, the constant surveillance and examination, and the search for objective grounds for calculated normalisation, are downplayed. The deterministic tone of objectification in which subjects are constituted as subjected subjects and the ideal visibility of the Panopticon are abandoned. He treats security not as a condition for retaining political power, in the sense that security is an aim of political rationality to be pursued by political methods but, rather,
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as a specific principle of political method and practice. So the change in Foucault's thinking is away from the visible, determinate categories of the geometer to those of the possible and probable; security prescribes not by a binary demarcation between the forbidden and the permitted but by advocating means within acceptable limits of variation; and it evaluates by calculations of comparative costs. There is a move away from the basis of legitimacy as residing in the law and natural rights towards legitimacy and security based upon the condition of liberty to pursue autonomous projects or interests. From Foucault's discussions of governmentality, I wish to isolate four categories or principles to look at the neo-liberal notion of the autonomous chooser. First, the neo-liberal critique of education should be seen and understood as an ongoing aspect of governmentality. Second, that as in liberal critiques of earlier forms of policing there is also presupposed here a particular but different form of human nature in the notion of the autonomous chooser. Third, that as autonomous choosers are conceived as an aspect of security the state would enhance the ability to reproduce such 'individuals'. Finally, there need to be different forms of monitoring for surveillance of the production and reproduction of these new forms of normalised individuals.
The Autonomous Chooser In New Zealand and elsewhere in the Western world there has been recent
massive restructuring of the education system in the name of reform. Underlying this and other recent 'reforms' in Western educational systems have been notions of freedom, choice and quality (Department of Education 1988). Students, parents and guardians, etc. are presumed to be persons not merely capable of deliberating upon alternatives, and choosing between alternative educational programs according to individual needs and interests and the qualities of programs but also it is presumed that it is part of their very nature to both make and want to make continuous consumer style choices. It is presupposed that such choices are the student's (or chooser's) own, and that have not been manipulated or imposed in some way upon the chooser. Therein lies the problem of the autonomous chooser. From a Foucauldian perspective recent reforms are merely changes in the forms that governmentality takes. Governmentality carries with it notions of leadership and husbandry, and policy from successive governments has carried strong overtones of both. Governments have overridden traditional methods for setting agendas - educators have been excluded from the educational agenda setting forums - providing leadership through a 'busnocratic' form of rationality. By 'busnocratic' I mean a form of technocratic rationality fused with business principles and practices. At the same time they have claimed to be providing a better form of security for those in need of health care and those for whom access to educational services has been difficult. They have not abandoned security but reassessed it in terms of individualism and the autonomous chooser in particular. In so doing, they have exercised a form of power which impinges both on living individual human beings and on them as subjects of a population. In
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producing and reproducing a form of human nature- autonomous choosers - this 'busno-power' also impinges upon the population as a whole as individual consumer activity improves the economy. By 'busno-power' I mean a form of power directed at individuals to turn them into autonomous choosers and consumers. In 'busnocratic' rationality and the exercise of 'busno-power' there can be seen a merging of the economic, the social and the activity of government. It will be argued however that choice, needs, interests, and quality are constituted in such ways that they are problematic notions at the least, and politically dangerous at the worst. Just as Foucault saw the emergence of liberal doctrines as an attack upon policing so also can these neo-liberal doctrinesbeseenasanattackuponwelfarismandthewelfarestate.Foucault also attacked social security but argued that this needed to be rethought in linewithincreasingdemandsforautonomy,andnotthatsocialsecuritywas not needed. Dearden (1968) is a good example of a liberal philosopher of education who saw something important in the child centred movement's notions of needs, interests and growth. He argues that, properly construed, these notions are important for the development of personal autonomy based upon reason. By this he means first, independence from authorities, and second, that of testing the truth of things for oneself, whether by experience or by a critical estimate of the testimony of others, and that of deliberating, forming intentions and choosing in accordance with a scale of values which is self formulated (Dearden 1968:46). Both understanding and choice, or thought and action, are therefore to be independent of authority and based instead upon reason. From this broad philosophical position personal autonomy is construed as an ideal, to be aimed at by educators, and to which children are to be enabled to grow. This general approach respects the child asanindividualperson,ashavingadistinctivepointofview,anddistinctive purposes to pursue. This, Dearden himself concludes, is the only moral way for pedagogy to proceed. The autonomous chooser of neo-liberal theory might seem to be a logical outcome of Dearden's position. But this is not so. First the needs and interests of autonomous choosers are being shaped through ideologies and multi-media forms of presentation which emphasise the need for skills, the continual need during a working lifetime to be reskilled, and the economic motives for both getting educated and purchasing quality education. Second, what is perceived as being worthwhile in education, what is perceived as quality education is about to be imposed in New Zealand from outside the traditional educational institutions. The New Zealand Qualifications Authority has stated that it is the consumers of education and particularly industry that should determine quality (Barker 1993) and the Minister of Education has recently established a working party to see how such definitions and accompanying practices can be introduced into the state system. So the range of choices will be determined from outside, and the providers of education will become technicians providing these 'quality' offerings from which the autonomous chooser will choose. There seems to be then a major shift in the objects or individuals of the new theory(ies) from classical economic theory. There is almost a postulation of
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a fundamental human faculty of choice, which is both part of human nature and which humans need to exercise to be 'proper' human beings. This is different from autonomy which could or could not be exercised. Choice on the other hand cannot be resisted, or so it seems. It is not just that human beings are autonomous, or that their autonomy can be developed, or that it is a duty to exercise autonomy, but instead there is said to be a faculty of choice which is necessarily continuously exercised on commodities, and which sweeps aside or over-rides the traditional categories and frameworks of human nature, of the human sciences. These new economic theories with the further twist of behaviourist doctrines, see an autonomous chooser as perpetually responsive to the environment. In which case the autonomous chooser is capable of infinite manipulation by the structuring of the environment. If so, then the environment can structure the choices of the individual. Hence economic intervention in the social can manipulate the individual, transgressing the fundamental rights of non violation of the individual, and the individual's self formulated purposes and projects, of earlier liberal thought which are encapsulated in the liberal view of personal autonomy as an aim of education. The logical implication is that one's life becomes an enterprise - the enterprise of the autonomous chooser. But it is not the self of classical liberal theory, where the right to formulate one's own purposes and projects was seen as inviolate. It is not just that the insertion of the economic into the social structures the choices of the individual but that, also, in behaviouristic fashion it manipulates the individual by penetrating the very notion of the self, structuring the individual's choices, and thereby, insofar as one's life is just the individual economic enterprise, the lives of individuals. Needs, interests and growth then become contaminated as both needs and interests become constituted by the insertion of the economic into the social. The very autos is penetrated by these economic, individualistic, needs and interests, setting growth patterns towards, eg. freedom from and choice. If the older liberal version of autonomy had some historical justifications, it is clear that these 'new' autonomous choosers have different needs and interests and that their autonomy is problematic. If the liberal model was aware of the problems associated with the possibility that needs and interests themselves are socially constructed, nevertheless it believed that personal autonomy provided one with some independence. The autonomous chooser is quite an explicit construction, and one which can be continually restructured. By emphasising skills and down playing knowledge and understanding, and by emphasising information and information retrieval as characteristics of the educated person, neo-liberal education can seen to be heavily embroiled in the security of state and international capitalism, as there is both a particular kind of person sought under the form of an autonomous chooser and a clear intention by state institutions to foster and reproduce such individuals. On such notions of autonomy, meant to lead to emancipation, Lyotard says (1993:151): 'this "emancipation" is the story of a Faust who didn't need to sell his soul because one had not been entrusted to him, so he was under no obligation to return itto the donor, nor did he have the power to stealit from its donor'.
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The liberal Left in New Zealand education has had no real response to these changes, either intellectually or in practice, except to provide critique and/ or repeat the principles and policies of the past. If Foucault is correct, what is needed in response to nee-liberalism is an increased vigilance, and an increased imagination and inventiveness, for there is a complex problem space brought into play by these neo-liberal reforms (Gordon 1991). What is required is a neo-socio-democratic approach to these 'crises' of the welfare state and education. This is of course but another critique. It may just be to re-iterate the dark side of the 'progress' of the human sciences to which Foucault drew our attention. But there may well be spaces, and antinomies, for a resistance to this demeaning form of education and its associated demeaning notion of human being. 1
I am indebted to Gordon for much of the following section on Foucault's changed approach to govemmentality.
References Barker, A.l. (1993). 'The New Zealand Qualifications Framework: practical issues in its implementation'. Paper presented to the conference, Successfully Managing Quality, Performance and Efficiency, Wellington 13-14 April. Barrow, R. (1975). The Philosophy of Education. London: Methuen. Baier, K. (1973). 'Moral autonomy as an aim of moral education', in Glenn Langford and D.J. O'Connor, (eds)New Essays in PhilosophyofEducation. London: Routledge Kegan Paul, pp.96-114. Brown, S.C. (ed.) (1975). Philosophers Discuss Education. London: Macmillan. Dearden R.F. (1968), The Philosophy of Primary Education. London: Routledge and KeganPaul. __ _,(1972). 'Autonomyandeducation',inDearden,R.F., HirstP.H. and Peters, R.S. (eds), Education and the Development of Reason. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, pp.448-60. __ _, (1975). 'Autonomy as an educational ideal', in Brown, S.C. (ed.) Philosophers Discuss Education. London: Macmillan, pp.3-18. Dearden, R.F., Hirst, P.H. and Peters, R.S. (1972). Education and the Development of Reason. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Department of Education (1988). Administering for Excellence. Wellington: Government Printer (known as the Picot Report). Foucault, M. (1979a). Discipline and Punish: the birth of the prison. New York: Vintage Press. __ _, (1979b ). 'Govemmentality', Ideology and Consciousness, 6, pp.5-26. __ _, (1980). The History of Sexuality, Volume 1. New York: Pantheon Books. __ _, (1983). 'Afterword: The Subject and Power', in Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, pp.208-26. Gordon,C.(1991).'GovernmentalRationality:Anlntroduction',inGrahamBurchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (eds) The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality,.Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp.1-52. Hare, R.M. (1975). Chairman's remarks on the symposium' Autonomy as an educational ideal', in Brown, S.C. (ed.) Philosophers Discuss Education. London: Macmillan, pp.36-42.
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Lankshear, C. (1982). Freedom and Education. Three Rivers, Ca.: Milton Brookes. Lyotard, J.F. (1993). Political Writings, trans. Bill Readings and Kevin Paul Geiman, London: UCL. Press. Miller, J. (1993). The Passion of Michel Foucault. New York: Simon and Schuster. Sartre,J.P.(1946).ExistentialismisaHumanism,trans.PhilipMairet,London:Methuen, 1948. Walzer,M. (1986). 'The Politics ofMichelFoucault',in David Couzens Hoy, (ed.) The Critical Foucault Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, pp.51-68.
Ethics, Technics, Politics: Australian Debates on Competencies and Citizenship tiJenise Meret!ytli Introduction This paper addresses the relationship between expectations of education and the governmental components of state schooling.! It suggests some reasons to reconsider the kinds of political assessment applied to education, particularly those which treat state schooling as a vehicle for the realisation of principle. The central instance is provided by the current debate on 'competencies' associated with the Finn, Mayer and Carmichael Reports (AEC Review Committee 1991; ESFC NBEET 1992; AEC and MOVEET 1992). These reports provided the template for the Australian Vocational Training System, a key component of the reorganisation of technical education and training pursued in Australia under the Keating Labor government's Working Nation scheme (Keating 1994). The 'national training agenda', as reform of Australian postcompulsory education has become known, is perhaps the most controversial reform of Australian education since the reorganisation of universities and Colleges of Advanced Education into the Unified National System under John Dawkins in the late 1980s. The reaction to these reforms elicited utopian statements about the role of education (including its capacity to live up to ideals of freedom and equality) along with equally romantic dystopian denunciations ofbureaucracy, instrumental calculation and state interference (Hunter et al. 1991). The competency debate has continued this tenor of argument. For some cautious supporters, the national training agenda represents a long-awaited opportunity for the realisation of democratic education principles. For others, it marks another instance in which public education, under a Labor government, has exchanged the social democratic promise of 'education for citizenship' for the false coin of vocationalism, choice and consumerism. Arguably, both sides of the existing debate exhibit a characteristic 'romantic republican' understanding of the relationship between states and citizens (Minson 1993). To be legitimate, it is assumed, then government should live up to the ideal of citizenship and democratic participation. That is, legitimate government is identified with the democratic expression of the rational will of acollectivesubject-thatof'society', 'the community', or 'the people'. Where this will is not democratically expressed- where there is a gap between democratic values and governmental norms - then government is found to be unjust and illegitimate. It will only reclaim its legitimacy when governmental norms are once more joined to democratic values. In this instance, it seems, that moment will come when education opens itself
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to the democratic participation of all citizens, surrendering barriers to engagement in administrative and expert decisions and razing the thresholds of educational entry points. Since educational participation (in these two senses) equates with the citizen's right to participation in the political process, then the principle of citizenship must be at stake in these reforms. This paper addresses the terms and circumstances in which these arguments have been put. Rather than describing the details of the AVCTS or assessing its effects, it treats critical academic debate on the issue as an instance of some characteristic problems in conceptions of bureaucracy, citizenship and state action. In this, it takes its cue from a field of 'postFoucaultian' work on the comparative history of government and selfgovernment, a field which places strong emphasis on non-humanist descriptions of historical changes to rationales of rule, modes of conduct and regimes of ethical formation. But before drawing on these perspectives, let me first outline the details of the case study and the issues which it raises.
Programmatic imagination The competency program is designed to build a new system of Australian credentialling, based on an identification of the core and common competencies possessed by an Australian workforce and provided by the Australian school system (AEC 1991:55). As part of an integrated reform of industrial relations, training and education, it is one of the most extensive reconstruction efforts of the post-war period. It stems from international developments in the establishment of common standards of training levels and skill classifications across OECD countries and within the Asia-Pacific region. However, it also builds on efforts since the mid 1980s to develop national co-ordination in Australian education, raising school retention rates, promoting equity targets and establishing national curriculum and assessmentframeworks(Dawkins and Holding 1987; Dawkins 1988; Dawkins 1989; Morrow 1992). Its construction has depended on at least a decade of administrative effort by a number of bodies (see Beazley 1992; Marsh 1994). Its reception, in turn, has generated an industry of criticisms and expert commentary, much of it sceptical and some of it oppositional. The 1991 Finn Report formulated the goal of constructing a unified national training system and a consistent national framework for qualifications. Under this system, credentials would no longer reflect the number or duration of courses that an individual had taken. Instead, they would assemble information on the skills or knowledge possessed by that individual, no matter where these capacities were acquired. Individuals would enrolinindustry-accreditedon-sitetraining,intraineeships,inTAFEcourses, or in secondary school units (either full or part-time). In these sites, they would be able to develop particular vocational competencies, evaluated by 'qualified assessors' on the basis of comparisons between industry standards and performance in specific tasks. At the same time, they would be assessed on their level of achievement in a common national core of Key Competencies. The central image was that of 'pathways'. Individuals were to move flexibly between classrooms, training sites and workplaces, avoiding the pitfalls of unemployment and dead-end training, while building registered
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generic capacities, which are adaptable to various kinds of work (Keating 1994:99). Profiles based on competency norms were to be nationally portable across schools, workplaces and training institutions, bypassing local and State-based differences in education systems and providing 'some common language, some common framework of description of outcomes that can operateinalleducationand training institutions and in the workplace' (AEC and MOVEET 1992:95). Such at least was the objective put when these reforms were initially proposed. It is worth emphasising the programmatic ambition driving the competency developments. Designing an integrated training program of this scope represents a considerable achievement, entailing unprecedented co-ordination between the education bureaucracies, employers, industry bodies, unions and professional associations, as well as between federal and State governments. As a bureaucratic effort of co-ordination, the program spans schools (state and private), workplaces and the different state-based TAFE sectors and universities, not to mention families. As it turns out, however, the ambition and scope of the program has presented its own problems, at the points where programmatic aspirations are translated into concrete proposals, negotiation and planning. For its early supporters, the announcement of the competency schema seemed to promise the realisation of some long-delayed social democratic goals for Australian education and industrial relations. According to John Freeland, a leading expert in youth welfare, the release of the 1991 Finn Report presaged the emergence of a new' coalition of industrial and political forces' set on 'shaking the established educational world to its foundations in its search for a "productive and flexible culture (Freeland 1991:85). He predicted the development of 'a new integrated provisional settlement in the conflicts over macro-economic, industry,labour market and educational policies' (Freeland 1991:86). As it turns out, the alignments have not been so neat. The negotiation of competency schema has met with sustained criticism from TAPE and secondary school teachers (eg. Thomson 1991; Whitely and Dugan 1991) and from youth welfare experts (Sobski 1992; Cooper 1992). Equally serious doubts have arisen about the 'pathways' to be built between secondary school, TAPE, the universities and the professions. Negotiation on this issue has extended some well-established tensions between the education bureaucracies and universities (Johnston 1992:10; Wilson 1992:57) and between the Commonwealth and the States. Academic argument on the reforms has been equally vexed. Various critical analyses of the policy program have been marshalled, many of them drawing on well-established diagnoses of the ills of 'economic rationalism' and 'corporate managerialism'. (Marginson 1993; Porter, Rizvi, Knight and Lingard 1992; Seddon 1993; Morrow 1992; Collins 1992; Blackmore 1991; Sachs 1991; Meyer 1991). The 'competency agenda', it has been argued, represents the latest in a line of regressive governmental measures motivated by economic objectives and serving the interests of industry. The education bureaucracy has been infiltrated by a hybrid of classical liberal political theory and neo-classical economics, resulting in the revival of 111
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'human capital' theories of the economic outcomes of education (Margins on 1993: 31-54). Mated with the corporate managerialism prevailing in the public sector, the effect is a strategy co-opting the ACTU, unions, employers and teachers into a corporate model of consensus, cemented by the technology of 'human resources management' (Knight 1992). In this new climate of instrumentalism, it is argued, students exist only as economic units and as consumers. In turn, individuals have come to treat themselves as investors in their own human capital. At the political level, it seems, the shift is from centralised political authority to devolved markets. On the political philosophical plane, the shift in governmental rationality is from citizenship to consumerism (Marginson 1993). Armed with these arguments, teachers and educationists have been urged to stand their ground against the incursions of educational instrumentalism.
Prescription and description This is a mixed debate: both removed from policy and within it, both critical and expert. A number of the most prominent of the academic opponents of the proposed reforms have themselves been engaged as specialist consultants in the policy process, while also offering equally specialist ethical appraisal from within the academy. In the former mode, they work within the technical registers of public administration, providing expert predictions of the likely effect of education measures on economic performance, on the labour market, on youth unemployment or on patterns of participation. But in their capacities as critical intellectuals, they tend to be sceptical of technical concerns and instrumental calculation. Perhaps the most common tactic of critical analysts of education policy is the 'discursive analysis' of policy documents, examining the vocabulary of policy documents and identifying the presence of such elements as 'human capital' assumptions or of'economic rationalist' or'corporate managerialist' doctrines. Once identified with their founding doctrines, these assumptions can be shown to be internally incoherent and therefore invalid. If they have no intellectual standing - so the argument goes - then they must be shored up by political interests. Their foundations can then be traced to a deeper layer of dialectical oppositions between classes, between labour and production, between the human and the technical and between citizenship and consumerism (Burchell1994). Too often, however, some important ground-level features in the landscape are lost in this shift to a higher plane of analysis. No doubt, theories and doctrines do shape bureaucratic routines and (in different ways) policy priorities. However, they are also adapted and hybridised when put to use. In developing its links to industry-driven training programs, for instance, the educational bureaucracy has called on the expert vocabulary of human capital, and on the expert prediction of economic outcomes from training. Public administration has evidently taken on some techniques, routines and vocabularies particular to the private corporation. However, it is too easily assumed that the adoption of these techniques and vocabularies is an expression of class interests or of particular political or economic doctrines. As Miller and Rose (1990) point out, it is important to bear in mind the ad hoc and non-ideal circumstances in which bureaucratic departments call on
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political vocabularies and in which governments arbitrate between competing funding priorities. Modern governments, they argue, tend to achieve their ends through a flexible combination of regulation and persuasion, eliciting the co-operation of semi-autonomous agents and institutions through indirect and non-coercive means. Expert vocabularies play a key role in these negotiations, establishing shared goals and common problems and translating governmental objectives into voluntarily adopted imperatives. However, policy statements, programmatic objectives and administrative routines cannot be treated as if they were theoretical reflections of the kind conducted within the academy. These analyses help to modify expectations of government, clarifying the diverse range of alliances entailed in particular programs. This serves to undermine critics' use of formulaic oppositions such as those between the market and the community, the state and civil society, the private and the public. For instance, take the assertion made by critical educationists that, in drawing on the vocabularies of human capital and 'quality management', public administration has been colonised by market forces, and therefore 'depoliticised'. There are three main points to be made here about the conceptions of politics, government and democratic principles called upon in such arguments. The first point concerns the question of 'political vocabularies'. There is no need to dispute that, in developing its links to industry-driven training programs, the education bureaucracy has indeed called on the expert vocabulary of human capitat or on the expert prediction of economic outcomes from training. It may also be the case that public administration has taken on vocabularies developed within the private corporation. But if this set of exchanges can be represented as an effect of the 'corporatisation' of government, it could just as readily be described as the 'governmentalisation' of the corporation. The second point concerns the impoverished conception of the 'political' at stake in such critiques. It is asserted that in drawing on the vocabularies of human capital and 'quality management', the bureaucracy has become 'depoliticised'. Arguably, this assertion tends to collapse too many distinct elements into this term 'politics'. It conflates bureaucratic conduct and party politics with electoral politics and, in turn, with democratic political principle. Furthermore, the insistence on a 'politicised' reading of policy rhetoric tends too easily to make the link between expert vocabularies, theories and interests. Some important descriptive elements are lost in both analytic manoeuvres. The third point concerns the opposition drawn between democratic principles and the 'marketplace' - home, apparently, of private consumer choice in education (Marginson 1993; 1992a; 1992b). Again, these formulae have some descriptive limitations. The emphasis in the Labor government's education strategy has indeed been on altering parents' ambitions and students' choices, with the goal of altering enrolment patterns. But these processes take place not in a 'free market'. They operate as part of governmental systems for allocating resources and for planning the provision of educational services - processes entailing considerable public expenditure
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and regulation. Arguably, what has occurred over the past two decades is the establishment of a 'government-made market', in the governmental regulation of private schooling and of the provision of privatised modes of training (Smith 1993). Across the various sites involved in these reforms, then, private industry and private ambitions are' govemmentalised', being drawn into programmatic ambitions through indirect means of shaping and normalising, means made available by particular forms of expertise (Miller and Rose 1990).
State reasoning and citizens. It is here- where we encounter the difference between bureaucratic reason-
ing and principled reflection- that we can call most usefully on the conceptual and historical perspectives ongovernmentprovided by Michel Foucault and others. For Foucault, state reasoning (of the kind which emerged in the early modem Western states) cannot be reduced to 'general principles of reason, wisdom and prudence'. Instead, such reasoning emerged as a set of administrative techniques and rationales of rule which were geared not to the higher end of human improvement but to the goal of strengthening the security, prosperity and peacability of 'the state as a state' (see Foucault 1981; 1991a, 1991b; Pasquino 1991; Gordon 1991). In its emphasis on the 'concrete, precise and measured knowledge' required for the state's strength, state-based reasoning is distinct from natural law conceptions of rights. It also diverges from Christian theological conceptions of just government as vested in human, natural or divine laws: The state is something which exists per se. It is a kind of natural object, even if the jurists try to know how it can be constituted in a legitimate way. The state is by itself an order of things, and political knowledge separates it from juridical reflections. Political knowledge deals not with the rights of people or with human or divine laws but with the nature ofthe state which has to be governed ... The state's capacity and the means to enlarge it must be known. The governed state must hold out against the others. A government, therefore, entails more than just implementing general principles of reason, wisdom and prudence. A certain specific knowledge is necessary: concrete, precise and measured knowledge as to the state's strength (Foucault 1988:51).
Foucault's historical comments are sketchy and provisional, but extremely suggestive. They are perhaps most helpful in suggesting why it is that academic arguments on the state are so circular. Critical intellectuals, it has been pointed out, tend to take the state to task because its operations are not infused by the higher principles of freedom, equality and justice. Such Kantian conceptions of 'ultimate ends' have infused modem understandings of the relationship between states and citizenries, not only in the domains of critical reflections but also in some areas of legal and administrative reasoning (see Koselleck 1988; Minson 1993; Hunter 1994). But the ways in which modem states address themselves to their citizens cannot be summed up in such abstract and ideal terms. Others have built a body of work which has extended and adapted Foucault's arguments, using them to investigate the peculiar history of citizenship and rights arguments. This has involved building on the less evolutionist aspects ofT.H. Marshall's analysis of citizenship, especially his
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description of the piecemeal emergence of civil rights as established by common law precedents; of the uneven aggregation of political rights such as those associated with the franchise; and of the patchwork application of social and industrial rights to the citizenry during this century, within the expanding areas of social welfare and education (Marshall1963; Hindess 1987; Minson 1993). These different ways of organising the rights, entitlements and duties of 'citizenship', as Marshall points out, are unlikely to be reconciled by philosophical arbitration. Instead, each has historical conditions of emergence which bear a tangential relation, at best, to political philosophies or to absolute principles. Despite the expectation that social welfare, the law and the education system should treat each individual as the possessor of inalienable human and political rights, each of these areas actually functions by allocating a limited set of statuses, and by attaching rights and capacities to those statuses. However, these areas of social reality do not operate in this way - as is often assumed - because governmental operations have failed to express a set of pre-existent rights. In fact, the notion that all the capacities of an individual add up to a self-reflective unity is quite foreign to the spheres of social administration. These domains are too busy carving up the undifferentiated mass of humanity into the categories and statuses of specific governmental programs - categories that in Marshall's words, will'instantly ring the appropriate bell in the mind of the busy official' (Marshall1963:124-5). The fact that the school system is no exception to this rule is the lesson that its historians can teach us. Hunter's Rethinking the School (1994) takes up this argument and puts the case that state education systems cannot be treated as expressions of political rights, or as conduits through which absolute ideals can enter the world. Instead, they are complex apparatuses forged by the pastoral and bureaucratic machinery of government, machinery driven by the imperatives of the well-being of the population, the strengthening of the state and the maintenance of territory. The modern school system's ambitions, he argues, are bureaucratic ambitions, based on its institutional capacity to provide uniformity in the capacities required by a citizenry. This capacity has made it possible to provide the population with a common basis in the capacities now regarded as fundamental to the exercise of basic rights- not the least of these being literacy.. These.arguments raise two important points. First, they question the assumption that the school system could or should be treated as a means to express rational and moral capacities that stem from human subjectivity or its historical emancipation. Second, they mark a gap between the governmental technology of popular schooling and the sphere of political rights. In other words, the philosophical and political ideal of the citizen as the bearer of political rights bears no immediate relation to the ways in which states conduct themselves towards citizens as the objects of governmental action. In Western social democracies, citizens are treated as the bearers of a range of rights- civil, legal and political rights. But at the same time, the citizen is treated as a being requiring governmental care, protection and training. These relationships are too historically disparate and contingent to be consistent with coherent philosophicat jurisprudential or theological prin-
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ciples. Academic analysis seems to be confident of its ability to arbitrate between these conflicting rights-based claims on the basis of principle- even though these claims are themselves made in the name of principle- and assumes that government should be informed by similar concerns. The disconcerting fact, however, is that it is possible for these issues of principle to go unresolved within the realm of programmatic rationality. The education bureaucracy is capable of conducting itself without undue anxiety over inconsistencies in the political rationalities that it deploys in its statements on the rights of citizens and the responsibilities of the state. It does so without great difficulty, because its modes of operation and calculation are on the whole distinct from those of 'integrationist' academic reflection..
Conclusion It is in this broader historical and theoretical terrain that we should place our
expectations of educational reforms such as the current competency program. The first step involves identifying.some standard confusions in conceptions of the relationship between political principle and governmental technologies, between states and citizens, and between rights and capacities. The standard assumption, as we have seen, is that citizens possess a number of absolute and pre-given rights, simply by virtue ofbeing human .. .It is against these absolute rights that the capacities and achievements of state education is assessed .. However, democratic 'participation' is a more painstaking and precarious achievement of government itself. Occupying the status of citizen entails being able to exercise political, civil and social rights. This entails the acquisition of definite capacities - capacities distributed (unevenly) by the school system itself. The distribution of these capacities and competencies cannot be credited to the vision of cultural prophets. Rather, the credit belongs to the institutions capable of equipping citizens with the capacity to exercise these rights. The current competency program is typical of these inglorious and flawed, but nevertheless indispensable institutions. It well may be that the introduction of the competency reforms will neither produce educational equality, nor speed the realisation of social democratic principles in Australian education. After all, it is not as if building a more uniform national education system will remove the schools' institutional role of distributing qualifications and social standing. Despite the expectation that schooling should be able to realise principles such as equality, schooling is connected to the machinery of vocational training and to the instruments of educational and social differentiation. The state, in its provision of schooling, holds itself responsible for claims made in the name of the child's human right to self-realisation. At the same time, it is accountable to parents, taxpayers and voters, with their interest in ensuring that the determination of 'education outcomes' is fair and efficient. It sets itself the obligation to provide all citizens with a common plateau of competence that might enable them to participate in the education system. But it also bears the institutional responsibility for allocating differentiated educational outcomes and for providing reliable and regular forms of vocational distri-
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bution. These forms of educational and vocational differentiation are certainly 'instrumental'. But the educational bureaucracy cannot look into its conscience to find the definition of educational outcomes (or educational disparities and disadvantages). What it uses instead are instruments intricate statistical calculations and elaborate forms of record-keeping, such as those now being assembled in the competency program. These instruments are certainly imperfect and are often arbitrary. Their uses are frequently profane. These instruments are not just used to mark out the space of 'whole selves' - they are also deployed to measure the skills of the future worker and to monitor the competence of future citizens. But is it possible to have a state-organised mass school system which did not pursue these joint activities? Those who insist that Australian education faces a crisis of conscience have yet to address this question. 1
I would like to thank Ian Hunter and Jeffrey Minson for their help in the early formulation of this work.
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__ _, (1991b) 'Politics and the study of discourse', in G. Burchelt C. Gordon, and P. Miller (eds) The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, London: Harvester and Wheatsheaf, pp.53-72. __ _, (1988). 'The political technology of individuals', in L. Martin, H. Gutman and P. Hutton (eds) Technologies of the Self, London: Tavistock. Freeland, J. (1991). 'Education and training for the school to work transition', in C. Deer and T. Seddon (eds) A Curriculum for the Secondary Years, Hawthorn: ACER. Gordon, C. (1991). Governmental rationality: An introduction', in G. Burchelt C. Gordon, and P. Miller (eds) The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, London: Harvester and Wheatsheaf, pp.1-51. Hindess, B. (1987). Freedom, Equality and the Market: Arguments on Social Policy, London: Tavistock. Hunter, I. (1994). Rethinking the School: Subjectivity, Bureaucracy, Criticism, Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Hunter, 1., Meredyth, D., Smith, B. and Stokes, G. (1991). Accounting for the Humanities: The Language of Culture and the Logic of Government, Brisbane: Institute for Cultural Policy Studies. Johnston, N.H. (1992). 'The universities and competency based standards', in Centre for Continuing Education, Higher Education and the Competency Movement: Implications for Tertiary Education and the Professions, Canberra: Australian National University, pp.2-14. Keating, P. (1994). Working Nation: Policies and Programs, Canberra: AGPS. Knight, J. (1992). 'The political economy of industrial relations in the Australian education industry, 1987-1991', Unicorn 18(4):1-20. Koselleck, R. (1988). Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society, Oxford: Berg. Marginson, S. (1993). Education and Public Policy in Australia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marsh, C. (1994). Producing a National Curriculum: Plans and Paranoia, Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Marshall, T.H. (1963). Sociology at the Crossroads and Other Essays, London: Heinemann. Meyer, T. (1991). 'Post-Fordist ideologies and education', in D. Stockley (ed.) Melbourne Studies in Education, Melbourne: La Trobe University Press. Miller, P. and Rose, N. (1990). 'Governing economic life', Economy and Society 19(1 ): 129. Minson, J.P. (1993). Questions ofConduct: Sexual Harassment, Citizenship, Government, London: Macmillan. Morrow,A. (1992). 'The Finn Review and thetwocultures:butwhich two cultures?'. Unicorn 18(1):13-22. Pasquino, P. (1991 ). 'Theatricum politicum: The genealogy of capital-police and the state of prosperity', in G. Burchell, C. Gordon and P. Miller (eds) The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, London: Harvester and Wheatsheaf, pp.105118. Porter, P., Rizvi, F., Knight, J. and Lingard, R. (1992). 'Competencies for a clever country: building a house of cards?', Unicorn 18(3):50-58. Sachs, J. (1991). 'In the national interest? Strategic coalitions between education and industry', Australian Journal of Education, 35(2):125-130.
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Seddon, T. (1993). 'An historical reckoning: education and training reform', Education Links, 44:5-9. Smith, B. (1993). 'Educational consumerism: family values or the meanest of motives?', in D. Meredyth and D. Tyler (eds) Child and Citizen: Genealogies of Schooling and Subjectivity, Brisbane: Institute for Cultural Policy Studies. Sobski, J. (1992). 'Pathway to Finn', Unicorn, 18(1):49-55. Thomson, P. (1991). 'CBT: The problems', in C. Carey, G. Burchell, C. Gordon, and P. Miller (eds), Proceedings of the Conference on Competency-based Training, Melbourne,November 27-29,1991, Leabrook, SA: TAPE National Centre for Research and Development Ltd. Whitely, J. and Dugan, J. (1991). 'Assessment models appropriate to CBT and their relationship to teaching and learning approaches', in C. Carey (ed.) Proceedings
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Education and the Competency Movement: Implications for Tertiary Education and the Professions, Canberra: Australian National University.
Competency-Based Training- Taylorism Revisited?
Competence and competency-based training A number of major inquiries in recent years have led the Australian government to embark on a wide-ranging restructuring of post-compulsory education and training. ThemostimportantaretheFinn(1991)Mayer(1992) and Carmichael (1992) reports. These initiatives are based on the idea that all young people should participate in some combination of education, training and work experience beyond the age of compulsion. All young people should either stay at school until Year 12, or be involved in a training program instead. The Finn Report suggested an Education and Training Guarantee available to all those under 20 on the 1st ofJanuaryeach year. This would provide education or training places beyond the compulsory years of schooling for a period of two years full-time or three years part-time. These initiatives are linked to broader concerns about Australia's international trading position on, in particular the strategy of developing valueadded export industries able to compete in world markets without tariffs, quotas or other forms of protection. Problems are seen with the lack of appropriate skills in the workforce, as well as with Australia's historically poor record in retaining students till the end of high school. As an integral part of award restructuring, the Government has introduced competencybased training (CBT), which it believes will develop a skilled and adaptable workforce. Competence can be either intellectual or manual. It is defined in terms of discrete outcomes which are observable and measurable. The focus is on output rather than input- not the amount of time you spend in a course, but rather the actual skills, knowledge, or capacities which you have acquired as a result of taking this course. CBT involves the development of both general vocational and occupation-specific skills. The Finn Report refers to six 'key competencies' (or more accurately 'key areas of competence') essential things which all young people need to learn in their preparation for employment: • language and communication • mathematics • scientific and technological understanding • cultural understanding • problem solving • personal and interpersonal characteristics Young people should be able to develop these key competencies regardless of the particular education or training pathway that they follow. CBT can also be placed in the context of the convergence between general and vocational education visible in Australia over the last twenty years. This in turn relates to a convergence between work and education. According to
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the terms of the relevant discourse, the best forms of work organisation are those which encourage people to be multi-skilled, creative and adaptable. Regular updating of skills and knowledge is becoming essential to maintain and enhance productivity. Hence teaching specific vocational skills is of limited utility- rather we should focus on more general skills which workers can transfer from one task to another, one job to another, one career to another. CBT has been welcomed and sponsored by certain sections of the Left, but criticised by others. Supporters see it as a way of according proper recognition to the value of manual as well as mental work, and of opening up meaningful career paths for manual workers. Opponents have tended to draw parallels with Taylorism and/ or Fordism.
Taylorism revisited? A number of critics (eg. Stevenson 1992) have expressed concerns about CBT by drawing parallels with Taylorism. Taylorism involved the systematic analysis of work practices specifically human-machine relationships - in order to maximise productivity. The work process was broken down into discrete tasks; the best method of performing this task was then examined -the appropriate speed; the best position of the body or particular parts of it in relation to the machine; the most efficient way of sequencing different actions, and so on. The human body was treated purely as an object to be dissected and analysed. There are certainly some parallels here with CBTparticularly the elaborate codification of work tasks and skills, the latter being seen as discrete, observable and measurable entities. There is also a parallel in terms of the overall goal of the two improving productivity without provoking conflict between capital and labour. I argue that there are important differences between Taylorism and CBT, and further that changes in the political-economic context since the early twentieth century render a direct comparison dangerous. The stress in CBT on general skills is one important difference from Taylorism. The worker needs to actively apply these general skills to particular tasks - specific vocational skills are seen as derived from and dependent on these generalised skills. There is not such a total objectification of the worker within this model; not such a total appropriation of judgemental processes by management. The worker is seen to a limited extent at least as an active agent in the production process. This role takes place in the context of constantly changing technology and work organisation. The worker has to be able to apply key competencies in order to keep pace with these changes and to stay employed. Hence the self-interest of the worker is implicated in CBT as well as the self-interest of management. There are further implications in terms of the changing relationship between employer and worker. If we draw a broad contrast between Taylor's day and our own, we can say that previously the worker identified with a particular trade or skill. Work defined his being, his status, his identity. Any change in the pace or content of the job was seen as a threat; loss of your job or the necessity to change from one trade to another much more so. Secondly, there was a more strongly oppositional stance towards management than today. Thirdly, attitudes to work were basically instru-
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mental - work provides money which enables self-actualisation in leisure time; work itself is something to be endured, and the main focus of struggle was around the issue of wages. By contrast, the worker today has to be prepared to change constantly. Theaccentisontheindividual'sautonomyandcapacitytoadapt,evenifthis autonomy is circumscribed by the overall political-economic context. AB Donzelot (1981/2:4) says in relation to similar developments in France ('perpetual training'), 'instead of defining the individual by the work he is assigned to, it regards productive activity as the site of deployment of his personal skills'. The worker's response to work - his/her subjectivitybecomes a key area of concern. Hence all the moves over the last few decades to put meaning into work. Worker participation in decision-making, job enrichment, multiskilling, innovative forms of work organisation are all based on the assumption of an alliance between workers and management in achieving goals of productivity, efficiency and so on. These developments mobilise the active involvement of the worker; workers are encouraged to draw on their own resources; workers' sense of collective responsibility is appealed to. Enterprise bargaining can be seen as another aspect of this same mobilisation.
Homogenisation and individualisation CBT is concerned with attaining and demonstrating specified knowledge, skills and application by an individual, rather than merely measuring an individual's achievements relative to others in a group: This aspect of CBT is a move away from a culture of failure, where some are stigmatised as failures, to a training culture in which each and every individual is challenged to meet or exceed specified standards of performance. This is also a departure from imputations of capability from measured intelligence (Carmichael1992:25).
As this remark shows, CBT tries to incorporate everyone within the same field of reference. It represents an attempt to break down the division between mental and manual work, and to accord greater value to the latter. Career paths should now be available to everyone; job fulfilment should be available for everyone. The same, universal criteria can now be used to judge the value of any kind of work, in terms of the level of skill required, whether the task involves creativity, whether one has to supervise other workers, and so on (see Stevenson 1992:7). Whatever ultimate judgement one forms about CBT, this obviously cannot be analysed as a simple imposition of control over the working class. As an alternative, I have found that these developments can be fruitfully analysed using Foucault (primarily Discipline and Punish). Foucault argues that modernity can be characterised in terms of a simultaneous process of homogenisation and individualisation. With CBT, the mental/manual distinction begins to blur. The working class is incorporated more fully within a homogenised social field, rather than being defined in terms of a particular status standing in opposition to the ruling class. CBT (in theory) is a neutral, technical way of assessing any type of ability, manual or mental. Differences still emerge- individuals are produced and certified with different capaci-
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ties, skills and knowledges- but these differences are now differences within a common field of reference. They become neutral, technical differences, rather than differences tied to an all-encompassing status linked to class struggle and an oppositional, heroic role for the working class. Instead of the relatively crude binary divisions characteristic of 'law', heavily laden with moral and political overtones- divisions such as mental vs. manual, middle class vs. working class, career vs. job, high school vs. technical high school- modernising trends such as CBT substitute a finegrained graduation along a common, continuous scale ('norm'). Everyone is brought 'within the pale', within a common field of aspiration and examination. Following Foucault, this normalisation also allows a more effective differentiation of skills, capacities and knowledges - 'real' competencies, rather than competencies assumed to exist as a result of possession of educational or trade credentials. It simultaneously homogenises and individualises, the two things being part and parcel of the same process, rather than representing some kind of contradiction at the heart of our social order. CBT and related developments mobilise the (culturally defined) selfinterest of individuals in keeping themselves employable and in negotiating agreements with their employers. It does so in such a way that this selfinterest harmonises with the aims of the state. In other words, it makes the population governable, while avoiding repressive controls or the detailed supervision of everyday life by the state. Of course this active role of the individual occurs within limits defined by the overall system of power I knowledge, but it is not simply a sham, to be dismissed as simply another example of the cunning of bourgeois hegemony or of the insidious spread of state power. As Donzelot says in relation to 'sieve-like' concepts such as 'crisis' and' contradiction': 'they blur the positivity of these transformations and obscure their efficacy' (1979:8).
Australian political-economic context CBT is seen by its framers as a technical solution to the problems of Australia's international economic situation- the development of appropriate skills in a context of changing technologies and an increasingly competitive international environment; developing a multi-skilled, adaptable workforce who will be able to produce value-added goods for export. Whether it succeeds in this aim remains to be seen. Regardless of the answer to this question, CBT can alternatively be interrogated in terms of what it tells us about the kind of society in which we live, and the possibilities open to us in the current historical conjuncture. One way of doing this is through Foucault's analysis of forms of governmentality. Within this framework, CBT can be seen as part of a broader constellation of initiatives for defusing potentially dangerous conflicts. Castles (1985) analyses the 'historic compromise' between capital and labour at the turn of the twentieth century in Australia, involving a trade-off between high wages and (relative) security of employment on the one hand, and protection- for local manufacturing industries on the other. Protection
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enabled employers to hire workers and pay them good wages. Other elements of this compromise included the conciliation and arbitration system, the basic wage, the award system, and old-age pensions. This compromise was modified after World War 11, following the breakdown of the economy in the Depression and the sacrifices of the war. A range of new or improved social security measures were introduced. Keynesian techniques of demand-management promised full employment, and gave hope that the Depression would never be repeated. Full employment was never guaranteed, but nonetheless became a major aim of government policy in a way which it had never been before. The recession since the mid-1970's has produced policy responses which threaten to break down the 1900 I 1940 compromise altogether. Tariff reduction and the development of internationally competitive industries signal a radical break with the previous national economic strategy. High levels of unemployment have become standard, and there has been a downgrading of full employment as an objective of government policy. There has been an abandonment or indefinite suspension of any notion of a rightto work. What is substituted is a right to training organised and financially supported by government. Individuals have to embrace appropriate training opportunities to keep themselves employable, to give themselves the greatest possible chance of gaining or retaining employment. The language of rights has been replaced by the language of risk. As Donzelot says in the more general context of 'statistics': For the absolute character of the opposition between the right to work and property rights, it substitutes the relative calculus of risks and chances. It counters the division between workers and capitalists with a mechanism of common compensation, with collective amends for injuries suffered within the framework of the collectivity that they form. The social rights which follow from the use of this technique are not absolute, but relative and circumstantial. They do not require the State to embark on a partisan transformation of society but engage the collectivity in compensating for its own shortcomings and excesses (1984:423).
The transformation of industrial relations is another element of the current governmental strategy. Award restructuring involves granting pay rises in exchange for greater productivity. Generalisable notions of competence are essential in order to measure increases in productivity. This restructuring seems to have taken place at the expense of concern with unemployment. Unemployment no doubt has many and complex causes, but one must surely be the introduction of labour-saving technologies and work practices. Increasing productivity means that less people are producing the same output. To some extent at least, increases in productivity and associated wage rises for those in full-time employment occur at the expense of increasing unemployment. The latter has been downgraded as an issue, as reflected in recent (June 1994) political announcements about the health of the Australian economy. It was announced that the' economic fundamentals' were the best they had been in decades, completely ignoring the 10% unemployment rate.
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The right to training can be seen as a depoliticising strategy for resolving the contradictions (from a governmental point of view) inherent in the right to work. Whether this strategy works remains to be seen. The promised new jobs - replacing the ones that have undoubtedly been shed - will have to become available. The stakes and the odds have to be convincing enough for individuals to be motivated to participate in the system, and not to revert to struggles over absolute rights. A Foucauldian analysis suggests that CBT is very much in line with the homogenising/individualising character of modern disciplinary power. Although as already indicated one must be prepared to analyse the specificity and positivity of these changes, it is hard to see any radical break within this perspective heralding the emergence of a post-modern, postindustrial, postFordist, etc. society. Somewhat paradoxically, Foucault can be used in this context as a theorist of continuity rather than discontinuity. I find this an important corrective to ill-defined concepts of radical disjuncture such as postmodernism.
References Australian Education Council (1991 ). Young people's participation in post-compulsory education and training, Canberra: AGPS (Chair: T.B. Finn). Burchell, G. et al. (eds) (1991 ). The Foucault effect- studies in governmentality, Chicago: University of Chicago Press/Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Castles, F.G. (1985). The working class and welfare, Wellington/Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Donzelot, J. (1979). The policing offamilies, New York: Pantheon. __ _, (1981/2). 'Pleasure in work', I&C, No.9:3-28 __ _, (1984). 'The promotion of the social', Economy and Society, 17(3):395-427. Employment and Skills Formation Council (1992). The Australian vocational certificate training system, Canberra: NBEET (Chair: L. Carmichael). Employment-related key competencies (1992). Melbourne: Mayer Committee. Foucault, ( 1977). Discipline and punish, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Stevenson, J. (ed.) (1992) Developments in post-compulsory education and training, Centre for Skill Formation Research and Development, Griffith University, Newsletters 1-12.
'This Slender Technique': Examining Assessment Policy
Introduction Foucault (1977) describes the 'examination' as 'this slender technique' which exemplifies the embodiment of modern power. Assessment by means of tests/examinations falls within the domain of 'government' (Foucault 1991) where assessment practices yield information about the individual and about the schooling system. Rose (1990:4-5) deftly explains the Foucauldian understanding of government thus: 'Government ... describes ... a certain way of striving to reach social and political ends by acting in a calculated manner upon the forces, activities and relations of the individuals that constitute a population'. When applying this interpretation of government to practices of educational assessment, state policy making does not necessarily constitute a repressive mode of control nor a liberatory move, but rather it represents a calculated way of knowing a population in order to be able to manage it in terms of social and educational administration. As a requirement of modern government and through the effects of what Foucault (1980) terms 'power /knowledge', techniques of educational assessment provide knowledges which are important to government in accomplishing certain social and political goals. Elaborating on his concept of government, Foucault (1991:102-3) writes of 'govern-mentality' or the 'mentality of government' which he describes as 'the ensemble formed by institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, the calculations and tactics' which lead to a 'convenient end'. Thus there is an emphasis placed on expediency which is inherent in this notion. Governmentality has a wide ambit, but is essentially concerned with improving the lives of individuals in alignment with what is in the state's best interests and by using the most convenient means. This balance is important in the framing of policy initiatives. Assessment practices provide an important instance of how governmentality operates in modern societies. Through such specific and calculable techniques as the examination in its various forms individuality is shaped (Foucault 1982:214). Thus testing practices have become a fundamentally necessary strategy of government in constructing individuality as 'scholastic identity' (Ball1990:4). In order to analyse the Student Performance Standards policy as a governmental technique, it is important to chart changes in the policy discourse and to place this in the wider context of assessment practices. What follows then is a discourse analysis of the Student Performance Standards which shows the kinds of imperatives which promoted it and something of the resistance which made the Queensland State Department of Education postpone its implementation. Despite union bans which have hindered the policy's progress towards implementation, factors which seem strong enough to overcome setbacks will be analysed.
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Official policy texts as well as popular discourse in the form of newspaper reports are analysed because of their importance in showing how policies are subject to multiple readings which make changes in the policy intention possible.
Interpreting policy As a policy initiative the Student Performance Standards exemplifies how the policy process in one of complexity where policies are made and remade (Bowe et al. 1992:23) at different levels of interpretation and through differing practices so that it is more appropriate to speak of policies having 'effects' rather than 'outcomes'. Policy texts, as working documents, are open to many interpretations by many readers. Certainly, the policy proposal of the Student Performance Standards illustrates the ambiguities, contradictions and omissions which abound in the policy process as it interacts with a variety of interrelated contexts (Boweetal.:ll-4). It also highlights the difficulty in implementing a policy from a top-down imperative. The Student Performance Standards policy was announced in 1992 as a new state-wide system of testing students' levels of knowledge and understanding in various subjects against 'educational benchmarks'. Claimed to be a 'revolutionary' program, it aimed to assess six levels of competency in Years 1-10 and was developed and trialed in a selection of schools by the State Department of Education (Queensland, Department of Education (QDE) 1992a: 1). An official announcement of its 'demise' in January 1994 followed a statement in October, 1993 about its postponement unti11995 (The Courier Mail (CM) 1994:14). Problems with its implementation stemmed from the fact that the trialing period had shown that teacher work and concomitant stress had increased to the point where the Queensland Teachers' Union (QTU) had imposed work bans, despite generally supporting the testing policy in principle. At its launch the Student Performance Standards was alleged to be at the express wishes of parents in their search for a clearer indication of what their children are learning (QDE 1992d), of employers and community groups who 'want to know about the outcomes of schooling' and of teachers and administrators who 'have called for the introduction of common sets of Standards and want them used state-wide' (QDE 1992c:2). Whilst the liberatory flavour of this discourse testifies to the need to enlist people's cooperation, the validity of these claims was somewhat diminished when the executive of the Queensland Council of Parents' and Citizens' Associations denied that parents had been included in discussion about the new assessment program (Gubby 1992b). In addition, the president of the Queensland Teachers' Union stated that the level of consultation with teachers had been 'minimal' (Gubby 1992b) despite the proposed program's aim to assist teachers in supplying parents with more detailed information about their children (QDE 1992a:1). Again, in liberatory mode, a favourable press synopsis of the rationale for the tests presented it as enabling policy since 'parents will be able to see how their child has performed in his [sic] class and on a state-wide scale' (Gubby 1992a). The State Premier asserted that the Student Performance Standards
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policy represented 'one of the most significant and fundamental improvements to Queensland's education system in recent history' (QDE 1992a:1), while the Minister for Education stated that, 'most importantly it will enable teachers to provide parents with more detailed information about their child's progress' (QDE 1992a:1). A strong recommendation in favour of the tests was that movement around the State could be facilitated by test results which would aid the placement of students since 'a level-four result in Brisbane will be the same as a level-four result in Birdsville' whereas a 70 per cent maths result might differ from school to school (Gubby 1992a). Further press reports supported this idea: 'For the first time we can really see what is going on... when a kid moves from State to State, they can see immediately where they fit in' (Comben, cited in Gillespie 1993:7).
The policy in context It is necessary now to look at the contingent conditions from which this
testing initiative has emerged by investigating the wider contextual background. Queensland, according to the Education Minister, had 'taken the initiative' (Gillespie 1993:7) by supporting a Federal government policy on national testing which itself was based on 'developments elsewhere' (QDE 1992c:7). Plans for a national curriculum and national testing were laid down in the Hobart Declaration on Schooling (1989:1) which speaks of 'national reporting to the Australian people' and of national goals for schooling in order to provide a framework for co-operation between Schools, States, Territories and the Commonwealth. Thus this represents a shift to a centrally governed curricula, formally endorsed by the Australian States and Territories. Additionally, three major reports by federal government committees, generally known as the Finn, Mayer and Carmichael reports, have emphasised the perceived need for a national framework of competency based curricula and assessment. The language of competency is currently powerful in articulating the needs of industry and also the political imperatives of an education-led national economic recovery. Thus, the Student Performance Standards policy is Queensland's response to the national framework of competency based education (Aubert 1993:1). Paradoxically, this is occurring at the same time as devolution and decentralisation policies have been put into place in the state education system. National policy initiatives for control of curricula and assessment bear some resemblance to national testing in education in Thatcherist and postThatcherist Britain (Broadfoot 1991; Gipps 1992; Taylor 1993) and in the United States of America and New Zealand (see Dale and Ozga 1993:63) where the influence of New Right strategies is recognised (see Lingard et al 1993). However there are significant differences. In Queensland, current policies for national testing are not so easily identified as being those of New Right discourses because they are mediated through Labor governments at state and federal levels. Nevertheless, obvious links with the discourses of economic rationalism and corporate managerialism in educational policy have been well established (see Lingard et al.) as powerful influences on governmental goals and in Australia these are increasingly manifested in educational policies (Lingard et al.).
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National testing, as a technology of government, is a means of translating these discourses into practices of bureaucratic regulation. Such regulation seems to be welcome in the current economic and political climate of the early 1990s if the editorial of the Brisbane Courier Mail is any barometer of local thinking: For too long, Australian educators have promoted the view that testing children against set standards is counter-productive or unfair. In fact it is productive and very fair: It creates an environment in which children will want to succeed, and one in which they can measure their progress against universal tests (CM 1992).
Ironically, testing is productive in a governmental sense because it produces knowledges of the individual and the system. Interestingly, centralised testing is not generally seen to be an instance of control in a repressive sense. Indeed the popular press is dismissive of negative effects: It is inevitable that some students will fail such tests. They will do so for a
variety of reasons, from lack of interest to simple dunderheadedness ... There is no way that society can function in an environment in which no one fails by virtue of the fact that no one is subjected to realistic testing (CM 1992).
This reaction is in itself significant, as in the spirit of the return of 'commonsense', it welcomes the new testing policy by stating that: 'The fundamental utility of standard state-wide testing of primary school students has at last made itself re-apparent to the Education Department and its political masters. This sensibility is to be applauded' (CM 1992). However, such praise was misplaced because of the ambiguous focus on 'standard state-wide tests'. The language conjured up a negative connotation which the Department and its 'political masters' rejected, because, according to the Department, the media had got the testing program all wrong. The official statement to redress the misunderstanding argued that 'the whole notion of State-wide testing was erroneous' since 'the only State-wide aspect of the whole concept would be the benchmarks against which student performance is reported' (QDE 1992b:1). The testing itself would in fact be school-based, and would be both formative and summative, using a variety of methods including tests and examples of work produced.
The power of language Because the Student Performance Standards policy has been conceptualised in the discourse of competency based education, it basks in the reflected glory of'competency' which currently enjoys an inherent aura of progressiveness. The language of competency therefore provides an important means of acceptance. Indeed, the particular use of language and vocabulary is critical to a program's success. It is crucial that policy statements contain vocabularies for making a program thinkable and manageable because language and vocabulary are tactics for 'the building of desires, the enlistment of cooperation, [and] the adjustment of choice' (Meredyth 1993:3), all of which are necessary for successful policy implementation. The Department is therefore being solicitous that this particular program represents a desirable move. To this end, strong emphasis is placed on the Student Performance Standards policy as 'competency based benchmarks' and as a 'reporting framework' with emphasis on gains for the individual.
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Thus testing is tied to an optimistic hope for a better way of administering education. For instance, when the policy was announced, the QTU, albeit rather belatedly, voiced 'conditional support' for the Student Performance Standards concept, provided the 'standards were not tests or hurdles for students, but signposts of achievement' (Queensland Teachers' Journal (QTJ) 1992). In this discourse, whilst there is evidence of some uneasiness associated with testing, there is also the hope that somehow the child will benefit through this new expression of 'expertise' (Miller and Rose 1990:2). Such thinking is compatible with govemmentality where government, operating through a 'pastoral bureaucracy' (Hunter 1993), is concerned with improving the chances of happiness for individuals as well as operating in the state's own interests of state-building. Testing as a way of 'knowing' has become a practice which parents, communities, students and teachers welcome in 'the child's best interests'. This confidence is based on a widespread belief that the uniqueness of the individual child can be enhanced by the knowledge yielded by tests (Kapferer 1990). Thus, by association, however tenuous, with the liberal ideal of individualism, the language of testing secures acceptance. In the case of the Student Performance Standards policy, when 'competency' is aligned with a 'unique personal profile' (QDE 1992c:10), the former takes on the therapeutic aura of a blend of individualism and psychologism, both of which have an entrenched place in Queensland education (Meadmore 1993b). In spite of the use of currently 'progressive' language which seeks to distance the Student Performance Standards from other standardised tests, the 'benchmarks' are nonetheless designed to locate the child in a normative field based on 'objective comparison' so that: 'If we have a class or a school that is not performing well it will show up' (Comben cited in Gillespie 1993:7). Such a statement is compatible with the aims of govemmentality in knowing a population so that it becomes amenable to being treated and controlled. The more altruistic notion of testing individual competency becomes somewhat undermined in this context. Competency benchmark tests, because they are individual reporting frameworks, are likely to produce the deleterious effects of testing, such as labelling and teacher expectations, which have been well documented (Hargreaves 1967;Rosenthal and Jacobson 1968; Good and Brophy 1973).
Producing individuality Whilst it is claimed that, from the use of the benchmarks,'a unique personal profile which changes over time' (QDE 1992c:10) will be constructed, the Department states that it would not support using the standards for purposes of stereotyping and labelling. Yet individual profiles as normative testing procedures are technologies designed to make each individual a 'case' accompanied by documentation where difference is codified, mathematised and standardised (Rose 1988:194). For instance, the Teacher Information booklet addressed the topic of individual student profiles thus: 'the introduction of Standards will provide the common elements for student profiles. At certain times -especially for formal reporting purposes - the teacher will need to make a judgement by comparing a student's performance with the Standards' (QDE 1992c:7-8).
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In itself, profiling is obviously normative and governmental, designed to inscribe an image of the 'whole' child's capacities (Meredyth 1992:16; Broadfoot 1991:16) warns that 'profiling... represents a new disciplinary technique' which combines 'comprehensiveness' with 'self-surveillance' and therefore 'has the potential to exercise more effective control than any assessment procedure yet devised'. Certainly, the intention is that judgments of performance will be placed alongside all kinds of other assessment information about the individual (eg. results of end-of-semester tests, psychological tests, behavioural evaluations, counselling and medical records). A likely outcome, is that, as a case study for 'pedagogic observation', the child through testing techniques is gradually 'translated into a "web of texts" in which s/he is codified and notated according to the complex nomenclature of individuality and difference' (Preston and Symes 1992:199). In this process, there is the additional possibility that vestiges of the still powerful psychometric paradigm could influence the competencybased benchmarks and profiles of achievement (Berlak et al. 1992). The Student Performance Standards policy has the potential therefore for producing individuality in similar ways to other testing practices. Additionally there is also the likelihood that teachers will teach the benchmark competencies, thereby narrowing the curriculum in much the same way as examinations I tests have done in the past.
The past in the present The social, historical and political background of Queensland education helps to explain why the policy of testing all children in the State against standard benchmarks in order to construct individual student profiles has been accepted in principle, despite there being gaps, contradictions and 'grey' areas which made the policy intention far from clear. For instance, in primary education, the State Department of Education has tested 'normal' populations in various ways for many decades. In effect, the Student Performance Standards policy had replaced another testing program The Queensland Primary Schools Testing Program (more commonly known as the October Tests) which had operated in one form or another for almost thirty years. Prior to that program, the State Scholarship Examination had, for ninety years, governed primary school populations as a selection, streaming and tracking technology. Apart from other myriad forms of testing and examining, externally and internally, the school population has also been subjected to the 'gaze' of psychologism in both piecemeal and universal programs since the 1920s (Meadmore 1993a:33). Significantly, in March 1994, recommendations for a new program of assessment in schools were incorporated into the Wiltshire Report which has been commissioned to review the Queensland school curriculum. This report recommends diagnostic testing of all children in Year 2 in order to provide early intervention and remediation, while students in Year 6 would be tested by standardised tests as is already happening in New South Wales. Information about testing in this State and in Britain was appended to the Report. When compared to the Student Performance Standards, policy such a move seems regressive. At present the outcomes of both initiatives hang in the balance with the outside possibility of both being adopted.
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Assessment, then, can be clearly positioned as a regular goal of government. Although there are differences in circumstances, government has a limited range of techniques and strategies at its disposal, and testing as a technique falls within these limitations so that it has become a continuous strategy of government. For instance, the Queensland example is interesting in terms of its politics at State level. Its centralised education system has meant that the State had always been involved directly with government of school populations so that the' examination' in one form or another has been used as a technical means in the administration of education in Queensland since 1873 (Goodman 1968). Thus testing for administrative reasons has been regularly used in both conservative and Labor regimes in Queensland education (Meadmore 1993c). Whilst it must be conceded that, historically, both sides of the political fence in this State have been conservative in things educational, especially in regard to government spending on education, testing was accepted on its own merits as an administrative technique although deployed for reasons of broad-based political expediency. In contrast to earlier testing programs, the Student Performance Standards policy as competency based assessment, is putatively more flexible and individual. It seems, from the QTU reaction, that perhaps this policy aims to do too much at too great an expense of teacher effort. Trials in over 100 government and non-government schools presented difficulties in terms of teacher time and teacher stress in a climate of education funding cuts and low morale. It is not surprising, when analysing assessment in terms of governmentality, that this competency based assessment program met with problems because it is not the most 'convenient' in terms of the present climate of economic rationalism.
Policy effects Since all assessment practices are normative, government of schooling demands that comparisons be made in specific and calculated ways so that each individual becomes a case with a unique personal profile. As part of good practice, 'running records' are already kept of each student. This constant form of surveillance becomes a self-surveilling mechanism as older students are encouraged to construct their own profiles and dossiers. In these ways a student's scholastic identity has not only been constructed but is made visible. The student is the subject and object of the discourses of educational management, knowable and therefore treatable in administrative terms. Modern government is dependent on such information to extend the disciplinary society. Increasingly, assessment practices must yield knowledges of the population which can be readily and efficiently calculated. Whilst the Student Performance Standards policy has been promoted as a progressive form of assessment because it is competency based with benefits for the individual, will the effects be significantly different from earlier testing programs? Certainly, the accompanying rhetoric about the Student Performance Standards policy contains a social justice component. However this stands alongside economic rationalist principles of efficiency and accountability as if their compatibility were assured. Nevertheless the social
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justice provision is in marked contrast to the State Scholarship Examination and the October Tests which did not make any allowances for children who were culturally and/ or socially different or who were disabled in any way, thereby epitomising socially unjust pedagogy. However whilst social justice is a stated goal of the Student Performance Standards, it also provides a useful means of securing political aspirations by promoting the idea of a 'level playing field' (CM 1993) since the liberal conception of equity and individual self-development is part of the rationale of the newly devolved culture of the State Education Department. Significantly, the notion of catering for individual differences has long been part of the liberal discourse of the psychological-pedagogical union as a means of legitimating differential treatment of the individual (Meadmore 1993c). Couched in social justice terms, it remains unconvincing since all tests are designed to produce difference through affording an 'objective' judgement on the person, thus 'substituting for the individuality of the memorable man [sic] that of the calculable man' (Hoskin and Maeve 1986:107). The effect is one of 'calculable minds and manageable individuals' because when individuals become objects of a certain system of power they are amenable to being calculated about, having things done to them, and doing things to themselves in the name of psychological capacities and subjectivity (Rose 1988:197). In the Australian context, Queensland has certainly been a consistent leader in the recent move towards national assessment. Once the parsimonious and conservative relation to the southern States in terms of educational provision and progressiveness, Queensland is currently in line with wider trends of national testing and competency based curricula. Through testing practices students are both subjects and objects of the discourse of individualism, ever heeding the' experts' who continue to govern subjectivity. Moreover, a return to centralised assessment, after having dispensed with most of its State-wide external examinations decades earlier, represents a paradox in a system which is undergoing decentralisation and devolution. Because centralised assessment involves moving assessment from the local site of the school and classroom, current policies at State and national levels constitute a return to this former centralised means of achieving'competence, competition, content and control' (Broadfoot 1979:30). Thus an argument is proffered that, as part of a national program, 'the way people are moulded through their schooling years is of fundamental importancetoAustralia'sfuture' (CM 1993). In this moulding, 'common standards and goals' are a 'worthy objective'. The very latest assessment policy incorporated into the recommendations of the Wiltshire Report has met with differing reactions. What is significant is that the need for some form of assessment to monitor individuals throughout their schooling is entrenched in the mentality of government. Testing is a necessary part of schooling since it is a legitimate technology to secure certain social and political ends. Whilst outcomes of the battle over the Student Performance Standards are presently juxtaposed against the Wiltshire Report recommendations, doubts remain about any form of state-
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wide testing. Any large scale testing policy falls short of authentic assessment (Berlak et al. 1992) by virtue of the fact that, at the very least, a state/ national assessment must succumb to the negative aspects associated with wide-scale testing.
Conclusion In alignment with national goals for centralised curriculum and assessment,
Queensland is intent on implementing a policy which sets in place practices of continuous assessment in its schooling system. Past traditions in testing have produced a generally accepted understanding of testing as being central to the administration of education. Testing policies for both competency and standardised tests are presented as being a progressive move for the individual as well as the nation, even in an education system which is presently engaged in policies and practices of decentralisation. Although the Student Performance Standards policy is still struggling to get to the point of implementation, whilst meeting challenges in the form of the recommendations of the Wiltshire Report, it seems that a continuous record of individual achievement through the deployment of a centralised testing program is deemed to be absolutely necessary. Therefore, the likelihood of the Student Performance Standards becoming practice seems assured. In terms of the national goals for testing and curricula which are in themselves expressions of governmentality, the production of subjectivity on an individual basis, but also in a totalising way from the earliest years of formal schooling, is now an integral part of the competency agenda at national and State levels. Foucault's 'slender technique' of the examination continues to be a means of securing the goals of governmentality. In current assessment discourses, this technique, in various forms, delivers its promise of power I knowledge. 1
Another version of the ideas contained in this paper appeared in Assessment in Education, 2(1), 1995.
References Aubert, E. (1993). Academic unease over national school learning profiles, Campus Review Higher Education News, 3(17):1, 13-19 May. Ball, S.J. (ed.) (1990). Foucault and Education: Disciplines and Knowledge, London: Routledge. Berlak, H., Newmann, F.M., Adams, E., Archbald, D.A. Burgess, T., Raven, J. and Romberg, T .A. (1992). Toward a New Science ofEducational Testing and Assessment, Albany: State University of New York Press. Bowe, R. and Ball, S.J. with Gold, A. (1992). Reforming Education and Changing Schools, Case Studies in Policy Sociology, London, Routledge. Broadfoot, P. (1979). Assessment, Schools and Society: Contemporary Sociology of the School, London: Methuen. __ _, (1991). The significance of contemporary contradiction in educational assessment policies in England and Wales', Advances in Program Evaluation, 1a: pp.730.
The Courier Mail (1992), 4 June.
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__ _, (1993), 28 June. __ _, (1994), 25 October. Dale, R. and Ozga, J. (1993) Two hemispheres- both New Right? in: B. Lingard, J. Knight and P. Porter (eds) Schooling Reform in Hard Times, London, The Palmer Press. Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Harmondsworth: Penguin. __ _, (1980). Truth and Power, in C. Gordon (ed.) Power/Knowledge Selected Interviews and other Writings 1972-1977 Michel Foucault, Brighton: Harvester) __ _, (1982). The subject and power, in H.L. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, New York: Harvester. __ _, (1991). Govemmentality, in G. Burchell, C. Gordon and P. Miller (eds) The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Gillespie, P. (1993). Curriculum standard nation-wide, Sunday Mail, 27 July. Gipps, C.V. (1992). The Realization of Potential: The Challenge for Assessment. Address to Australian Primary Principals' Association, Gold Coast. Good, T. and Brophy, J. (1973). Looking in Classrooms, New York: Harper and Row. Goodman, R. (1968). Secondary Education in Queensland, 1860-1960, Canberra: Australian National University Press. Gubby, R. (1992a). Students face state-wide tests, The Courier Mail,3 June. __ _, (1992b ). Parents resent Govt. snub on education, The Courier Mail, 4 June. Hargreaves, D.H. (1967). Social Relations in A Secondary School, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Hobart Declaration on Schooling (1989). Canberra, Department of Employment, Education and Training. Hoskin, K. (1979). The examination, disciplinary power and rational schooling. History of Education, 8(2):35-146. Hoskin, K.W. and Maeve, R.H. (1986). Accounting and the examination: a genealogy of disciplinary power, Accounting, Organisations and Society, 11(2):105-136. Hunter,!. (1993). The pastoral bureaucracy: towards a less principled understanding of state schooling, in: D. Meredyth and D. Tyler (eds) Child and Citizen: Genealogies of Schooling and Subjectivity, Brisbane: Institute of Cultural Policy Studies. Kapferer, J.L. (1990). Expert advice: the mystification of common sense, Discourse, 19(2):36-50. Lingard, B., Knight, J. and Porter, P. (eds) (1993). Schooling Reform in Hard Times, London, The Palmer Press. Meadmore, D. (1993a). Divide and rule: A study of two dividing practices in Queensland schools, in: R. Slee (ed.) Is There a Desk with My Name on It? The Politics of Integration, London, The Palmer Press. __ _, (1993b ), The production of individuality through examination, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 14(1):59-73. __ _, (1993c). For reasons of govemmentality: A genealogy of dividing practices in Queensland schooling, (Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Queensland.) Meredyth, D. (1992). Introducing the citizen to the child, working paper.
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__ _, (1993). 'Marking the immeasurable: debates onASAT',in: D. Meredythand D. Tyler, Child and Citizen: Genealogies of Schooling and Subjectivity, Brisbane: ICPS. Miller, P. and Rose, N. (1990). Governing economic life, Economy and Society, 19(1):131. Preston, N. and Symes, C. (1992) Schools and Classrooms: A Cultural Studies Analysis of Education, Melbourne, Longman Cheshire. Queensland, Department of Education (1992a). Education Views, 1(11), 5 June, Brisbane. __ _, (1992b). Education Views, 1(11), 16 June, Brisbane. (Should be vol. 1(12) incorrectly labelled.) __ _, (1992c) Peiformance Standards for Years 1 to 10 Students in Queensland State Schools: Teacher Information, Brisbane. __ _, (1992d). Peiformance Standards for Years 1 to 10 Students in Queensland State Schools: Community, Brisbane.
Queensland Teachers' Journal (1992). 15(6). Rose, N. (1988). Calculable minds and manageable individuals, History of the Human Sciences, 1(2):179-199. __ _, (1990). Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self, London: Routledge. Rosenthal, R. and Jacobson, L. (1968). Pygmalion in the Classroom, Eastboume, Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
The Sunday Mail (1993). 27 June. Taylor, S. (1993). 'Equal Opportunities' Policies and the 1988 Education Reform Act in Britain: Equity Issues in Cultural and Political Context, Discourse, 14(1):30-51. Wiltshire, K., McMeniman, M. and Tolhurst, T. (1994). Shaping the Future: Report of the Review of Queensland School Curriculum (Brisbane).
Michel Foucault, Dorothy Heathcote, Drama and Early Childhood
Introduction Discourse, power and knowledge are inextricably linked Foucault believes. Discourse transmits power and power produces knowledge (Foucault 1978:101). Discourse provides reality and meaning (Racevkis 1983:26), it establishes knowledge and imposes truths (p.20). Through discourse, power and knowledge are joined in an inseparable relationship (Foucault 1978:11; Diamond and Quinby 1988:23). Dorothy Heathcote, the English drama educator whose practice and influence changed the practice of drama in education throughout the world, has approached her work through the same channels. Through discourse, teachers are able to transfer power to children in ways which develop their knowledge and understanding of the world in which they live and of the people who inhabit it with them (Warren 1993:83).
Empowering children through drama Children learn by drawing on their knowledge of the real world and, through collaboration with the teacher and the other children, creating a parallel but fictional world (Simons 1991:25). Foucault, who has also expressed interest in trying to understand how human beings understand themselves through configurations of knowledge-power-self believes it has always been one of society's preoccupations (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983:17; Bernauer 1988:75; Foucault 1984:369). Racevskis (1983:91) points out that, according to Foucault discourse has the capacity to produce and convey power. Heathcote would agree, but for her, discourse has the possibility of effecting a transfer of power. She is in agreement with Foucault when he says that power can invite people to speak, but believes this is most likely to occur when teachers take steps to pass their own power across to the children (During 1992:134). Power as oppression, Foucault believes, can be opposed by the honesty of discourse (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983:129). Heathcote, (1978:21) believes that power is opposed, initially by teachers taking notice of children and being slow to pass judgement. Children need, says Heathcote (1980:132) the power to influence their own construction of meaning from events. The teacher needs to provide the means whereby children can do that and to preserve the children so they explore 'in a nopenalty area' (Heathcote 1988:41). Bolton, another world figure in drama in education and a colleague of Heathcote, discusses ways in which drama enables children to take responsibility for what happens in a drama experience. The teacher continually keeps in mind the possibilities by which power can be realigned (Bolton 1979:116, 145).
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Teacher in role The teaching technique which has become synonymous with the work of Heathcote is the use of teacher in role. This means, simply, that the teacher takes a role in a drama experience, and through that role facilitates children's learning as the drama develops. Working in role is a powerful teaching tool which extends and deepens children's commitment to the work in progress and the learning that flows from it and at the same time effects a transfer of power from teacher to children (Warren 1992:8). Bolton (1992:31) describes it as 'the most important strategy in the Drama teacher's repertoire'. When teachers work in role, they are no longer the ones with the power, the knowledge and the expertise. They can, through the use of role, transfer the decision making and hence power, to children in ways that are safe for both. Heathcote (1984:205) introduced a teaching strategy which she has called 'Mantle of the Expert' where the children are given a role in which they function as experts. Parsons (1991:99) points out that this increases the children's status in the drama and develops confidence in speech and action which leads towards resolution of the problems that arise in the drama. It engenders an ownership of knowledge where the usual classroom situation with the teacher as the one who knows and the children as the ones who will be taught, is reversed (Bolton 1992:32). Furthermore, it implies a willingness on the part of the teacher to relinquish his or her powerful role. 'I seem to have spent my whole career', said Heathcote recently (1993), 'standing around in classrooms looking thick'. Foucault speaks of a web of unequal relationships, believing that relationships of power are deeply embedded in a society (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983:185; During 1992:131). He refers to the pedagogical relationship as being one where knowledge flows from the one who knows the most (the teacher) to the one who knows the least (the pupil) but questions the efficiency of such a dominating relationship (Foucault 1984:378). Heathcote (1978:21) recognises that these relationships can exist in the classroom, but believes that through negotiation in role, teachers can facilitate an exchange of power; a realignment of relating, 'the power of the powerless', to use the words of Havel (1978).
Language, drama and power Drama both demands and embodies language, says Booth (1987:5). It is the heart of the drama process (O'Neill and Lambert 1982:18). Furthermore, Booth (1987:4) believes, discourse affects our view of the world and of ourselves and gives us control over those views. Through drama, children develop power over their own use of language and over themselves. Teachers using role are able to use dialogue to effect a shift in the relationships of power in the classroom while children are enabled to take responsibility for their own understanding as they influence the course of the drama (Booth 1987:8). It is the language in drama classrooms that connects most closely with Foucault's ideas about the relationship between discourse and power. In his last course at the College of France, Foucault referred to the Parrhesiast who spoke of the importance of telling the truth and of interactions with others
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who will also tell the truth, thus setting up a condition of power between the listener and speaker (Flynn 1988:67). This 'equal discussion' (Foucault 1984:382) has particular relevance for young children for whom the acquisition of language is a primary developmental task. Tough's (1977:174-9) research led her to conclude that if children are to acquire facility with language that will enable them to achieve academic competence they must have opportunities for dialogue with an empathic adult (teacher in role provides this condition admirably), opportunities for dramatic play (again, precisely what drama provides) and the opportunity to encounter a variety of language experiences, again a feature of good drama. Booth (1987:6) points out that through drama, children are able to use language to plan, speculate, predict, listen, organise, map, tell stories, sequence, narrate, interview, question, ask for information, persuade, reason, criticise, evaluate and reflect. As Byron (1986:126) states, when children are engaged in the 'as if' situation that drama provides, they are able to use language in a variety of ways but, because of the power drama gives to discourse, they use it for what appear at the time of the drama, to be real, not imagined situations. Teachers are not, however, deceiving children. Human beings, says Boal (1979:114) can hold the real and the imaginary in their minds simultaneously. Bolton (1992:11) believes this empowers as children recognise they are 'in two social contexts at the same time'. Warren (1991) emphasises that young children need to be aware that drama is fictional for although they are certainly able to hold the real and the imaginary in their minds at the same tine, the bridge between reality and fiction can be a little shaky. Children are empowered by understanding that the drama in which they take part is fictional and that they are choosing to believe in it.
Empowering children through questioning Wagner (1976:37) writes of the language registers Heathcote uses as she works with children. The register of power (the one-who-knows register) is rarely a useful register for a teacher who wants to effect a transfer of power from adult to children. A register oflower status, however, is, paradoxically, a much more powerful teaching technique (Morgan and Saxton 1987:53). When working in role, especially a role of medium or low status, teachers enable children to take much of the responsibility for what happens in the drama (Davies 1983:37). Foucault (1984:389) suggests there are many responses that can be made to any set of difficulties. Drama poses such difficulties so children may consider a range of possible options. When teachers question as if they really want to know, children, even very young children, are immediately empowered as they recognise that they are free to contribute a range of ideas and possible solutions without fear of disapproval or rejection. Gillan (1988:35) refers to the distance between questions and answers as being the distance that creates dialogue. On the other hand, teachers often use questioning to demonstrate their power over children (Warren 1992). In other words they ask questions to which they know the answers and they ask them in such a way that the
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children 'fail' if the answers they provide are not the answers the teacher requires. This is using discourse to disempower children. A good drama experience uses much more sophisticated techniques. Fines (cited inJohnson and O'Neill:10) emphasises that Heathcote asks questions as if she really wants to know, not as if she already knows and is testing whether or not the children can answer as she believes they should. Morgan and Saxton (1991:ix) refer to questioning as 'an essential democratic skill' for in the dialogue between teachers and children, neither should be more powerful than the other. Even very young children can, through questions which empower, be enabled to bring their own knowledge, understanding and feelings into the discourse. Drama is an ideal medium through with this can occur, even with the youngest children.
Nonverbal empowering Martin (1988:6) discusses Foucault's contention that power seeps into people's bodies and is demonstrated by their gestures, posture and speech. O'Toole and Haseman (1986:76) extend this argument pointing out that we express our ideas, feelings and needs by language and para-language and by a range of non-verbal communications. This occurs in drama just as it does in real life. Teachers can use their bodies and their speech to indicate their status. O'Neill and Lambert (1982:140) discuss the language, attitudes and gestures a teacher can use which are appropriate for the role he or she is taking and to the status of that role, 'the activity of representation' (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983:25). Wagner (1976:160) describes Heathcote's use of gestures, posture and movements, non-verbal signs in drama. Such signs are important for all ages, but for young children they are paramount (Wagner 1976:16; Warren 1992:39). A teacher-in-role uses non-verbal signs to convey to children the sort of character he or she is portraying (Morgan and Saxton 1987:62). The teacher need not ask the children how they read the signs; their responses, both verbal and non-verbal will make that clear. The teacher also responds to the children's non-verbal signals, recognising that they can be as powerful as the verbal ones. Bolton (1984:134) discusses the empowering effect of having children direct a teacher-in-role in his or her physical stance and movement to develop authenticity. This is as appropriate for young children as it is for older ones and is another way in which power is transferred from teacher to children (Warren 1992:26). Heathcote like Foucault recognises the tripartite relationship of power, discourse and knowledge. Heathcote believes, that children know and understand many things that they are barely conscious of knowing or understanding. Drama can act as the catalyst that can enable children to own their own knowledge if they are framed in a position of influence within the drama context (Warren 1992:3; Heathcote 1984:168). By empowering children in a drama experience, teachers facilitate their learning about the world in which they live, their own place in that world and the people who inhabit with them. They learn, too, about relationships that exist between people as they are faced with real life problems for which there are no easy answers (Davies 1983:42). Through discourse they are
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enabled to discuss such problems and to consider solutions. For young children 'the world is still a new phenomenon' (Neelands 1984:3) although they enter school with rich, yet diverse backgrounds in terms of experience, knowledge, attitudes and language (Parsons 1991:88). Drama recognises and draws on this knowledge and experience and extends it- it is a way into knowledge (Forehan 1991:13; Bolton 1992:115).
Feminism, Foucault and drama When using the strategy of teacher-in-role, early childhood teachers need to consider the messages they are conveying both the verbal and non-verbal. Jones (1988: 122) refers to female patterns of speech as being differentto those of men in rhythm, nuance, emphasis, assertiveness, tone and syntax, with male patterns appearing more authoritative. Women, smile more, use a variety of facial expressions and follow rules formulated by society about general bodily deportment, gesture and posture (Bartky 1988:67). The link between gender, power, language and non verbal communication is one that early childhood educators should remember. Warren (1992:9) believes that when using the technique of teacher in role, early childhood teachers should, in the main, take roles appropriate to their gender. It is only too easy to infer that the exciting and important roles are those taken by men. Furthermore, teachers working in role need to consider their portrayal of that role. Children receive mixed and confusing messages if the character is female but the portrayal is masculine. Heathcote rarely refers to issues of gender in her work. She does, however, emphasise the importance of 'dropping to the universal' (Wagner 1976:76)andofrememberingwhateverthesituation,thathumanshavebeen in this situation many times before. Teachers need to bear in mind the ideas of Gilligan (cited in McNay 1993:94) which maintain that the universal is often regarded as a male universal and excludes the feminine. It is interesting that although Foucault discussed many aspects of the nature of power he did not write of the power of male domination (Wolin 1988:184; Sawicki 1988:162). Feminists who are interested in the work of Foucault have said that there is an alternate concept of the universal which is based on the values of women (mothering theory) which are more caring and empathic than those displayed by men (McKay 1993:94). At the same time, there is criticism of female early childhood educators who convey to children and especially little boys, that it is the feminine view of the world which is the preferred one. Ramazanoglu (1993:9) refers to Foucault's discussions on who exercises power, how it is exercised and on whom. Phillips (1993) believes that there is a distinction between the power women exercise over small boys and that which they exercise over girls. Mothers, she believes feel a sense of continuity with their daughters who will, after all, grow up to be like them (Phillips 1993:102). With their sons, however, there is a sense of difference. Dawkins (1991:5) suggests that early childhood teachers (who are, after alt mostly female,) also have this sense of difference. They show approval of girls who, through their dramatic play, indicate they are developing an understanding of what it means to be an adult woman. When boys, in their play, emulate
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the males whose images are most readily available to them, often images derived from the rough and tough television heroes, teachers disapprove. Boys, then, develop a concept of maleness as being equivalent with badness. Girls are not given the same message. Is the aim of female early childhood teachers to produce what Bartky (1988:62) calls 'docile bodies'?
Conclusion As an early childhood educator with a real belief in the cognitive, affective and social educational effectiveness of drama in education I have been heavily influenced by the work of Dorothy Heathcote. My own work has focused on the ways in which Heathcote's ideas relate to early childhood and to the ways in which early childhood educators can understand the practice and theory of process drama in early childhood. My interest in the work of Michel Foucault has been aroused by the similarities I have perceived between his philosophies, especially as they pertain to the relationship between discourse, knowledge and power, and the work of Dorothy Heathcote. They have, I believe, separately and independently, developed their theories and in Heathcote's case, her practices, along the same paths. Heathcote is both a theorist and a practitioner, and her work has been based on the premise that the practice illumines the theory and the theory, the practice. Foucault never saw himself as a practitioner (Rabinow 1984:12). As a writer and 'universal intellectual' (Rabinow 1984:24) he has postulated the configuration of knowledge-power-self that he believes has always been and still is a part of human existence. Coming from such different positions it is perhaps amazing that there should be so many similarities in their thought. But then, didn't somebody once say 'Great minds think alike?'
Bibliography Balbus, I. (1988). Disciplining women, Michel Foucault and the power of feminist discourse, in J. Arac (ed.) After Foucault: Humanistic Knowledge, Postmodern Challenges. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Bartky, S. (1988). 'Foucault, femininity and modernisation of patriarchal power', in I. Diamond and L. Quinby (eds) Feminism and Foucault: reflections and resistance. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Bernauer, J. (1988). 'Michel Foucault's ecstatic thinking', in J. Bernauer, D. and Rasmussen, D. (eds) The final Foucault. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press. Boal, A. (1979). Theatre of the oppressed. London: Pluto Press. Bolton, G. (1979). Towards a theory of drama in education. London: Longman. __ -' (1984). Drama as education. London: Longman. __ -' (1992 ). New perspectives on classroom drama. Hemel Hempstead, G.B.: Simon and Schuster. Booth, D. (1987). Drama words. Toronto: Language Study Centre- Drama, University of Toronto. Brown, B. and Cousins, M. (1986). 'The linguistic fault: the case of Foucault's archaeology', in M. Gane (ed.) Towards a critique ofFoucault. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Byron, K. (1986). Drama in the English classroom. London: Methuen. Davies, G. (1983). Practical primary drama. London: Heinemann.
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Dawkins, M. (1991). 'Hey dudes, what's the rap? a plea for leniency towards superhero play'. Australian Journal of Early Childhood, 16(2):3-6. Diamond, I. and Quinby, L. (1988). Feminism and Foucault: reflections and resistance. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Dreyfus, H. and Rabinow, P. (1983). Michel Foucault: beyond structuralism and hermeneutics. 2nd edn, Chicago: University of Chicago. During, S. (1992). Foucault and literature: towards a genealogy of writing. London: Routledge. Favel, V. (1978). 'The power of the powerless', in C. Lawrence (ed.) Voices for change. Newcastle upon Tyne: National Drama. Fines, J. (1984). Cited in the introduction to L. Johnston and C. O'Neill (eds) Dorothy Heathcote: collected writings on education and drama. London: Hutchinson. Flynn, T. (1988). 'Foucault as Parrhesiast: his last course at the College of France', in J. Bernauer and D. Rasmussen (eds) The final Foucault. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press. Forehan B. (1991). 'Drama with visually impaired children'. National Association for Drama in Education Journal, 15(2):11-15. Foucault, M. (1978). The history of sexuality. Volume 1: An introduction, trans. A. Lane New York: Random House. __ _, (1984). 'On the genealogy of ethics: an overview of work in progress', in P. Rabinow (ed.). The Foucault reader. London: Penguin. __ _, (1984). 'Politics and ethics: aninterview',in P. Rabinow (ed.) The Foucault reader. London: Penguin. __ _, (1984). 'Polemics, politics and problemizations', in P. Rabinow (ed.) The Foucault reader. London: Penguin. Gillan, G. (1988). 'Foucault'sphilosophy',inJ. Bernauer and D. Rasmussen(eds) The final Foucault. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press. Gilligan C. (1982). In a different voice: psychological theory and women's development. Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press. Haseman, B. and O'Toole, J. (1986) Dramawise: an introduction to the elements ofdrama. Melbourne: Heinmann Educational Australia. Heathcote, D. (1978). 'Excellence in teaching', in L. Johnson and C. O'Neill (eds) Dorothy Heathcote: collected writings on education and drama. London: Hutchinson. __ _, (1980). 'Material for significance', in L. Johnson and C. O'Neill (eds) Dorothy Heathcote: collected writings on education and drama. London: Hutchinson. __ _, (1984). 'Dorothy Heathcote's notes', in L. Johnson and C. O'Neill (eds) Dorothy Heathcote: collected writings on education and drama. London: Hutchinson. __ _, (1988). Drama and social change. Auckland: Kohia Teachers' Centre. __ _, (1993). Address at A conference to celebrate the work and influence of Dorothy Heathcote. Lancaster, England. Jones,K. (1988). 'Onauthorityofwhywomenarenotentitled tospeak',inl. Diamond and L. Quinby (eds) Feminism and Foucault: reflections and resistance. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Martin, B. (1988). 'Feminism, criticism and Foucault', in I. Diamond and L. Quinby Feminism and Foucault: reflections and resistance. Boston: Northeastern University Press.
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McNay, L. (1993). Foucault and feminism: power, gender and self Cambridge: Polity Press. Minson, J. (1986). Strategies for socialists? Foucault's conception of power, in M. Gane (ed.) Towards a critique of Foucault. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Morgan, N. and Saxton, J. (1987). Teaching drama: a mind of many wonders. London: Hutchinson. __ _, (1991). Teaching, questioning learning. London: Routledge. O'Neill, C. and Lambert, A. Drama structures. London: Hutchinson. Parsons, B. (1991). 'Storymaking and drama for children 5-8', inS. Wright (ed.) The arts in early childhood. Sydney: Prentice-Hall. Phillips, A. (1993). The trouble with boys: parenting the men of the future. London: Pandora. Rabinow, P. (ed.) (1984). The Foucault reader: an introduction to Foucault's thought. London: Penguin. Racevskis, K. (1983). Michel Foucault and the subversion of intellect. London: Cornell University Press. Ramazanoglu, C. (ed.) (1993). Up against Foucault. London: Routledge. Sawicki,J.(1988). 'Feminism and the power ofFoucauldiandiscourse',inJ. Arac (ed.) After Foucault: Humanistic Knowledge, Postmodern Challenges. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Simons, J. (1991). 'Concept development and drama: scaffolding the learning', in J. Hughes (ed.) Drama in education: the state of the art. Sydney: Educational Drama Association of New South Wales. Tough, J. (1977). The development of meaning. London: Unwin. Wagner, B.J. (1976). Dorothy Heathcote: drama as a learning medium. Washington: National Education Association. Warren, K. (1991). Drama for young children, inJ. Hughes (ed.) Drama in education: the state of the art. Sydney: Educational Drama Association of NSW. __ _, (1992). Hooked on drama: the theory and practice ofdrama in early childhood. Sydney: Institute of Early Childhood, Macquarie University, __ _, (1993). 'Empowering children through drama'. Early Child Development and Care, 90:83-97. Wolin, S. (1988). 'On the theory and practice of power', in J. Arac (1988) (ed.) After Foucault: Humanistic Knowledge, Postmodern Challenges. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Reconceptualising Parent and Child Conflict: A Foucauldian Perspective Susan (jriufta6er Behaviourist Discourse Children and parents are constructed by behaviourism as passive in their reception of, and response to environmental stimuli. To this end many behaviourist programs developed for rectifying oppositional and noncompliant child behaviour tend to utilise classical and operant conditioning techniques. Such programs are aimed at educating parents through training them to incorporate reward, extinction and strategies such as 'time out', to manage children's behaviour. Behaviourist discourse also positions parents as responsible for the management of appropriate child behaviour which leads to 'normal' socialisation. This means that unusual or abnormal behaviour patterns exhibited by children are frequently categorised as inabilities of the parent. Parents are often classified as having failed to manage the behaviour of the child because such behaviour patterns are unlike or dissimilar to other 'normal' children (Gard and Berry 1986). Non-compliant and oppositional behaviour, such as refusal to conform with the ordinary rules and conventions of society (Gard and Berry 1986), threatens the social and moral order because such children continually challenge society's positioning of adults as authority figures. Hence, behaviourist discourse construes parents as authority figures responsible for effective socialisation; by implication, they are 'inadequate' if children do not behave within parameters set by society. Children are positioned as minors without access to authority and as being problematic if adult authority is challenged on a regular basis (ie. there is something wrong with the child). Therefore, the reason for remedying the behaviour of these children is to stop them challenging adults, defined as authority figures. Typically, behaviour modification programs are aimed at changing the opposition to authority demonstrated by these children because continuance of such behaviour is an indicator of ineffective socialisation and a threat to the established social and moral order of society. In relation to 'problem' families, behaviourist discourse identifies the ability of parents to elicit immediate compliance in their children (Trickett and Kuczynski 1986) as the critical element in the effective use of behaviour modification programs. In addition, problem families are believed to demonstrate what has been called'coercive interaction patterns' (Paterson 1980, 1983). Such patterns occur in families where parents generally respond to repugnant child behaviour with what has been described as aversive behaviour of their own. A response such as this is said to engender an escalation of the original child behaviour, thus prompting a 'no win' situation to develop. Patterson (1980, 1983) has identified a critical element
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in such families as being parental use of weak forms of initial punishment. Weak initial punishment (that is, by the parents) is seen as ineffectual because it does not immediately terminate aversive child responses. Hence, behaviourist discourse identifies 'problem' families by 'marking the gaps' (Foucault 1977:181) between those who are 'normal', and those who are need of regulation in order to return to 'normal'. Parents are therefore targeted for treatment so that in tum, the behaviour of oppositional children can be regulated and normalised. This means that the discourse identifies parents as focally responsible for oppositional, non-compliant and deviant children (victim blaming). One of the factors contributing to the development of radical and humanist psychology was the dehumanisation inherent in behaviourist approaches, characterised by 'the mechanical emptiness of correlations and functions' (Henriques et al. 1984:4). Behaviourist discourse was characterised by its controlled, economic and efficient approach to the human encounter. The development of humanist discourses was aided by critics of behaviourism arguing that if the social was stripped, 'you would have nothing left' (Ingleby 1986:299).
Humanist and Socialisation Approaches Humanistic and socialisation theories tend to utilise the concept of intemalisation, where the child intemalises the social world and thus becomes a social being. However, the way in which children and parents, and hence the social and moral order are regulated differs according to the theoretical explanation adopted. According to Harre (1986:289), socialisation involves cognition and is 'something that is required of an individual and it is achieved by the acquisition of something mental'. Under the umbrella of developmental psychology, humanistic and socialisation approaches have employed ecological and ethological perspectives, personal construct and attribution theory, and sensitive mothering orientations to explain parentchild conflict. All are characterised by the addition of a cognitive and/ or social element onto a behaviourist base. Although these discourses compete with each other and some are therefore more powerful, parents and children are regulated because these discourses produce conceptions of what are considered to be effective approaches to managing children's behaviour. In theorising about the process of socialisation, these specific discourses also offer remedies for the management of oppositional and non-compliant children in order to integrate the child successfully into the social world. As the next step towards advancing an alternative conception of parent-child conflict, I now provide a general critique of discourses concerning parentchild conflict.
Critique of Discourses Concerning Parent-Child Conflict Those discourses emanating from materialist philosophy I psychology such as behaviourism, ethological and ecological discourse posit the individual as a passive organism responding to environmental changes. Such approaches rely on an environmentally invoked stimulus-response explanation of child behaviour and consequent changes to it. This means that behaviour is ultimately reducible to organismic or biological beginnings (Venn:984). In signifying the influence of the environment, these discourses
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rely on a descriptive version of 'the child', where characteristics which are deemed naturat innate and hence presumed as 'given'. AB subject and object of the prescriptions of these discourses, 'the child' can then be seen in relation to two significant binary opposites: passive rather than active; and respondent as opposed to initiator. For those discourses of child psychology which incorporate a cognitive and/ or social element, the dualism of individual and society remains problematic. Most socialisation and humanistic (rationalist) discourses understand the relationship between the individual and society in terms of a model of socialisation, where role theory is utilised to explain how social structures external to the individual (usually the child) are acquired through a learning process. The discourses referred to previously under the umbrella of humanistic and socialisation approaches cannot resolve the 'idea of individual existence as something conceivable apart from the social' (Ingleby 1986:01). Such approaches presuppose a unitary rational subject and privilege agency. The focus in child psychology on individual development is therefore challenged on the basis that the object of psychology needs to be reconstructed 'in a way that transcend[s] the dualism of individual and society' (Ingleby 1986:301). The incorporation of a cognitive and/ or social domain by humanist and socialisation theories still leaves the power relationships at the micro level untheorised. For example, Munn (1991) argues that sibling relationships are far more complex than is postulated by approaches in developmental psychology, which typically view sibling relationships through the single dimension of envy. In addition, Munn (1991:162) asserts that developmental psychology has concentrated on the description of 'the archetypal motherchild dyad' to the exclusion of mothers with more than one child, and hence makes no attempt to deal with the complex relations amongst children and between mothers and children. Furthermore, humanist and socialisation approaches have not addressed the micro and macro relationships of power which operate in contemporary Western culture. My aim here is to move some way towards theorising the links and relationships between the forces of power operating at the micro and macro levels of contemporary Western culture, with a specific focus on parent-child conflict. As Phoenix and Woollett (1991a:6) have explained, developmental psychology incorporates the idealised mother-child relationship as well as responsibility for 'fostering good child development'. Many discourses of humanism and socialisation construe good mothers as those who are able to avert the possibility of conflict occurring because of the way in which the environment is structured. For instance, the warm, supportive and nurturing atmosphere created by the sensitive mother will entice the child into compliance with adult requests. If conflict does eventuate, the good mother is able to rationalise it, to reason with the child and therefore gain compliance through the ability to make the child see the reason behind requests. Therefore, in developmental psychology, the skill in fostering what is considered good child development rests on the proficiency of the sensitive mother to use the technique of reasoning to resolve conflict. To this end, socialisation and humanist discourses place significant emphasis on 'cor-
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rect' models of socialisation which provide specific details of how motherchild interaction should occur. Such explanations are problematic for a number of reasons. Establishing 'correct' models of socialisation which promulgate preferred ways of interacting with children has the effect of pathologising a significant proportion of parents (mothers). Walkerdine (1992:12) has argued that such models produce normalised conceptions of mothering: 'the idea became common that there was an observable truth of correct mothering, a type of care and interaction which was normal in that it could ensure the production of normal children, that is, ones who would not grow up to be anti-social' (Walkerdine 1992:12). A normalised ideal emerged in the regulation of mothering. Deviation from the 'norm' was observable: one merely had to look at the mother, the mothering practices or the child, and as a result mothers and children were either exalted or pathologised. Therefore, humanist and socialisation models aim to produce particular types of children/ persons and have inbuilt penalties to deal with those who do not measure up to the model. For parents (mothers) who are at risk of producing anti-social children, contemporary Western culture has its own mechanisms of control: 'society demands that mothers be in control, blames them when they are not, and has the power to remove children from their care if they consider that mothers' control is insufficient' (Woollett and Phoenix 1991:37). The way in which Walkerdine (1988 1992) and Walkerdine and Lucey (1989) have analysed discourses of parenting and child rearing which are operating in contemporary Western culture provides some alternative perspectives for viewing the construction of parent-child conflict. For instance, Walkerdine and Lucey (1989) have argued that the ideal sensitive mother, characteristic of humanist and socialisation discourses, regulates children through an illusion of autonomy. Part of the illusion is achieved through the use of reasoning, where reasoning is understood as subverting conflict and as being situated in specific historical, cultural and social circumstances. As such, reasoning functions to covertly produce and control specific types of persons (Walkerdine 1992). My purpose here is to understand the way in which these practices operate, as well as the meanings so produced. Hence it is necessary to look at the way in which 'the subject and the social are created together, not a knowing subject creating a known world' (Walkerdine 1992:15). Through examining the way in which the subject and social are created together in some specific instances, W alkerdine (1992:20-1) argues that Western rationalist thought has successfully perpetuated the idea that man can dominate and control nature: forgetting meanings, practices, the constructed character of the subject, produces a very special form of power and it is this power, the power of Western Rationality, which has understood nature as something to be controlled, known, mastered ... Such a fantasy is omnipotent because it is unfulfillable.
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Thus Walkerdine has shown it is possible to conceptualise parenting and child rearing in ways other than those prescribed by the dominant discourses of humanism and socialisation. The possibility of developing alternate constructions is central here. I have argued that social control and regulation are both the aims and the constructions of the disciplinary framing of parent-child conflict. By contrast, poststructuralist feminist and feminist studies have investigated how taken-for-granted conceptions of motherhood, femininity, and childhood have evolved (Luke 1989; Marshall1991; Oakley 1981, 1986; Phoenix and Woollett 1991a, 1991b; Urwin 1985; Steedman 1982; Walkerdine and Lucey 1989). Sociological and ethnographic research projects which incorporate an explanation of conflict/resistance have been restricted primarily to the analysis of resistance in school settings, concentrating on the later primary and secondary years, with the exception of the Walkerdine (1981) study which analyses power, resistance and violence occurring in a British nursery school. Child psychologists have used methods which deal with parentchild conflict by finding fault with the parents (specifically mothers), the children, or both. By questioning the power-knowledge basis on which family life is structured, it is possible to produce an account that offers an alternative to psychological explanations of parent-child conflict. A Foucauldian approach sets out to make parent-child conflict problematic in terms of power, knowledge and discourse relations. Discourses of psychology have constructed parent-child discourse-conflict in the interests of particular institutions and patterns of social discipline and regulation. A poststructuralist perspective views young children as situated within and defined by regulative domestic circumstances controlled by power-knowledge relations. Episodes of conflict or non-compliance occurring between parents and children in such circumstances can therefore be analysed as potentially resistant because of the subjective positioning of the children. At the same time, however, 'the child' and 'child resistance' are problematic because they are sites of discourse construction where the child is posited as object. Hence, the child is simultaneously positioned as subject and object. Analysing dialogue and reflective dialogue during and following parentchild conflict episodes thus is a means of accounting for child resistance through discourse construction. The power-knowledge liaison is inherent in the parent-child relationship that exists in daily domestic interaction and practice. In order to confront power in its local form this analysis focuses on the operation of powerknowledge at its extremities, that is, in domestic interaction and practice. The centre of attention is the point of application and exercise of power, that is, where power is in direct contact with its object. Hence, my analysis here focuses on child resistance and bids for power by children. In this understanding power is a mode of action which does not act directly and immediately on others, but upon their actions (Foucault 1982:220). Discourse-embedded parental power, authority and associated social practices are constantly challenged by young children, who respond through resistance in a variety of ways. These include argument/ disagreement,
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conflict and opposition. The relationship between child resistance and parental authority is thus a two-way process often characterised by conflict, opposition and contradiction. The theoretical orientation adopted here posits families as sites of complex interactions underpinned by the powerknowledge relationship. The family then, is a political institution. Ochs and Taylor (1992:301) explain: Families are political bodies in that certain members review, judge, formulate codes of conduct, make decisions and impose sanctions that evaluate and impact the actions, conditions, thoughts and feelings of other members. Such administration of power is characteristic of families everywhere and may occur whenever family members interact.
The family as an institution and as a set of social practices is analysed in accordance with the power-knowledge relationships that link socio-economic and political characteristics of the larger social order with the institution itself. Families are viewed as political sites and as being involved in the construction and control of discourse, meaning and subjectivities. This includes construction of the familiar codes, styles and conventions associated with 'common sense' conceptions of families, along with the established routines and continuity of habits that are involved in domesticity. Incorporated in this is the whole range of practices, strategies, representations and textual devices that persons use to identify and come to expect of families, including the construction in discourse of identities and beliefs. Disciplinary power provides a docile work force but also reaches into everyfacetofdomesticity,includingwomen's(mostly)workofchildrearing. Disciplines are represented at the micro level of interaction and practice where individual movements, decisions and attitudes are constrained in very subtle ways. The object of control is the regulation of young children through domestic organisation. This requires continuous supervision by an adult in order to ensure the smooth functioning of daily routine and practice. Domestic organisation incorporates many processes which combine to produce docility in children and adults alike. These discourses are the result of a combination of historically constituted discourses which together form power-knowledge relationships. For example, the bodies of (mostly) women are used to regulate the daily routines and needs of young children in a way that ensures required activities are completed. Meals are consumed in routine order with specific expectations concerning the location in which food is eaten, the way in which the food is served and eaten, and the type and amount of food that is consumed. Supervision throughout meals is constant so that children eventually learn to consume food in a regulated and disciplined manner, within a particular time frame and in a particular limited space. Here power can be seen to be working both on people and through them. It is also in these instances that acts of resistance are likely to occur. Using this framework parent-child resistance and conflict can be located as a form of modern individuality, which psychology has been instrumental in constructing. Examining child resistance is one way in which it is possible to unpack the 'common sense' and taken-for-granted assumptions that surround persons and their lived experience.
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Power-Knowledge-Resistance in Daily Domesticity This project identified a number of regimes of truth which were operating in daily domestic interaction and practice in the four families involved. It also identified the actual disciplinary techniques through which families and individuals in them are regulated and normalised. The focus however, is on how children resist these processes of normalisation. For the purposes of this paper and by way of explanation, I use some examples from the regime of truth associated with bedtime procedures to demonstrate how the above occurs. Meanings are created through specific ways of organising families that encompass the rituals and routines associated with that organisation. Hence various overlapping modes of subjectivity are available from which parents can select particular subject positions. They do this by articulating and enforcing in talk and discipline a 'regime' of truths which rationalises their actions and power. The investigation of episodes of parent-child conflict and resistance demonstrates how power relations are played out on a daily basis. Although different rules about sleeping operated in each of the four families, the Gordon family was the only one where a 'set' bedtime of 7.30 pm was enforced each night. The sensitive mother discourse operated in the Anderson home, where Amy was encouraged to go to bed at 7.30 pm because she had recently started school, but was required to be in bed by 8.30 pm (thereby regulating herself within a given time frame). Norms of conduct associated with school attendance meant that Allison and Amy's parents organised the home routine so that the children were adequately rested for school the following day. The data showed there was little resistance from Allison and Amy when going to bed, or when rising the next morning. Both girls remained in their beds the whole night and generally were configured to be independent in bedtime and waking routines. Interestingly, the two boys were constructed differently from the girls in relation to sleeping habits and bedtime arrangements. Peter usually went to bed around 10.30 pm. On several occasions, Nancy and Neil talked about ensuring Peter went to bed earlier, because he had recently started school. This required Nancy and Neil to change their night time routine and therefore adopt normalised conceptions of an early bedtime, because of school attendance. Daily routines were modified to some degree, however, participating in events such as BMX training two nights perweekmeantthatthefamilydidnotarrivehomeuntilapproximately8.00 pm The evening meal was then prepared and eaten before Peter went to bed, making 9.00 pm the earliest bed time that could be achieved on such occasions. The change in discursive positioning resulted in some resistance from Peter. In his resistance to the change, Peter attempted to negotiate with his parents about his pre-bedtime activities. In most cases this occurred through Peter making bids for power by demanding activities that were available before the normalisation of the bedtime. Successful resistance meant that he could stay up later. The following transcript (which includes an indication of the time), demonstrates the way in which Peter and his parents struggled to maintain their discursive positions during one of these instances of resistance:
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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11
Peter
I just think, after tea I have to go to bed without a story, without a [Peter banged his fork on the table to emphasise the words as he said them] Uhh.. . Nancy Neil Peter .. . Uh, uh, Peter, Peter, stop, enough [taps fork with her hand Nancy as she says them to reinforce words]. I'll tell you the story about when you were a little baby, Neil right? I don't want to, I don't want to even listen to it. Peter Nancy and Neil Good, don't do it. Neil You and your tommy rot, you can go to bed with a smacked bottom, and ... I don't want that story; I don't want anything except a Peter game of pool. Neil You are not playing pool tonight. You can play pool in the morning before you go to school. Then I won't have nothing. I'll just colour-in... Peter
The transcript is interspersed with rule propositions about eating (turn 4), and in the following section (turns 22, 23 and 32), which are utilised in response to Peter's resistance, and as attempts to assume more powerful positions (eg. refusing to listen to the story Neil offers, and demanding a game of pool). Nancy spoon feeds Peter for a short time and there are constant challenges and bids for power from all concerned. For example, Peter seizes power from Neil when he rejects Neil's offer of a story (turn 6), and from this point there is a constant jockeying of positions between Peter and his father, based on rejection and refusal (turns 9 and 11), settings limits (turn 10) and the use of threat (turn 8). The transcript continues in a similar fashion: 12 13
Nancy Neil
14 15 16 17 18 19 20
Peter Neil Peter Nancy Neil Nancy Neil
21 22
Nancy Neil
23 24
Nancy Neil
25 26 27
Nancy Neil Peter
Good. OK. Peter, eat your tea now!. No more back answer, and go to bed when I say. Is that understood? Yes. Yes what? Yes, Mum. [smiling] Yes, Dad. No. Just ignore him, Neil. He's being very silly. You have got five minutes, mate. Very silly. You are going to bed at nine tonight. I mean it. Sue doesn't think you are being funny, Peter.lt's very silly. Not at all funny tonight. Come on, Peter. Sit up properly at the table please. Feet underneath. Chew quietly. Feetundemeath.Givemeahoy,Sue,ifheisbeingnaughty [Neil leaves the kitchen]. No, I'll hoy you, don't worry. I mean it, Peter. You'll go to bed without ... Can I leave those Mummy, please?
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20:53 28 Nancy 29 30
Peter Nancy
31
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Urn, eat two more pieces. OK? [Nancy feeds him two mouthfuls]. Most probably taste nicer if you chewed it nicer. Mum, find a page please. Well, if you are going to colour-in, don't ask Mummy for a story. Right? That one there. That one there with [Nancy flicks through his colouring book].
In this section of the transcript Neil continues to set limits (turns 18 and 20) and makes another threat (turn 26). Nancy refers to Peter's behaviour as 'silly' (turns 17 and 19), which Neil reiterates (turn 20). Walkerdine and Lucey (1989) noted this description (silly) was characteristic of middle class mothers who used it as a regulatory device with their daughters. All four mothers in this study often used terms such as 'silly', 'stupid' and 'sensible' as regulatory devices. In the next section of the transcript it is evident that Peter's resistance has caused some disagreement between Nancy and Neil:
32
Nancy
20:56 Neil 33 34 Nancy 20:59 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42
43 44
45 46 47
Neil Nancy Neil Peter Neil Nancy Neil Nancy Neil Nancy Nancy Neil Nancy
48 Peter 21:00 49 Nancy
21:07 50 51 52 53 54
Nancy Neil Peter Nancy Peter
Don't talk with your mouth full. You can finish eating your peas first ... Is he finished? [from the lounge room] He's having a Milo and then he'll clean his teeth in a minute. Cleaned your teeth Peter? Yes. Been to the toilet? ... [in the bathroom] Doawee.E He's got two minutes. Why can't he get in now? He's got two minutes. ... [argued with Nancy, but couldn't hear what was said] [to Sue] See fight, domestic. Alright, you've got two minutes. That's mother conceding, because I'm glad to sleep in the morning. We sleep in until seven instead of six. He still wakes up at the crack of dawn. [returns to kitchen after talking with Neil] Five minutes. Five minutes. Alright. [Peter and Nancy, at kitchen table playing a game. Both are laughing; Peter is not closing his eyes when he takes his turn; Nancy playfully says he is cheating]. OK, you won. Give Mummy a kiss goodnight. Can we play it again? In the morning. Can I have a story?
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Neil
I'll tell him a story. Say goodnight to Sue
Unlike Neil, Nancy does not threaten, reject or refuse, but attempts to invoke rules and set limits (turns 42 and 49) in the sensitive mother mode, while Neil makes his power explicit through devices such as the use of threats. Neil and Nancy argueoverthelimits that have beenset(turns41 and 43), with the result that Peter has an extension of time (turn 48) from the previous limit (turn 46). Nancy positioned herself to allow Peter more time because they did not have to be at swimming early (6.00 am) in the morning, and was able to convince Neil to alter his position as well. Having successfully gained more time and engaged in his preferred activities before bed, the nature of Peter's resistance changed significantly towards the end of the transcript (turns 52 and 54). Here, his position is less intense and resistance is posed more in the form of requests, rather than as demands and refusals. This transcript is also significant because it shows how much of the conflict occurs between Peter and Neil, with Neil making threats about the overt use of his power and Nancy positioned as sensitive mother, attempting to control Peter's resistance and bids for power through regulatory devices such as the term 'silly'. Hence, in this excerpt Neil does most of the controlling and regulating of Peter's behaviour, with Nancy indicating she will give Neil a 'hoy' if Peter is being 'naughty' (turn 25). Thus Neil constructs himself as responsible for controlling Peter's behaviour, and Nancy as an accessory. Regulation of children occurs through regimes of truth via subject positions and adult invoked rule propositions. For example, the 'normal' bedtime for young children is considered to be 7.30 pm This is a concept of the child which constructs normal children as going to bed about this time, based on the advice of child care and parenting manuals, advice from teachers, and the reasoning that children attending school need an appropriate amount of sleep, and should therefore go to bed at the 'normal' time. Parents, then, within this discourse, want their children go to bed at the 'normal' time, because of the desire for their children to be well rested and able to perform appropriately at school. One way of fulfilling this desire is for parents to invoke a rule about the time children should be in bed. Such rules (and others noted during this project) are examples of disciplinary discourses operating through regimes of truth, which according to Luke (1990:4) 'in effect constitute and create truths about subjectivities'. Although 7.30 pm is recognised as the 'normal' bedtime for young children, not all parents involved in the study were positioned to ensure children wentto bed at this time. For example, despite pressure from friends and other family members to set an earlier bedtime, Eloise allowed her children to go to bed later because they slept later the following morning. Here the chief surveillance mechanism, the panoptic gaze of family and friends, was used in an attempt to regulate Eloise. Eloise argued that her children were receiving the same amount of sleep, but at different times of the night from 'normal' children. In this example, Eloise contests and rejects the regulatory discursive pressures exerted by family and friends. The disciplinary process of establishing rules about the time children
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should be in bed demonstrates how power-knowledge works at the point of its application, as a mode of action in everyday life (Foucault 1977). The relational nature of power so established (between parents and children) creates the opportunity for resistance in collusion with a panoptic gaze. A symbiotic relationship exists between the gaze and resistance; each is dependent upon the other. The gaze operates as a preventive measure because continued surveillance works to discourage, detect and correct acts of resistance in order to achieve successful normalisation and regulation. Without the gaze however, the notion of resistance becomes obsolete, as young children must be successfully encultured through the processes of normalisation and regulation. Resistance thus owes its existence to the gaze, and the gaze to resistance. One cannot exist without the other: each is redundant without the other because where there is power, there is also resistance. This means that the power-knowledge-resistance relationship is always accompanied by the gaze, whether in a preventive or corrective mode.
Bibliography Gard, G.C. and Berry, K.K. (1986). 'Oppositional children: Taming tyrants'. Journal of Clinical Child Psychology, 15(2):148-58. Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison, trans. A. Sheridan, Harmondsworth: Penguin. __ _, (1982). 'The subject and power'. Critical Inquiry, 8(4):777-89. Harre, R. (1986). 'The step to social constructionism', in M. Richards and P. Light (eds) Children of social worlds: Development in a social context, pp.287-96. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Henriques,J.,Hollway, W., Urwin, C., Venn, C. and Walkerdine, V. (1984). Changing the subject. London: Methuen. Ingleby, D. (1986). 'Development in social context', in M. Richards and P. Light (eds) Children of social worlds: Development in a social context, pp.297-317. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Luke, A. (1990). 'The body literate: Discursive inscription in early literacy training'. Paper presented to the XII World Congress of Sociology, Madrid, Spain. Luke, C. (1989). Pedagogy, printing, and Protestantism The discourse on childhood. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press. Marshall, H. (1991). 'The social construction of motherhood: An analysis of childcare and parenting manuals', in Woollet, A., Phoenix, A. and Lloyd, E. (eds) Motherhood: Meanings, practices and ideologies, pp.66-85. London: Sage. Munn, P. (1991). 'Mothering more than one child', in A. Woollet, A. Phoenix and E. Lloyd (eds) Motherhood: Meanings, practices and ideologies, pp.162-75. London: Sage. Oakley, A. (1981). 'Interviewing women: A contradiction in terms', in H. Roberts (ed.) Doing feminist research, pp.30-61. London. Routledge and Kegan Paul. __ _, (1986). 'Feminism and motherhood', in M. Richards and P. Light (eds) Children of social worlds: Development in a social context, pp.74-94. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ochs, E. and Taylor, C. (1992). 'Family narrative as political activity'. Discourse and Society, 3(3):301-40.
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Patterson, G.R. (1980). 'Mothers: The unacknowledged victims'. Monographs of the society for research in child development, 45(5), Serial180, pp.1-64. __ _, (1983). Coercive family process. Eugene, OR: Catalina Publishing. Phoenix, A. and Woollet, A. (1991a). 'Introduction', in Phoenix, A., Woollet, A. and Lloyd, E. (eds) Motherhood: Meanings, practices and ideologies, pp.1-12. London: Sage. __ _, (1991b). 'Psychological views of mothering', in Phoenix, A., Woollet, A. and Lloyd, E. (eds) Motherhood: Meanings, practices and ideologies, pp.28-46. London: Sage. Steedman, C. (1982). The tidy house. London: Virago. Urwin, C. (1985). 'Constructing motherhood: The persuasion of normal development', in Steedman, C., Urwin, C. and Walkerdine, V. (eds) Language, gender and childhood, pp.164-202. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Venn, C. (1984). 'The subject of psychology', in Henriques, J., Hollway, W., Urwin, C., Venn, C. and Walkerdine, V. Changing the subject: Psychology, social regulation and subjectivity, pp.119-52. London: Methuen. Walkerdine, V. (1981). Sex power and pedagogy. Screen Education, 38:14-21. __ _, (1988). The mastery of reason. London: Routledge. __ _, (1992). 'Reasoning in a post-modem age'. Paper delivered at the 5th International Conference on Thinking. Townsville: Queensland, Australia. W alkerdine, V. and Lucey, H. (1989). Democracy in the kitchen: Regulating mothers and socialising daughters. London: Virago. Woollet, A. and Phoenix, A. (1991). 'Psychological views of mothering', in A. Phoenix, A. Woollet and E. Lloyd (eds), Motherhood: Meanings, practices and ideologies, pp.29-46. London: Sage.
Power Relations in Pedagogy: An Empirical Study Based on Foucauldian Thought Jennifer M. (jore ... And in school it was power, and power alone that mattered. D.H. Lawrence, The Rainbow
While I would not go as far as Lawrence in characterising the importance of power in schooling, this paper is premised on the view that power matters. Specifically, I am interested in the functioning of power in the pedagogical activities of teachers and students. The pervasiveness of power is not in question here. In literature, in film and television, in newspapers and other popular cultural forms, in the stories people tell, schooling is frequently associated with power. Moreover, educational researchers have addressed power from a wide range of theoretical and methodological perspectives. Briefly, I categorise these perspectives as: (1) technical- seeking techniques to ensure a' correct' balance between teacher and student power; (2) organisational- seeking to understand the functioning of power at the level of the bureaucratic institution; (3) ideological- seeking to reveal, through critique, the capitalist, patriarchal and racist practices and effects of schooling and to provide visions of alternative pedagogies aimed at transforming classroom and societal power relations; and (4) empowering- seeking to shift the balance of power in educational systems and institutions. It is not within the scope of this paper to provide a review of these various approaches. However, I want to suggest that the perspective taken in my own study of power and pedagogy builds on, but also implies a vigorous critique of each of these earlier approaches. My approach to power and pedagogy involves a systematic multi-site study of the micro-level functioning of power relations. This approach potentially offers a more complex understanding of classrooms than earlier approaches and, subsequently, provides a more delineated mapping of possible sites of intervention in schooling policy and practice. In framing this study, some of the theoretical insights of Michel Foucault on power relations are central. In what follows, I provide an overview of the study in which I am engaged, details of aspects of the methodology, and a reflexive comment on the use of Foucauldian theory for this kind of empirical education research.
Foucault and power relations For the purposes of my study, Foucault's linking of what he calls 'modern disciplinary power' or 'bio-power' with modern institutions is particularly salient. Unlike the sovereign power of earlier periods, Foucault elaborates
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the invisibility and pervasiveness of power in modern society: 'The eighteenth century invented, so to speak, a synaptic regime of power, a regime of its exercise within the social body rather than from above it' (1980:39). The key features of this form of power are (1) power is productive and not solely repressive, (2) power circulates rather than being possessed, (3) power exists in action, (4) power functions at the level of the body, (5) often, power operates through technologies of self. This conception of power suggests a very different level of analysis than is evident in other approaches to power and pedagogy. As Foucault says: In thinking of the mechanisms of power, I am thinking rather of its capillary form of existence, the point where power reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their action and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and everyday lives (1980:39). According to Foucault, 'disciplinary power' emerged with the advent of modern institutions. Mass schooling, as one such institution, can be seen to operate in ways that demand individuals' participation in their own subjection (Jones and Williamson 1979; Walkerdine 1986; Meredyth and Tyler 1993), that demand self-disciplining for both students and teachers (King 1990). Foucault illustrates this argument with Bentham's Panopticon, an architectural structure designed such that inmates, unable to detect surveillance, regulate themselves. At the same time, the supervisors in the Panopticon are subject to surveillance by their superiors. Donnelly (1992) criticises Foucault for generalising the notion of panopticism to the functioning of all modern institutions, and emptying it of specific context. I believe Foucault was more cautious than Donnelly suggests. Nevertheless, it is true that, with only a brief genealogical analysis of some schooling documents, Foucault (1977:176) declares: 'a relation of surveillance, defined and regulated, is inscribed at the heart of the practice of teaching, not as an additional or adjacent part, but as a mechanism that is inherent to it and which increases its efficiency' In my study, specific practices (like surveillance) which construct pedagogical relations in various sites are the primary point of inquiry. As such, I aim to put Foucault's generalised claims about disciplinary power 'to the test of reality, of contemporary reality' (1984:46), within the specific context of pedagogical practice. In Foucault's account of disciplinary power, his departure from many earlier analyses of power and schooling crystallises. He explicitly characterises a relation of surveillance as productive for pedagogy, a view which is in stark contrast with traditional conceptions of power which equate power with horror 'so that the less horror there is the less power there must be, and the more power there is the more horror there must be' (Cocks 1989:5). Such traditional approaches tend to focus on those individuals and groups which hold power. Replacing a concern with the subjects of power, my study mirrors Foucault's concern with the mechanisms of schooling. Put another way, rather than begin with questions of who holds power or even who exercises power, I begin with the question, 'What specific practices actualise relations of power in pedagogy?' In short, then, the aim of this study is to employ the theoretical lens provided by Foucault's account of power in investigating the functioning of
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power in various pedagogical sites. Some commentators have criticised Foucault's pervasive conception of power, worried that if power is everywhere it cannot be identified or pinpointed. Of particular concern to such critics have been the political implications of Foucault's conception of power. My own project would be futile if I did not believe that power or, more accurately, power relations could be identified. If power relations operate at the level of the body, and exist in action, then they should be observable in the micro-level practices of pedagogical events. AB Foucault says of the body, 'power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs' (1977:24). Not only is this empirical study conceived on the possibility of observing power relations but it is premised on actual observation. Moreover, as I intend to show in a preliminary way, this study demonstrates that the circulation of power, its capillary nature, does not deny the existence of patterns and structures in the functioning of power, and so does not evade politics.
Outline of the study The central task of this study is a mapping of practices of power in pedagogy. To my knowledge, few other researchers have begun to systematically examine the minute practices of classrooms, examining the bodily effects of power in pedagogy. 1 Of fundamental importance to my approach is demonstrating, rather than only asserting, disciplinary power. To the extent that mapping practices of power might reveal 'spaces of freedom', illuminating thatwhichcausesustobewhatweareineducationalinstitutions,Itaketrust this is a worthwhile task. For such a task, the choice of sites for investigation would not matter providing the study is not limited to a single site, that is, providing there is some variation. However, given other interests which underlie this study, sites were selected for particular theoretical purposes. First, this study builds on earlier work in which I explored critical and feminist pedagogy discourses as regimes of truth (Gore 1993). Although these discourses claim alternative pedagogies characterised, in part, by more democratic relations between teachers and students than found in more traditional classrooms, my analysis of literature in these areas showed that whatever was unique about critical pedagogy or feminist pedagogy did not appear to lie in different instructional practices. Second, given Foucault's thesis on the institutionalisation of modern disciplinary power, I have also speculated that it is this institutionalisation within Education which gives pedagogy a consistent character, despite claims to alternative pedagogies. Hence, the study is designed to include both 'radical' and 'mainstream' sites, in order to further examine my view that whatever is different about radical pedagogy discourses does not lie in the enactment of pedagogy. The study is also designed to include non-institutionalised sites- sites where pedagogy is not enacted within a school or university (or related institution) in order to test the 'hypothesis' (understood in its broad sense) that the institutionalisation of pedagogy accounts for its specific character and for continuities across sites. This design enables the following additional re-
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search questions to be addressed (1) Do power relations function differently in radical and mainstream classrooms? and (2) Do power relations function differently in institutionalised and non-institutionalised sites? If there are differences along these dimensions, different patterns in the functioning of power should be observable (since power exists in action). A finding of no differences would be consistent with the alternative thesis that such practices of power are constitutive of pedagogy as a modernist enterprise. The specific sites located for the study were: • Physical Education classes (PE), where the explicit focus includes direct concern for, and manipulation of, bodies [Mainstream Institutionalised]; • Teacher Education (TE) where the explicit course agenda includes critically discussing dilemmas and tensions underlying the institutional practices of schooling [Radical Institutionalised]; • a Women's Discussion Group (WG), where no explicit political agenda is apparent [Mainstream Non-Institutionalised]; • a Feminist Reading Group (FEM), in which feminists meet specifically to address feminist texts (broadly defined) and issues [Radical Non-Institutionalised]. Approximately six months were spent in each site, with my research assistants and I collecting data at most meetings of the particular group during that time period. The following figure summarises these sites according to the theoretically relevant dimensions outlined above:
Institutionalised Non-institutionalised
Mainstream PE WG
Radical TE FEM
Figure 1: Research sites
While claims to generalisability are necessarily limited with the selection of single sites in each cell of this matrix, and (in most cases) single groups within each site, intentionally sampling for theoretically relevant diversity through a multi-site design should increase the broad descriptive validity of findings (Firestone 1993; Maxwell1993). Despite Foucault's essay on the study of power 'The Subject and Power', he did not specify in practical detail how researchers might go about examining power relations. The methodology for this study, therefore, had to be invented. As one step toward that endeavour, a careful reading of Foucault's writing on thesubjectofpowerrelations (especially Discipline and Punish) was completed as a basis for developing a coding system which would facilitate data collection and analysis. A number of specific practices involved in the functioning of power relations - namely, surveillance, normalisation, exclusion, distribution, classification, individualisation, totalisation, and regulation-were identified as associated with Foucault's account of modem disciplinary power. Additionally, Foucault emphasised the functioning of time and space in actualising power relations, the linking of power relations with knowledge, and the exercise of power in relation to oneself. Coding categories were developed to characterise each of these moments in the pedagogical sites under observation. Pilot data were used
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to refine working definitions of these practices and develop a coding scheme (see Fig.2). My research assistants and I spent approximately six months achieving fairly high levels of inter-rater agreement in order to be able to use the data in quasi-quantitative ways. Surveillance:
Supervising, closely observing, watching, threatening to watch, avoiding being watched
Normalisation:
Invoking, requiring, setting or conforming to a standard, defining the normal
Exclusion:
Tracing the limits that will define difference, boundary, zone, defining the pathological
Distribution:
Dividing into parts, arranging, ranking bodies in space
Classification:
Differentiating individuals and/ or groups from one another
lndividualisation:
Giving individual character to, specifying an individual
Totalisation:
Giving collective character to, specifying a collectivity I total, will to conform
Regulation:
Controlling by rule, subject to restrictions; adapt to requirements; act of invoking a rule, including sanction, reward, punishment
Space:
Setting up enclosures, partitioning, creating functional sites
Time:
Establishing duration, requiring repetition, etc.
Knowledge:
Controlling, regulating, invoking knowledge
Self{/r/t/s):
Techniques/practices directed at the self by researcher, teacher or student
Figure 2: Primary coding categories
As with all categorisations, this coding scheme imposes an epistemological break with the events observed. Such a break is consistent with the theoretical concerns of the project and an integral part of much scientific endeavour. I should emphasise that the study is not an ethnography in which the aim is to give the accounts of participants in the various sites. Rather, like Foucault's own studies, this project seeks to illuminate the mechanisms of schooling and mechanisms of disciplining, enumerating and cataloguing its practices, trying to represent the complexity and contingency of schooling. Given the complexity of the coding categories, and the level of interpretation required in applying these constructs to specific classroom events, it was clear that reliable observational scales would be impractical. Hence, in fairly typical qualitative mode, I decided to begin data preparation with detailed descriptions of classroom events. Such detailed descriptions were also desirable in order to enable other analyses of the data. These detailed
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descriptions were completed, wherever and whenever possible, by two observers noting not only what was said but also what various participants did. When two observers were present, one focussed on the main classroom activity (eg. primary speakers and activities) while the other focussed on secondary events (eg. students not involved in primary discussions). In each site, an audio-recorder was also used to provide an additional source of data. The relatively small size of the women's group and feminist group made two observers too intrusive, so data collection was restricted to one observer and audio-recording. Given the multiplicity and complexity of classroom events, no claims are made to have comprehensively recorded any session even with these measures. Indeed, the theoretical concerns of the project neither depend on full accounts nor deem such accounts possible. Instead, as Bourdieu et al. (1991:10) say, I 'renounce the impossible ambition of saying everything about everything, in the right order'. The aim of data collection in this project was to construct detailed accounts of 'visible' and 'articulable' (Deleuze 1988) events in each site, where the visible refers to what is seen, withbothform(eg. 'school') and substance (eg. 'students'),and the articulable refers to what is said, with its own form (eg. 'education') and substance (eg. 'ignorance'). Semi-structured interviews were also conducted to address a number of issues beyond those informed by the observational processes. Field notes, session transcripts and interview transcripts have all been coded using the categories outlined above and entered using Ethnograph computer software. The following example illustrates this coding process.
An illustration The following extract from a Year 11 physical education class combines my field notes and the lesson transcript. 2 I begin this illustration by demonstrating the coding process, using the primary set of categories developed for the study, and then broaden the focus to the dimensions of disciplinary power Foucault outlines and to patterns evident. The teacher is writing notes on the board which the students are to copy in their books. As usual most of the students are copying the notes and chatting about various other things. 1. Teacher: 'Right-o. This is about to go guys' [gesturing to the writing she has done on one half of the board]. 2. The students make noises of protest. 'No'. 'No'. 'No, it's not'.
space, time, totalisation exclusion
3. The teacher replies: 'If you can't stop talking and do your work, why should I wait?'
normalisation, totalisation, time
4. She gestures to another section of the board which has some writing from another teacher and says 'I'm not sure if he wants this left'. 5. Natalie says 'Oh, who cares?' 6. Teacher replies 'I do'.
normalisation, self/t, individualisation, space, exclusion
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7. As the teacher keeps writing, Nat says to her: 'Hang about'. 8. Annaliese adds: 'Just hang ten, baby'. 9. Zac follows with: 'Just mellow out, Miss [and, in a soothing voice] Let the blood flow to your fingers'.
individualisation, normalisation, time
10. The teacher keeps writing and announces 'As soon as I get to the bottom of here [gesturing to the side of the board she's writing on], this comes off' [the other side].
regulation, time
11. A student says 'Hey, Miss, what do ya think about Michael Jackson, eh?' Uackson has just been accused of child abuse]. 12. The teacher converses with the students about this for a few minutes, taking time away from her writing. 13. The discussion shifts to Brooke Shields and her pictures in Inside Sport magazine.
individualisation, knowledge
14. As they keep talking, the teacher rubs off the first section of the board. 15. Some of the students scream. 'Aaaahhh!' 'Aaaaahhhh!' 'Mi-isss!' These screams are followed immediately by laughter. 16. The teacher says 'I told you'.
exclusion, normalisation
17. Madeleine says 'Miss, we can't exactly write if you stand in front'. 18. She replies 'I was over here'. There is quite a lot of noise in the room so she repeats more loudly: 'I was over here. You had full vision'. Even so, she stands much farther to the side as she continues writing.
exclusion, distribution, space, totalisation self/t
19. Madeleine announces 'I'm not writing'. She turns around to Ted and does not write for the rest of the period.
individualisation, exclusion, self/s
20. Jerry, drawing on the material they've recently learned in this class, says 'She's a fast twitch person'. 21. Some chuckles are heard. I can't see the teacher's face, as her back is to me.
classification, knowledge, individualisation
22. Zac asks her 'Have you been to see the school counsellor, yet?' 23. The teacher says, perhaps jokingly, that she will make an appointment tomorrow.
individualisation, exclusion, time
24. Jerry says 'Miss, can you stop for a sec?' She says 'No'. He adds 'Helen wants you'. 25. Helen, who is sitting beside Jerry, says 'Oh, Jerry, you lying bugger!'
time, individualisation exclusion
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26. Zac continues the struggle over the quantity of notes the students have to copy: 'I can't see the blackboard' (but he makes a face suggesting that he is making this up).
space, individualisation
individualisation, time, 27. Tom asks 'When are you going to start getting us out of class, Jenny?' This was in reference to the totalisation, interviews I was planning with the students. I said space, self/r I wasn't sure yet and turned my attention to the teacher, trying to avoid being drawn into conversation. 28. A few minutes later, a girl says 'Miss, slow down, the bell's going to go soon'.
time, individualisation, normalisation, exclusion
29. She continues writing. 30. Then Jerry finds success: 'Miss, what's the third word in the fourth line?' 31. The teacher turns, steps back from the board and replies 'Gaseous'. 32. 'No', says Jerry, 'the one under'. 33. The teacher tries again 'Gases'. 34. Jerry says 'No', again. 35. The teacher reads the whole sentence: 'Gases diffuse along concentration gradients also called pressure gradients'. 36. Jerry is laughing. It appears he wasn't after word clarification at all, but trying to achieve the slowing of the teacher.
knowledge, individualisation
37. She returns to writing. 38. A student announces 'She's suffering from stress'.
classification, individualisation
39. A few moments later, Remus says 'The bell's going, Miss, so go easy, eh?'
time, normalisation, individualisation
40. She finishes the section. 41. When the bell goes a couple of minutes later, most students leave the room immediately, although a couple remain to finish the notes. 42. Tom, trying to finish, says in an exasperated tone to Nat, now standing at the front of the room, 'Can you move please!'
space, individualisation, exclusion, self/s
This extract, selected at random from the mass of data collected, employs most of the specific categories within the coding system at least once. In itself, the use of these codes in this brief example highlights the extent to which the categories have proven useful and relevant for analysing pedagogical data. The process of coding reproduced here also demonstrates the
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coincidence of various specific practices of power, and the rapidity with which 'exercises of power' occur, thus highlighting Foucault's view that power relations, actions upon other actions, are simultaneously local, unstable, and diffuse, not emanating from a central point but at each moment moving from one point to another in a field of forces (Deleuze 1988). More specifically, of the codes used, individualisation (14 times) occurred most often. In comparison to explicit regulation (1) we see that, in this episode, power relations were enacted through the more subtle techniques of exclusion (9) and normalisation (6). Time (9) and space (6) were more often the explicit focus of the classroom action than was knowledge (3). These comparisons point to potentially interesting claims about schooling that will be verified by analysis of the entire data set for each site rather than specific episodes like this one. Hence, the coded data sets are undergoing analysis for the prevalence of particular practices of power (the proportion of surveillance, classification, etc. in each site), the direction of exercises of power (teacher to student, student to student, student to teacher), the substance of the exclusion, normalisation, and so on, (what was the object of the normalisation? how was it carried out? what reactions were discernible? etc.) and other patterns. Such patterns emerging from these analyses will be the focus of a later paper.
Evidence of disciplinary power With reference to the illustration above, and in relation to the particular dimensions of disciplinary power outlined at the beginning of this paper, there is certainly evidence of power relations functioning in the ways Foucault suggests. Lesson events show evidence of the circulation of power relations among the students (24, 25, 42), between the teacher and students (1-3, 5-9, 14-18,22-24,26, 28-29, 30-36, 39-40), and between teachers (4-6). Power relations, in this account, are both productive and repressive. For example, they produce laughter (15, 21, 36). With Jerry's reference to fast twitch muscle fibres (20), there is also (even!) evidence of knowledge produced in earlier lessons. In a sense, he uses against the teacher, the very knowledge she has 'given' him. Furthermore, the informality and familiarity evident in this passage show the classroom to be other than a repressive 'prison-like' institution- eg. in the suggestions that the teacher 'mellow out' and deal with her stress (7-9, 22-23, 38) and in the tangential discussions (1113). Power relations, in this example, clearly operate upon the bodies of teachers and students- eg. the position of the teacher (17-18, 19), and later Natalie (42), attempting to stop or slow the teacher's writing on the board (15, 17, 24, 26, 28, 30-36, 39), Madeleine's putting down of her pen with her decision to stop copying the notes from the board (19). Some of these practices of power can be seen as technologies of self- eg. the teacher's concern not to upset another teacher by erasing his work (4-6), the teacher standing to the side to maximise student visibility of her notes (18),Madeleine'sannounceddecisiontoceasewriting(19),Jerry'scleveruse of student norms to engage the teacher (30-36), the teacher interrupting her writing to address Jerry's question (31-35), Tom's decision to remain after the bell to complete his notes (42), my own avoidance of contributing to
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teacher was incited to shift her own focus. The other fairly obvious ploys to get out of work did not have the same 'power' as did an apparent attempt to do the work. From this example, it seems that perceptions of what teachers and students do, or are supposed to do, influence power relations in the classroom. Put another way, it will be interesting to analyse the data for ways in which discourses on schooling and on teachers and students support power relations.
Patterns in the circulation of power Power circulates in this classroom but the exercise of power is certainly not equal for all participants. The main action arises from the teacher's attempts to have the students complete a task she has set. The exercises of power by students are primarily reactive to this task. According to Deleuze (1988:71) To incite, provoke and produce (or any term drawn from analogous lists) constitute active affects, while to be incited or provoked, to be induced to produce, to have a 'useful' effect, constitute reactive affects. The latter are not simply the 'repercussion' or 'passive side' of the former but are rather 'the irreducible encounter' between the two, especially if we believe that the force affected has a certain capacity for resistance. At the same time, each force has the power to affect (others) and to be affected (by others again), such that each force implies power relations: and every field of forces distributes forces according to these relations and their variations.
Most exercises of power in the illustration occur between teacher and students, rather than, for instance, between particular students, although there are instances of such power relations. These patterns in the data (of teacher as more active and students more reactive, and of most exercises of power being between teachers and students) are suggestive of the structured circulation of power relations and point to more political analyses than some scholars have thought possible with a Foucauldian approach. That is, as these data illustrate, Foucault's notions of power as circulating, existing in action, and not necessarily repressive, do not violate traditional understandings of power vested in the position of the teacher. As illustrated, exercises of power by the teacher in this example were of a different order than exercises of power by the students. What this Foucauldian approach adds to current dominant understandings of power in pedagogy is the micro-level detail of how power is exercised and of specific ways in which the power relations of classrooms are not all embracing but, at least at specific moments, are escapable. By extension, this analysis should be able to pinpoint practices in the power relations of pedagogy that need not be as they are. Such patterns in the data will be explored at length in the ongoing analysis.
Other dimensions of the study In order to produce more finely textured and contextualised accounts of
power relations than are possible with the reduction that occurs in categorisation, the data are also being examined for themes and patterns in more grounded ways, typical of qualitative studies. Categories which have emerged from this analysis are displayed in Figure 3.
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Explicit power
Explicit discussions of, or references to, power/power relations and authorities (textual, institutional, embodied)
Explicit bodies
Explicit discussions of or references to bodies (including eg. bodily functions, body types, bodily control)
Specific regimes
The invocation of a specific power-knowledge nexus or discourse (eg. professionalism, fairness, separatism vs femocrat, denouncing the abuse of alcohol)
Specific rituals
The enacting of a specific ritual (pertaining to group or social norms) (including eg. pouring tea/ champagne, designating responsibilities, handing out tests, using journals)
Power techniques
Powerful/ engaging/ interesting stories I descriptions of power relations exercised in the various sites (accepting that so much of the data is about power, this code is used simply to highlight mechanisms/ devices I practices of power - eg. the look, silence- and their consequences)
Bodies disciplined
Powerful/ engaging/interesting accounts that involve bodies
Transgressions
Disruptions, transgressions (including inversions), pleasures, (eg. jokes)
Identity /positioning/being
Self or other references to particular subjectivities and ways of being (eg. experience,epistemicprivilege,credentials,self deprecation, social group identity)
Teacher-student differentiation
Specific events I accounts I practices which differentiate teachers and students from each other
Teacher-student integration
Specific events I accounts I practices which integrate teachers and students with each other
Researcher
Any interaction between researcher and teacher Is or student Is
Power dynamics
Invoked or enacted (eg. if reference is made to masculinity or sexism, or if behaviour might be interpreted as enacting masculinity or sexism). Specific dynamics coded are: gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, religion, language, disability, age
Figure 3: Secondary coding categories
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With all of these treatments of the data, the scope of this project is clearly much larger than this paper can convey. Some aspects of the study which I am, or will be, pursuing include (1) continuities across sites and time; (2) dominant discourses of schooling; (3) the disciplining of student and teacher bodies, (4) the disciplining of male and female bodies, (and others by social group); (5) the specific nature of bodily disciplining; (6) points of possible intervention in pedagogy; (7) a theory of pedagogy (through the examination of practices which may be constitutive of pedagogy); (8) a critique of Foucault's analysis of power.
Conclusion In this paper, I have provided an overview of my study on power relations
in pedagogy, outlining key theoretical and methodological considerations and providing one small example of methodological technique. Focussing on that aspect of the methodology involving the first coding system, I have demonstrated one way in which Foucault's analysis of power relations can be used to examine and support so-called empirical research in education. To the extent that the coding system adds to the methodological tools available to researchers using poststructural theories to investigate power relations, I trust the paper makes a contribution. Should others find the ideas and techniques reported here to be useful or even stimulating, I shall be pleased. Certainly, I offer this paper, at this embryonic stage of the overall research endeavour, in the hope of stimulating dialogue with others who share related theoretical or methodological interests. As I have argued about pedagogical practices (Gore 1993), I would also argue that specific research techniques are in themselves neither liberatory nor oppressive, structural nor poststructural, modern nor postmodem. While I am employing conventional techniques in this study, the poststructuralism of the methodology should be judged by the theoretical questions posed, the analyses conducted, and the reports written. What may look here like a possible 'taming' of Foucault, is only a temporary moment in what I hope will be a creative and exciting application of his work to the context of schooling. For many scholars, Foucault's work has enabled or prompted a great deal of theorising in making sense of his often fragmented, sometimes inconsistent work and in relating his work to other major theoretical and political positions. The vast intellectual labour which has gone into such processes is indicative, I argue, of the fact that Foucault's work is in need of some taming if it is to be applied to contemporary social and institutional practice. Thus, my own approach, signalled in the part of the research agenda outlined here, is to begin my own theorising, in the specific context in which I work, by employing Foucauldian theory in a reconsideration or 're-assembling' of what we are today (in our institutionally located work) in education.
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1
Reid, J. et al. are working on a project on the construction of the schoolgirl but, to my knowledge, their work is yet to be published.
2
Each small episode is numbered to facilitate reference to particular incidents in the ensuing discussion. Pseudonyms, selected by the students, are used throughout.
References Bourdieu, P., Chamboredon, J.C. and Passeron, J.C. (1991). The Craft of Sociology: Epistemological Preliminaries. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter. Cocks, J. (1989). The Oppositional Imagination: Feminism, Critique and Political Theory. London and New York: Routledge. Deleuze, G. (1988). Foucault. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Donnelly, M. (1992). 'On Foucault's Uses of the Notion of 'Biopower', in T.J. Armstrong, trans. Michel Foucault Philosopher, pp.199-203, New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Firestone, WA (1993). 'Alternative Arguments for Generalizing From Data as Applied to Qualitative Research'. Educational Researcher, 22(4):16-23. Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish: The Birth ofthe Prison. New York: Pantheon Books. __ _, (1980). 'Prison Talk', in C. Gordon, (ed.) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, pp.37-54, New York: Pantheon Books. __ _, (1983). 'The Subject and Power', in H.L. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow, (eds)Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd edn, pp. 208-26, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. __ _, (1984). 'What is Enlightenment?', in P. Rabinow, (ed.) The Foucault Reader, pp.32-50, New York: Pantheon Books. Gore, J.M. (1993). The Struggle for Pedagogics: Critical and Feminist Discourses as Regimes of Truth. New York and London: Routledge. Jones, K. and Williamson, K. (1979). 'The Birth of the Schoolroom: A Study of the Transformation in the Discursive Conditions of English Popular Education in the First-Half of the Nineteenth Century'. Ideology and Consciousness, 5(19):59110. King, M.B. (1990). 'Disciplining Teachers'. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Boston, Massachusetts. Lawrence, D.H. (1915). The Rainbow. London: Heinemann. Maxwell, J.A. (1993). 'Understanding and Validity in Qualitative Research'. Harvard Educational Review, 62(3):279-300. Meredyth, D. and Tyler, D. (eds) (1993). Child and Citizen: Genealogies of Schooling and Subjectivity. Griffith University: Institute of Cultural and Policy Studies. Walkerdine, V. (1986). 'Progressive Pedagogy and Political Struggle', Screen,27(5):5460.
Beyond The Panopticon: Accounting For Behaviour In Parent-Teacher Communications1
According to Miller (1987:12), Foucault's works comprise the most outstanding contribution to our understanding of how the government of individuals in Western societies operates through a variety of discourses and practices which seek to constitute human individuals as subjects, and to do so through notions of truth. While Foucault examined the discursive formations of prisons and medical institutions, he did not specifically deal with the institutions of education and the home. In this paper, I intend to use Foucault's theory of power /knowledge relations to examine the construction of subject positions and regulatory practices as evidenced in examples of both talk and printed texts wherein home-school (that is, parent-teacher) relationships are constituted. Using Foucault's concepts of normalisation, individualisation and the Panopticon, I will show how individual parents, teachers and students come to regulate each other and themselves through the analysis of discourses used in a number of different educational sites where parents and teachers meet, using language (both talk and print) as the mode of communication. During Foucault's early period of work, prior to the publication of Discipline and Punish, he was concerned particularly with the conception of discourses. For Foucault 'discourses are knowledges; [and] knowledges are collected into disciplines' (McHoul and Grace 1993:42). Foucault saw discourse as not just a form of representation but as 'a material condition (or set of conditions) which [both] enables and constrains the socially constructive 'imagination' (McHoul and Grace 1993:93). In The Order ofThings (1970:xiv), Foucault deals with rules of the formation of knowledges, arguing that 'the historical analysis of... discourse should be ... subject, not to a theory of the knowing subject, but rather to a theory of discursive practice'. In his later work he became interested in 'the construction of both a micropolitics of regulation of the body and a macropolitics of the body' (Turner 1991:22-3). He was particularly preoccupied with the body and population as 'the two places around which the organisation of power over life was deployed' (Foucault 1880:139). Fundamental to his view of discursive practices is that of power. For Foucault (1979a:93) 'power is everywhere'. Using a Foucauldian perspective of power, Lukes (1986:229) suggests that in a society such as ours there are manifold relations of power which permeate, characterise and constitute the social body, and these relations of power cannot themselves be established, consolidated, nor implemented without the production, accumulation, circulation and functioning of a discourse. There can be no exercise of
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power without a certain economy of discourses of truth. It is on the basis of this accumulation that Foucault links power to knowledge by his use of the term discipline. It is in his second phase of works, published in English from 1977 to 1980, that Foucault deals particularly with the relations of power and the control of the social populace. Foucault's view is that power is both constraining and enabling, which is quite unlike, for example, the view of Marxists who see power as being oppressive. As Rose (1990:4) states: 'the relations between power and subjectivity are ... not confined to those of the constraint or repression of the freedom of the individual ... [but rather] modern knowledge and expertise ... have ... their role in the stimulation of subjectivity'. According to Foucault (1977:25-6), the body is directly involved in a political field; power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, and to emit signs. Indeed, as he had previously stated in The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972:131) 'human subjects and historical events are not firm and distant entities but are fragmented and changing sites across which the flows of power move'. Foucault envisages three main ways in which power regulates the populace. Firstly, he speaks of 'governmentality' which is the ensemble of procedures, analyses and reflections, the calculations and tactics, formed by institutions, that allow the exercise of this very special albeit complex form of power, which has as its target the general population (Foucault 1979b). Secondly, Foucault does not view power as being an object, but rather sees individuals as being caught up and actively engaged in constituting their relative positions of power in networks or grids of 'disciplinary power'. Individuals' subjectivities are constituted through a myriad of discursive practices of disciplinary power, which target particular individuals or collections of individuals; what Foucault describes as a capillary form of power which 'reaches into the very grain of individuals' synaptic regime of power, a regime of its exercise within the social body, rather than from above it' (Foucault 1980:39). Finally, Foucault raises the possibility of 'bio-power' as that which is 'oriented to the subjugation of bodies and control of population in general' (Clegg 1989:155). Central to Foucault's conceptions of power is 'its shifting, inherently unstable expression in networks and alliances' (Clegg 1989:154). Within parent-teacher communications, the positionings and repositionings of the participants within talk, and readers and writers of written texts demonstrate the shifting nature of discursive practices within the language used, thereby evidencing the relative and changing versions of power as envisaged by Foucault. Certain formalised types of knowledge may reside within experts (such as teachers or doctors), but as such they acquire or transfer their knowledge through discourses. There is 'no univocal or unchallengeable measure of occupational status; there are only competing versions, each of which is incomplete becauseitengages in certain exclusions' (Agger 1991:28). Foucault also emphasises the processes of normalisation and individualisation, for example by the use of examinations, which combine 'the exercise of surveillance, the application of normalising judgement and the technique of material inscription to produce calculable traces of individuality' (Rose
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1990:7). In a previous paper (Baker and Keogh 1994), we showed how the achievement level of students was made the topic of talk in a number of parent-teacher interviews. In all the interview data analysed, student achievement levels, as evidenced from their school work grade levels or marks, were central to the talk. These grades were provided by the teachers on the basis of pieces of work which students produced for assessment (ie. for examination) purposes. Rose (1990:7) states that 'the examination not only makes human individuality visible, it locates it in a web of writing, transcribing attributes and their variations into codified forms, enabling them to be accumulated, summated, averaged and normalised- in short, documented'. In rendering individual subjectivity calculable, and in being able to calculate 'norms' (that is, in normalising student achievement and behaviour), the populace is more easily regulated for the purposes of disciplinary power. Indeed, teachers are positioned as institutional agents of regulatory power. A key concept underlying Foucauldian theory of regulatory control is that of surveillance embodied in a building designed by Jeremy Bentham called the Panopticon. This building rendered all the inhabitants of a particular institution visible, in that all could be observed from a central tower. Although Bentham designed this structure specifically as a prison, Foucault suggests that this architectural technology of control was adopted in other state institutions, such as hospitals and schools. Although the observer could gaze on the entire population of a social institution, the design did not enable the inhabitants to observe the observer, or to know when the observer might be watching them. Because of this, individuals tended to regulate themselves and their own bodies. According to Foucault, therefore 'surveillance comes from the inside as well as the outside' (Agger 1991:36). That is, individuals become agents of their own subjugation, or, stated in a different way, individual subjectivities are adopted through social practices of self regulation of the body according to particular institutional discourses of knowledge and regimes of truth. Although Foucault views governmentality as being all pervasive, he allows for the possibility of resistance. He emphasises the existence of micro practices of power as evidenced in various institutional sites demonstrating such situations as being sites of struggle and negotiation. Foucault believes that it was only through the analysis of various micro-sites that practices of power or governmentality might be identified. Indeed, Agger (1991:11) states specifically, when talking of school based relationships, that: it is not enough to analyse power relationships between teachers and students, mediated by the state apparatus. In addition, textuality itself must be interrogated for the ways in which texts become potent language games of their own in which power is encoded and through which it is transacted
It is partially in response to this suggestion that I shall now analyse examples of school based texts in order to examine the relationships not just between teachers and students, but also between teachers, students, and the students' parents. The appearance and positioning of individual student bodies in space and time are evidence of practices of social regulation and control. In a number of school based talk and texts where parents and teachers meet, the topic of their children's I students' appearance and their
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positionings within space and time are raised. The adult authors of these spoken and written texts are positioned as institutional agents of regulation and control. That is, such texts can be seen to actively mediate social organisation (Smith 1990).
Analysis of Parent-Teacher Talk The following extract is taken from a parent-teacher interview that took place at a state secondary school in Brisbane. The student, here named 'Donna', as well as her parents and teacher, were all present. The analysis of such talk is of interest in that parent-teacher interviews are one of the educational sites in which the institutional identities of parents, teachers and students are assembled and talked into being. In effect, parent-teacher contact language becomes the means by which the public or official faces of home and school are presented to each other. These constructions of realities are not neutral, but reflect regimes of truth within official, public institutional discourses. The following extract has been selected because it raises the topic of the student's position within space and time is raised in relation to her individualisation through academic achievement.
Interview Segment 1 Participants present: The student ('Donna'), her parents and her English teacher. 1
T
2
F M F
3
4
5 6
7
T F T
Okay, all right, we'll just forget it I should cover it up or something, I hate tape recorders! Right, Donna, I just took over Mister Jay's class four weeks ago so, I don't really know a lot about Donna's work. I've had a quick look ather work in her folder, and from her marks she, you seem to have, passed in the first part of the year and then really gone downinlasttwo, piecesofworkwhich was a poetry oral? A novel (2.0) a novel in another form that was putting part of the novel into another style of writing. Now (2.0) in class (1.0) Donna's a little bit distracted? often? down the back there, with the girls that she sits with, though she does give in class when she's asked to, she does all her work, I'm (1.0) would you like to, do you work with Donna at home with her school work at all? Do you see it at all or? Not really no ... We very rarely see her homework They generally disappear off to their bedrooms with their homework and ... Yes (2.0) well ... We don't see much of it. Let me see, yes I didn't mark this. This was all Mr Jay's ...
Similarly, in each of the eleven parent-teacher interviews that I have transcribed to date, the academic achievement of the student is initially designated as the opening topic by the teacher. Already, the inscription of calculable individualisation of the student as an object of control is demonstrated within this particular parent-teacher talk with the teacher's presentation of the student's marks for assessment items undertaken ('from her marks she, you seem to have passed in the first part of the year and then really gone down in the last two, pieces of work which was a poetry oral? a
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novel'). Advice is given by the teacher on how to improve the student's achievement. In the above extract the intended audience of the teacher's talk seems to continually be changing - the teacher begins by speaking to the student herself directly, addressing her by name, and then changes from using the proper noun (Donna) to that of the third person singular pronoun, denoting that she is now talking about the student rather talking directly to her. The student is, within the first utterance by the teacher, textually positioned as an overhearing audience (cf. Heritage 1985), and is, in the main, silenced for the remainder of this interview. Both the classroom and the home are definite geographical spaces with definite boundaries. Talk concerning school and home space becomes topicalised early in this interview. The boundaries of the spaces shift, and at times the teacher colonises home space as an extension of school space by her talk. The positioning of the student within social and moral space becomes topicalised as a problem. Where, and with whom the student is sitting becomes the issue in this interview. The teacher provides advice regarding Donna's achievement, linking her recent disappointing academic results to her location within classroom space. Within this talk, geographical classroom space becomes moral and social space. It appears from this teacher's initial utterance that the student, Donna, positions herself' down at the back there' and that she is often 'a little bit distracted' with 'the girls that she sits with'. The teacher constructs classroom space as moral space, and the students who sit in such the unacceptable space in the back of the room as being morally improper. The back of the classroom might be viewed as space beyond the gaze of the teacher; that is, the student has positioned herself 'beyond the Panopticon'. In this talk, the teacher positions herself as not being fully accountable for this student's behaviour in the classroom space at the back of the room which is beyond her direct gaze. Donna is here made responsible for positioning herself in space which is beyond this teacher's powers of surveillance and control. In this way the teacher retains her moral version of herself as a suitably diligent regulatory agent, thus, the student is held responsible for the problem of her achievement. School work and achievement is then immediately linked to' other' space beyond the geographical boundaries of the classroom walls by the teacher within her first utterance. Having positioned herself as not being fully accountable for the student's poor level of achievement in the space of the classroom the teacher now the raises the issue of surveillance by the parents when she talks of school work that she implies should be supervised by the student's parents in their home space. The teacher questions the use of home space when she asks the student's parents whether they 'work with Donna athomewithherschoolworkatall'.Hereitseemsthattheteacherisholding the parents as being accountable for surveillance of Donna's behaviour at home. Although Donna's parents implicate themselves as possibly not being'good' parents when they say they very rarely see her homework, their possible lack of diligence is deflected by their implication that their responsibility does not include Donna's private bedroom space. According to Dorothy Smith (1987), schools position mothers of primary school children as being adjunct teachers. It seems from the above extract of parent-teacher talk which took place in a secondary school that this stu-
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dent's home is also constructed almost as a school annexe, and the parents are positioned as being auxiliary teachers in this space beyond the school walls. School discourse dominates the talk in this educational site, actively colonising the home space and family time. Subtle tensions and competitions are herein evidenced between the teacher and the parents, demonstrating this site as being one of inter-institutional struggle between home and school. Analysis of a number of other parent-teacher interviews which took place both in other state and private secondary schools has demonstrated that finding the 'right' moral space and the 'right' group of students with whom to sit is a topic of general concern. Such recurring features in talk are evidence of Foucault's notion of the normalising and regulatory power of institutional discourse in relation to the positioning of docile bodies within geographical spaces. These are constituted as being moral spaces within such talk. The adults account for their behaviour in terms of surveillance of their children/ students within these spaces. Any implications by other adults that their powers of regulation have perhaps been somewhat remiss are deflected by the adults in the way they position the children/ students as being held responsible for their own behaviour in spaces beyond the adults' gaze. It seems that the children in secondary school who are both spoken to and talked about in these positions are recurringly held as being responsible for making their own decisions regarding the suitable placement and positioning of their own bodies within institutional spaces of home and school. This is similar to Silverman's (1987) findings regarding medical consultations in a cleft palate clinic, where the adolescent children were present. Analysis of this talk, as within parent-teacher interviews, revealed a delicate management of the balance between adult responsibility and student autonomy.
Analysis of School Printed Texts Addressed to Parents In a previous paper (Keogh 1992), I analysed in depth a letter sent to the
parents of students attending a private secondary school by describing the 'order of events' as evidenced in the sequence of topics dealt with in the letter, and by discussing the major moral categorisations which were assembled by this text. Similarly to the parent-teacher interviews earlier discussed, the positioning in space of student bodies and surveillance by the adult gaze was also obvious in this letter. The author of this letter constructs a 'Curriculum for Homes' suggesting how parents might maintain the moral order of the school by maintaining vigilance of their children during the vacation. Paragraph 1: Dear Parents Thank you for supporting your son or daughter through a very challenging and rewarding term. It is most pleasing to note the special efforts of those parents who have taken the time to attend the many sporting and cultural events of the term, and who have, at the same time, remained steadfast in the commitment to the standards and expectations we have at [school name]
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In this letter, the author-as-school agent provides directions for 'good'
parenting by positioning parents as ancillary teachers for the period of the vacation- in loco pedagogis in effect. Within the first paragraph the parents are thanked for 'supporting your son or daughter through a very challenging and rewarding term', and for 'the special efforts of those parents who have taken the time to attend the many sporting and cultural events of the term, and who have, at the same time, remained steadfast in their commitment to the standards and expectations we have at [the name of the school]'. The constructive use of time is, here immediately raised in relation to good parenting practices. The topic of students' physical appearance and dress is also raised in this letter in paragraph six, and is linked to parental surveillance: Paragraph 6: You should also be aware that there is another style of Clarks shoes in the boys shoes (sic) called 'Docs' which are available, but which we do not support as a regulation shoe. This shoe is a trend at the moment and is a reflection of the mediocre standards accepted by some but certainly not accepted by [name of school]
Thus it is that dress is constituted as indicative of standards of behaviour which needs to be rigorously regulated. The topic of space beyond the classroom and home is also raised in this same paragraph, and is linked directly to the adult gaze: 'it is disappointing to be told by the shop assistants at Mathers that some parents are allowing their son or daughter to purchase the incorrect shoe'. It seems that adult surveillance is maintained beyond the institutional spaces of home and school for the purposes of regulation of the entire community populace. The panoptic gaze is constituted as extending beyond home and school space and out into the space of the larger community. Both parents and their student children are here reminded of the all seeing but unseen observation from the Panopticon. Parents are here also explicitly directed to comply with the regulation of school discipline beyond the school walls, or to become subjects of this disciplinary power themselves (the sub text might perhaps be 'we have ways of making you conform')! Neither is this letter an isolated example of the stress laid upon student physical appearances, and use of time and moral space. For example, in all the secondary school prospectuses I have collected as components of my research data, the importance of physical appearance is explicitly emphasised with directions regarding the importance of students wearing the correct uniform. For example, the prospectus of one state secondary school located in a less than prosperous geographical location in the outer suburbs of Brisbane specifically states under the heading 'Dress' that 'students are expected to be neatly dressed in school uniform at all times. Hair must be kept neatly groomed. On no account may thongs, jeans or ordinary sandshoes be worn'. The reason provided for the necessity of not wearing such 'ordinary sandshoes' is given as a Department of Education Directive 'that all students who are likely to enter a laboratory, kitchen, Manual Arts Workshop or an Art Department workshop must wear adequate footwear
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[because] on rare occasion (sic) students with poorly protected feet have been injured by sharp objects, dangerous substances or hot liquids?" The penalties for not conforming to dress regulations can be drastic physical injury! In this same prospectus, immediately above the section titled 'Dress' is a section headed 'Travelling To And From School'. Here it is specified that: Students should be aware that while travelling to and from school they are under the joint control of parents and the school. It is expected that behaviour during these times will reflect favourably on the school. Students must line up and wait in an orderly fashion in the designated areas to catch the bus or meet parents
The regulation of the student populace of this school is, once again, subject to the panoptic gaze. Behaviour is regulated by specific instructions regarding the comportment and movement of student bodies in space. In addition to the preceding example of the textual regulation of bodily appearances, evidence in my research data suggests that many secondary schools, in addition to textual directives regarding appearance and movement, also relay directions to parents about the surveillance and regulation of student behaviour. Another independent school, for example, sent the following directive contained in the first newsletter sent to its parents at the beginning of a new school year: Please ensure that students are aware of the code of conduct and of the regulations regarding the wearing of correct school uniform. It is the parents' responsibility to see that students are properly outfitted and well groomed at all times. Cleanliness and tidiness are essential factors in a student's appearance and an outward sign of respect for themselves and others. All items of the uniform must be clean and kept in good repair. The school will endeavour to co-operate with parents on matters of behaviour and dress and likewise we expect that parents will support the school policies
A Code of Conduct frequently features in printed materials sent home to parents of secondary school students, and these too are designed as technologies of social regulation and control. I found, with interest, that two of my researched schools actually specified the same key terms in their codes of behaviour, although sequenced in a different order of precedence. They were 'Courtesy, consideration, co-operation and common sense'. Another school detailed its code of behaviour under the headings 'courtesy, standards and respect'. And one private school's 'Parents' Information Handbook' stated that: The Code of Behaviour was adopted by the ... school after a great deal of thought and discussion. It sets out the requirements of the school and it is important that students understand their responsibilities in regard to the Code of behaviour. Parents are asked to read through the Code with their child and to ensure its contents are fully understood.
Fully understood bywhomis left ambiguous- does theauthorimplythatthe parents or students should fully understand the contents of this school's Code of Behaviour?
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Parents are repeatedly addressed in printed texts directed to them as being agents of social regulation and control in an adjunct position to that of the teachers, in a similar way to techniques evidenced in my parent-teacher talk data. Parents are expected to maintain the moral order of the school in geographical spatial areas beyond the school boundaries. Unlike talk data, however, it is not possible to know how such directives are received or read by their recipients. AB Foucauldian theory suggests, there are multiple realities and multiple readings of texts which create multiple subjectivities. Some parents might receive such textual directives in a manner that might suggest that they take the role as regulator of their children's behaviour, movement and appearance seriously. Others might view such directives as being, to them, trivial. Some might hear themselves as being addressed as 'good' parents, who conform to school regulatory practices. Others might, equally, hear themselves as being remiss. Evidence of such differences of parental responses were verbally recounted to me by two different mothers who had children attending the same private secondary school. Both of them commented upon a letter which they had received earlier that week which dealt with the situation of senior students having part time paid work, written by the Principal of the school and addressed as 'Dear Parents'. The third paragraph commenced thus: It is of great concern that over and above this [earlier specified] amalgam of study and relaxation, many of our [students] in Years 11 and 12 are trying to
balance an outside job as well. No one disagrees that part-time employment provides a valuable experience of being in the workforce and that for some it is an economic necessity. However, there are some [students], especially those working in the fast food chains who are spending extraordinarily long and late hours in their jobs. This makes it virtually impossible for them to give their best to their studies and to be alert and awake during lessons. I would ask you to discuss this matter seriously with your [child] if it is applicable ... It is imperative in Years 11 and 12 that together you and your ... [child] try to rationalise and prioritise activities so that [your child] is able to devote productive and constructive time to ... studies. One mother told me that she read this letter as a reasonable warning regarding the dangers of conflicting loyalties regarding school work and paid part time work, recounting that she received the letter as a rational explanation for not recommending outside work if students' achievement levels were to remain high. The other mother recounted, quite angrily, that she felt the Principal was overstepping her mark as far as regulation of her child's behaviour outside school time was concerned, and rejected the Principal's advice which she received as a prohibition of the possibility of senior school students attending that school having part time paid employment. From my research so far, it seems reasonable to view schools as institutions of regulation and control. Disciplinary power tactics are evident in parent-teacher communications in both print and talk. Adults are positioned as agents of student surveillance and regulation, and as being responsible for encouraging their secondary school students/ children to conform to practices of governmentality. Teachers constitute themselves as
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the 'unseen but all-seeing observers' of the behaviours of the inmates of the schools (that is, the students). Parents are positioned as adjunct agents of regulation, and are directed to maintain the moral order of the schools within time and space beyond the geographical boundaries of the schools. Thus it is that parent-teacher communications, both as printed text and talk, demonstrate strategies of disciplinary power as it functions pervasively, across the entire population, in a capillary way. 1
A different version of this paper has been published under the title 'Governmentality in Parent-Teacher Communications', Language and Education, 10(2&3), 1995.
References: Agger, B. (1991). A Critical Theory of Public Life: Knowledge, Discourse and Politics in an Age of Decline. London: The Palmer Press. Baker, C. and Keogh, J. (1993). 'Accounting for Achievement in Parent-Teacher Interviews', Human Studies, 18l2-3):1-38. Clegg, S.R. (1989), Frameworks of Power. London: Sage Publications. Foucault, M. (1970). The Order of Things. London: Tavistock. __ __, (1972), The Archaeology of Knowledge. London: Tavistock. __ __, (1977). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. London: Allan Lane. __ __, (1979a). The History or Sexuality: Vol.1: An Introduction. London: Allan Lane. __ __, (1979b ). 'On Governmentality', Ideology and Consciousness, 6, pp.5-22. __ __, (1980), Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings: 1972-77. London: Harvester Press. Heritage, J. (1985). 'Analysing News Interviews-: Aspects of the Production of Talk for an Overhearing Audience'. Handbook of Discourse Analysis, Vol.3: Discourse and Dialogue. pp.95-117. Keogh, J. (1992). 'Curriculum For Homes: A Study of a School Letter', Language and Education, 9(1):31-44. Kirk, D. and Spiller, B. (1994). 'Schooling the Docile Body: Physical Education, Schooling and the Myth ofOppression',Australian Journal ofEducation, 38(1 ):7895. McHoul, A. and Grace, W. (1993). A Foucault Primer: Discourse, Power and the Subject. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Miller, P. (1987). Domination and Power. London: Routledge. Rose, N. (1990). Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self London and New York: Routledge. Silverman, D. (1987). Communication and Medical Practice: Social Relations in the Clinic. London: Sage Publications. Smith, D.E. (1987). The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology. Boston: Northeastern Press. __ __, (1990), Texts, Facts and Femininity: Exploring the Relations of Ruling. London: Routledge. Tumer,B.S.(1991),'RecentDevelopmentsintheTheoryoftheBody',inFeatherstone, M., Hepworth, M. and Turner, B.S. (eds) The Body: Social Process and Cultural Theory. London: Sage Publications.
Disciplining Students: The Construction of Student Subjectivities tJJar6ara (jrant Introduction: Reframing commonsense All my analyses are against the idea of universal necessities in human existence. They show the arbitrariness of institutions and show which space of freedom we can still enjoy and how many changes can still be made (Foucault, in Martinet al. 1988:11).
It is interesting to relate Foucault's challenge to the 'universal necessities of
human existence' to the experience of students at university and so reframe the received ways in which we think of students and the institution. Within the liberal discursive construction of education we usually think of higher education as a process through which every 'able' individual's potential may be realised more fully. Yet a critical analysis of the lived experience of students suggests instead a process through which they are, as subjects, arbitrarily disciplined. However, this disciplining is not found to be a monolithic top-down process but one in which, at times, students willingly co-operate, disciplining themselves. But as well, in this experience, we find instances of struggle and resistance, of ways in which the student-subject evades the full weight of the normalising discipline of the university. Such instances sometimes provide useful opportunities for critical educationists to work for changes in the institution: working within the site of student learning assistance, I position myself as such an educator.
The university as a disciplinary block In contrast to the liberal vision of a university education, a Foucauldian
perspective of the university as a disciplinary block is much more consistent with my analysis of the lived experience of students (Grant 1993). For Foucault (1986), a disciplinary block is formed when three types of relations -relations of power, of communication, and of objective capacities- establish themselves in a regulated and concerted system, and educational institutions are offered as a case in point: Take, for example, an educational institution: the disposal of its space, the meticulous regulations which govern its internal life, the different activities which are organised there, the diverse persons who live and meet one another, each with his own function, his well-defined character- all these things constitute a block of capacity-communication-power. The activity which ensures apprenticeship and the acquisition of aptitudes or types of behaviour is developed there by means of a whole ensemble of regulated communications (lessons, questions and answers, orders, exhortations, coded signs of obedience, differentiation marks of the 'value' of each person and of the levels of knowledge) and by the means of a whole series of power processes (enclosure, surveillance, reward and punishment, the pyramidal hierarchy) (Foucault 1986:427-6).
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From this perspective the university looks very different from the picture painted by the liberal education discourse: in the practices of lecturing, writing essays, and filling out multi-choice tests, for instance, we find examples of regulated communications. In the skills which students must acquire to write 'good' academic essays, we find an example of the acquisition of aptitudes. In the awarding of scholarships and degrees and in the public display of academic grades, reward and punishment rituals are exemplified. In the filling out of detailed enrolment forms and the allocation of an identification number we find examples of surveillance, a surveillance which is made more potent by its anonymity and unclear limits. In the physical arrangement of lecture theatres we find the 'disposal of space', while the timetable (that 'good' students plan) regulates her or his life as a student. These structures and practices can all be seen as disciplinary technologies which work at every level in the university to discipline students, to make them obedient, to make them students, especially 'good' students.
The 'good' student So, who is the 'good' student? InJohnHenryNewman'snineteenthcentury vision of the liberal university, the good student was the raw material for the 'educated man' who, with proper guidance, is brought to apprehend: the great outlines of knowledge, the principles on which it rests, the scale of its parts,itslights and shades ... hence it is that his education is called 'Liberal'. A habit of mind is formed which lasts through life, of which the attributes are freedom, equitableness, calmness, moderation and wisdom ... (Newman cited in Tristram 1952:30).
The notion of the unique but universal individual- sometimes called the liberal humanist individual - is an enduring legacy of Enlightenment thought. This individual is a rational, authentic, unified being with an essential identity. 'He' (and I would argue that, because of the historical context out of which he emerged, this individual is indubitably a 'he') extracted from any structural position he might occupy - is hailed as the basic social unit in which freedom and rationality are located, and his nature is seen to be inherently good or, at least, malleable. AB the 'sole author of his own beliefs and customs' (Cocks 1989:128), his rationality is privileged as 'the real basis of authority for regulating the affairs of daily life' (Bowers 1987:2) and his increasing knowledge about the world is assumed to be the crux of change which is ineluctably progressive. From this commonsense perspective, students are in their very nature rational, thinking individuals and the function of a university education is, as Newman contended, to improve on their nature. Because we understand the student in this way there are certain implications for our teaching practices: one is that in the classroom we only have to attend to the minds of our student which can be separated from their bodies and emotions. Thus in our practices we need not take these other (lesser) dimensions into account. Second, because the student is fundamentally a rational autonomous individual he can take care of himself; thus if he does not understand something he will ask. If he needs help he will freely seek it.
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Yet this is not what I hear in the stories of students. Rather I hear how they are often too afraid or too shy to approach lecturers who, in the current context of hugely increasing numbers of undergraduate students, are becoming increasingly distant- partly for their own self-protection perhaps. When students interact with lecturers mostly they do not do so as 'equal' adults-astheliberalhumanistdiscoursesuggests-butoccupyamultiplicity of positions, as child, as subordinate, as supplicant, as initiate, a rebel, as devotee, in fact as anything but an equal. Indeed those students who do front up to lecturers as 'equals' (adults) with a strong sense of their own rights to be heard, for instance, or to ask questions, or to disagree, are likely to be (mis?)read by lecturers as unduly stroppy or even harassing. Set against the universalism of the liberal humanist individual is the Foucauldian concept of the constructed and contested subject, who is multiple, in process, and culturally inscribed by the social. This subject is located always I already within many discourses, each of which produce a range of subject positions. Foucault is particularly interested in the ambiguous meaning of'subject', pointing out that we are both subject to and subject of, and suggesting that in this doubled sense of being subject we find a pervasive form of power which: applies itself to immediate everyday life which categorises the individual, marks him by his own individuality, attaches him to his own identity, imposesalawoftruthonhimwhichhemustrecogniseandwhichothershave to recognise in him. It is a form of power which makes individuals subjects. There are two meanings of the word 'subject': subject to someone else by control and dependence; and tied to his own identity by a conscience or self knowledge. Both meanings suggest a form of power which subjugates or makes subject to (Foucault 1986:420).
By focussing on this double sense of subject, and thus acknowledging the experience of both subjectedness and agency- although, and crucially for his theory, at the same time suggesting that agencyitselfis a form of subjectedness -Foucault's account of the subject makes a break from the autonomous Enlightenment individual. The Cartesian mind/body dualism that characterised this individual is replaced by the notion of the body I subject, that is the 'terrain of flesh in which meaning is inscribed, constructed, and reconstituted' (McLaren 1988:57-8). The meanings we make of ourselves and the world are embedded in our bodies which are gendered, ethnic, sexual, aged and so on. Thus for the Foucauldian subject, the body is central. From this perspective the student is subject not only to the controls (regulations) of the institution but also to her or his own 'conscience' which 'knows' what it means to be a 'good' student. This conscience or selfknowledge is formed in the dominant liberal discourse of studenthood which is dynamically produced by the relations between the institution (in its beliefs and practices, in its rhetoric and its physical arrangements, its representatives' on earth'- the lecturers) and its student-subjects. Because of this self-understanding the student-subjects work to produce themselves as good students- and theinstitutionrewards their efforts: after the long travail (the disciplining of themselves to be acceptable through the practices of planning minutely detailed timetables, attending lectures and tutorials,
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writing essays and lab reports, sitting exams), there is the reward- the ultimate, triumphal display of the capping parade, the rite of passage, in which the successful subjects are publicly shown with pink silk for this and blue for that and red for the other and so on. (Even at the moment of triumph, however, the choice of colour is regulated so that the 'truth' of the subject's status is known, and the hierarchy which exists even within the 'good' is visible for all to see.) Yet the liberal humanist discourse of studenthood is not simply monolithic because it intersects with other discourses to produce a variety of student subject positions. For example, where it intersects with New Right economic discourse, it produces what I have called an instrumental student subject position such as the student who 'plays the game' for her or his own ends such as getting a professional qualification.
Student-subjects in relations of power Within the university, students are subject to- in the sense of being ruled by, or of having a lack of freedom of action with respect to- the institution and thus their 'choices' of student-subject positions are constrained by the dictates of the institution and by the relations of power which exist between them and the lecturers and administrators (as representatives and also subjects of the institution). By using the term 'relations of power', Foucault is breaking with the usual ways in which we talk about power as repressive, negative and owned. Rather he talks about power as something which is everywhere, inherently neither good nor bad, therefore not something we need to bring into play or work to destroy. In his view, the human subject is placed in power relations along with relations of production and signification which are 'established, consolidated [and] implemented' (Foucault cited in Giroux 1990:84) in the functioning of a discourse. This brings into play complex relations of a specific nature between individuals (such as lecturer and student) or groups (such as between lecturer and students in a lecture theatre). In these complex and specific relations, the mode of action is the power to act on the actions of others, to modify them. Thus the exercise of power is seen to be: a total structure of actions brought to bear upon possible actions: it incites, it induces, it seduces, it makes easier or more difficult; in the extreme it constrains or forbids absolutely; it is nevertheless always a way of acting upon an acting subject or acting subjects by virtue of their acting or being capable of action (Foucault 1986:427). In this view, it is essential that for a relation of power to exist the target of power is one who acts (thus Foucault sidesteps consideration of those scenarios of domination which he has no interest in), and so there are, in principle, many possible responses/positions within a relation of power. However, given the discursive context, which both enables and constrains ways of thinking, speaking and acting in systematic ways, some responses I positions are made more likely and more privileged than others and some people take up those positions more easily. Thus, for student-subjects, for a myriad of reasons experienced in their daily lives, while one student position is made more likely, other student positions are marginalised or, in
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Foucault's words, made 'more difficult'. Thus it is easiest for the young (male), middle-class, pakeha student to take up the position of the 'good' student because the characteristics of this position sit most snugly with his other subject positions and interests.
Disciplining the student-subject The practices which make a particular way of being a student more likely are the disciplinary technologies which permeate the university. In the concept 'discipline', Foucault finds an interesting ambiguity (which parallels that which he talks about in the notion of 'subject'): it both refers to the distinct forms of knowledge as we conceive them and to the action of bringing about obedience. From its Latin origins, the word has signified this dual process: 'the discipline that is presenting a certain knowledge to the learner, and the discipline of keeping the learner present before the knowledge' (Hoskin 1990:30). This process lies at the heart of educational practice and although in the university, as a post-compulsory form of public education, the second sense of the word may be thought to be irrelevant, it is not so. (An example of this may be found in the experience of students who, responding to the code that students cannot judge what knowledge they do or do not need, are 'held' in the lecture theatres because they are afraid that if they leave they will 'miss something crucial'.) In the double meaning of discipline, Foucault finds the power/knowledge clinch: particular knowledge claims, in being permitted and legitimated as truth, are thus always underpinned and guaranteed by power relations. Power/knowledge- which we call the disciplines - is 'developed by the exercise of power and used in turn to legitimate further exercises of power' (Marshall 1990:15). It is exercised through disciplinary institutions like the university, coming together around the objectification of the body which it seeks to normalise, rendering it obedient, teachable, governable without recourse to outright coercion- thus the disciplines, through the workings of the twin technologies of domination and of the self (Marshall1989), produce'subjected and practised bodies, 'docile' bodies' (Foucault 1991:138). These technologies work by structuring the possible field of actions, with the goal of winning the student-subjects' consenting obedience. Further, their effects can be charted on the studentsubjects' bodies.
Technologies of domination The technologies of domination are exercised over the body and its powers and capacities, and 'are concerned with defining and controlling the conduct of individuals, submitting them through the exercise of power to certain ends so as to lead useful, docile and practical lives' (Marshal11989: 1). By virtue of becoming a student (enrolling at the university and agreeing to abide by its regulations), the individual is placed in the relations of power inherent in the technologies of domination, which operate through the processes of classification and objectification of the subject via regulation of space, time, and capacities. For instance, consider the dominant teaching process used at the university- the lecture, wherein the tight control exerted over spatial arrangements and time frame entails regulation and surveillance of the student-subjects. Yet another group of dominative technologies
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is the classification practices which control students by assigning them to particular cohorts (first year, second year, etc.) depending on prior achievement, and by relegating them to fixed tutorial groups which, combined with regular assessment of coursework, makes a degree of surveillance possible (which is usually justified as being in the best interests of the student). In examinations, power and knowledge come together in a particularly potent and visible way. Of this procedure, Foucault says: 'it is a normalising gaze, a surveillance that makes it possible to qualify, to classify and to punish. It establishes over individuals a visibility through which one differentiates themandjudgesthem' (1991:184). Theresultsoftheexaminations-although only permitting inferences about students' performances, as Howley and Hartnett (1992) point out- allow students to be classified, thus distinguishing among individual students. Further control and classification is established by regulating access to particular spaces on campus, by marking off staff-only spaces, by not allowing some staff to attend staff meetings. Then there are the complex, bureaucratic procedures which regulate many other aspects of the daily business of being a student - the payment of fees, permissions to hand in late work, to sit examinations at irregular times, to withdraw from papers, to receive recognition for disability. Such practices of domination are usually justified as being for the student's good, or in the interests of fairness or efficiency, or for the good of the university as a whole, and, at the same time, are established as 'normal' and thus guaranteed by commonsense. They produce calculable effects, that is, their purpose is to limit the field of possible action and thus control the behaviour of their subjects. In these ways the structure of the university induces similar effects to the Panopticon, the effects of constant and unverifiable surveillance. Students know they are subject to surveillance through regular assessment, the filling out of institutional and departmental enrolment forms etc. but they are never quite sure how much is known about them, nor why they have to provide particular information (such as ethnicity, age, nationality, gender, dependents, income). Neither do they know whether they have access to that information, nor who else has access to it, nor how to go about getting it, nor how it flows between departments and individuals in the university and so on. It is partly this sense of the continuous surveillance of the ubiquitous unseen watcher that brings students to normalise themselves through self-discipline and the technologies of the self.
Technologies of the self As well as producing institutional practices, discourses construct the subjective needs and desires of the body so the individual will act on themselves in ways which are instrumental to the ends of the state (Marshall1989) - or any other institution such as the university. By instilling in the individual the virtue of taking care of their own health and education, the state is taking care of itself. In the university, the student is governed by these technologies of the self, that is by the more covert constructive effects of the university's practices which work to create a certain kind of identity- that of the student -with a' conscience' which is informed/ formed in particular ways, resulting
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in the shaping of'appropriate' needs and desires. The culture of autonomy and individualism at the university constructs students who believe that success or failure lies with them; thus, solely responsible for their academic success, they seek to take care of themselves, and in this way the institution takes care of itself. For Foucault, who rejects the Cartesian dualism of the Enlightenment individuat desire is rooted in the body- in sexuality, pleasure and feeling -but desires are also shaped through the social processes of discourse and are thus linked to 'truth'. While in Western culture desires have been seen as subversive of both reason and the social order and the university appears concerned with rationality alone, many of its discursive practices impact productively on the desires of students: the desire to know, to be wise, the desire to please, the desire to be successful. How often have I observed on others- inscribed on their bodies, their faces- and felt in myself, the pleasure of a good grade. This desire has been formed long before in the discursive practices of schooling (and the family) where, through the grade, the student's 'true' self was known as 'good' or 'bad' or 'improving'. Marshall writes that, for Foucault, 'the key to the technology of the self is the belief, now common in Western culture, that it is possible to know the truth about one's self' (Marshall1989:17). The most influential discourse which informs and constructs (tells) this truth of the student is educational psychology: through its investigations of human learning, this discipline has constructed an object, the learner, and informed our beliefs about how 'normal' students learn, how they are motivated, the predictive significance (or otherwise) of IQ scores, the reliability of various forms of testing and so on. Learning practices themselves are shaped within the discourse of educational psychology which produces research findings about what students do when they learn and what factors enhance successful learning. These findings in turn construct teaching practices (although in the university, it has been suggested, they are largely ignored)! While it purports to represent objective truth educational psychology, as Foucault shows, makes 'truth' and generates discursive practices- ways of teaching and learning, ways of speaking about students, standards and values by which 'good' students are recognised -thatputthis truthintoplacein the world (Walkerdine 1984). But are student-subjects so easily dominated or harnessed into their own disciplining? It is time to turn to the notions of struggle and resistance.
Struggle and resistance: Refusals to become Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are, but to refuse what we are ... to liberate us both from the state and from the type of individualisation which is linked to the state (Foucault cited in Rabinow 1984:22).
Because the process of constituting subjects is riddled with conflicts and contradictions, we also find spaces for resistance. Further, there is, in Foucault's view, always the possibility that the acting subject, who is both the target and source of power relations, may contest the dominant meanings and oppressive positions constructed by the discursive field in which she or he is located, because, for Foucault, there is 'freedom, construed as the potential for autonomous recalcitrance' (Howley and Hartnett 1992:272).
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Thus, because power relations occur between and among acting subjects, we find an unpredictability in the effects of discursive practices and the potential for acting other than in a domesticated way: 'People know what they do; they frequently know why they do what they do; but what they don't know is what they do does' (Foucault cited in Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982:187). Crucially, then, the effects of power escape the actors' intentions. Foucault is most interested in the struggle against 'the submission of subjectivity', arguing that this struggle is becoming increasingly important in the present time. While it is not exactly for or against the idea of the individual, this struggle is against the restrictive 'government by individualisation' which works by making us into certain kinds of individuals who ought somehow to be all the same, i.e. normal. The fear of not being normal works to divide us off from the rest of the community (and thus those who are not normal) and so we define ourselves first as individuals, as 'self-inrelation-to-itself'. This struggle against the submission of subjectivity, Foucault argues, is also against the privileges of knowledge, and against secrecy and mystification, and the effects of power which are linked to them. It turns on the central question of 'Who are we?' and actively resists those abstractions (economic, ideological, administrative, scientific) which simultaneously determine and ignore who we are as individuals. Foucault suggests: the political, ethical, social, philosophical problem of our days is not to try to liberate the individual from the state and from the state's institutions but to liberate us both from the state and from the type of individualisation which is linked to the state. We have to promote new forms of subjectivity through the refusal of this kind of individuality which has been imposed on us for several centuries (Foucault 1986:424).
In the experience of an individual, struggle and resistance are possible because the positions constructed by overlapping discourses are frequently contradictory and herein lie possibilities for new positions. For instance, a mature woman student may be articulated both to the positions of 'good' student- of whom almost exclusive allegiance to study is demanded by the institution- and mother- of whom society demands a similar allegiance to her children. Living as a student and mother, she will almost certainly experience tensions that may lead her first to identify contradictions between these positions, and then to redefine her position as either student or mother or both. In so doing, she redefines her field of possible actions.
Conclusion: Working for change with a Foucauldian sensibility The hegemonic liberal discourse of university education allows us to understand the experience of students, especially their stories of success and failure, in certain sorts of ways which predominantly serve the institution's claims to be progressively developing the inherent potential of its students. On the other hand, a Foucauldian critique of this discourse and its practices opens new ways of understanding the relationship between the university and its student-subjects. In these other ways of understanding we see the student-subjects as normalised and disciplined both by the dominative tendencies of the institution and the ways in which the institution persuades
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them to work on themselves, apparently for their own good. The university can only do this because of its implication in other aspects of our culturenamelythroughitsrolein theallocationofmeritwithitsattendantpleasures and material rewards. From a Foucauldian perspective, student learning assistance work is found to be a site of struggle over'assigned meanings or subjectivities based in the experience of the reality of lived difference' (Lewis and Simon 1986:469): students are not free (as we have seen in the discussion of the technologies of domination) but neither are they simply determined (as shown in the technologies of the self). With this understanding, student learning assistance tutors can work in new ways with students, particularly those who are marginalised by the dominant discourse of studenthood. One way is to help students operate more strategically in their position of 'not unfree' within the particular context of the university by being explicit about the rules of the game in which students need to be both/ and - for instance, to be independent and subordinate. Another is to support resistant ('unmotivated') students by exploring with them some different possibilities for being students. Thus, through language, the notion of 'student' itself can come to be a different category (or series of categories) which is (are) more liberating, more flexible, more powerful, more inclusive. By supporting students who want to challenge the practices and forms of subjectivities required by the institution, student learning assistance may be subversive of the existing order, an order in which power is immanent- in the practices and structures, traditions, relations, and struggles that make university life. Because, in the Foucauldian view, there is no power-free zone to live in, those of us who are concerned about the effects of power as we currently find them must work to expose the play of power, thus attempting to keep power relations fluid and changing. Foucault (1976) suggests that in revealing relations of power between subjects, we can try to hand back those relations to those who are involved in them so they can act differently within them for instance, the power relations that exist between lecturer and student subjects can be re-examined critically and reconstructed. This is not to overlook, however, that teachers (lecturers and tutors) within the university are also subjects of and to disciplinary processes, subjects who occupy different positions within the discursive field of the university and thus who have different views of that field. In learning assistance, which is on the margins of academic life, we are more overtly normalising students; on the other hand, lecturers, as centred subjects, may have some difficulty seeing the processes of normalisation in action but, given their position of relatively more power (than to either learning assistance tutors orstudents),itis also crucial that they do. Like students and tutors, lecturers have the power to act and, as teachers, they are responsible for reflecting on the normative conception of the 'good' student, for questioning their own practices in relation to it, as well as their practices towards particular concrete students- especially those who are not 'good' in some sense. Even if discourses, as Foucault explains them, have no authors, it is vital that we understand that they constitute acting subjects who are not entirely determined by any one discourse and who are implicated in the
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production of those discourses. At the level of practice, these subjects make many deliberate ('authored') decisions with the intent of achieving certain goals yet often refuse to scrutinise the unexpected effects of their decisions and practices. Those of us who do wish to confrontthe microphysics of power within our institutions, and to develop concrete forms of practice that interrupt the effects of power relations where they work against the interests of particular groups of students, must remain situated within a Foucauldian cautiousness about the likelihood of achieving our desired ends. We too are subject to uncertainty: the effects of our interruptions, while attempting to be oppositional, may be to perpetuate unjust practices and structures and so we must necessarily make limited claims for the likely impact or worth of our work. The bottom line, however, is that this work - of marking out and interrupting discrimination and injustice in educational institutions- must go on being done.
References Bowers, C.A. (1987). Elements of a post-liberal theory ofeducation. New York: Teachers College Press. Cocks, J. (1989). The oppositional imagination: Feminism, critique and political theory. London: Routledge. Dreyfus, H. and Rabinow, P. (1982). Michel Foucault: Beyond structuralism and hermeneutics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Foucault, M. (1976). Interviewed on national French radio and reported in Impulse magazine. __ _, (1986). 'The subject and power', in Wallis, B. (ed.) Art after modernism: Rethinking representation. New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art. __ _, (1991). Discipline and punish. London: Penguin. Giroux, H. (1990). 'Reading texts, literacy and textual authority'. Journal of Education, 172(1 ):84-103. Grant, B. (1993). Making university students: The construction of student subjectivities. The University of Auckland: Unpublished Masters Thesis. Hoskin, K. (1990). 'Foucault under examination: The crypto-educationalist unmasked', in Ball, S.J. (ed.). Foucault and education: Disciplines and knowledge. London: Routledge. Howley, A. and Hartnett, R. (1992). 'Pastoral power and the contemporary university: A Foucauldian analysis'. Educational Theory, Summer, 42(3):271-83. Lewis, M. and Simon, R. (1986). 'A discourse not intended for her: Learning and teaching in patriarchy'. Harvard Educational Review, 56(4):457-72. Martin, L., Gutman, H. and Hutton, P. (eds). (1988). Technologies of the self A seminar with Michel Foucault. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press. Marshall, J.D. (1989). 'Foucault's technologies of power: Implications for education'. The University of Auckland: Unpublished paper. __ _, (1990). 'Foucault and educational research', in Ball, S.J. (ed.) Foucault and education: Disciplines and knowledge. London: Routledge.
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McLaren, P. (1988). 'Schooling the postmodem body: Critical pedagogy and the politics of enfleshment'. Journal of Education, 170(3):53-83. Rabinow, P. (ed.) (1984). The Foucault reader. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Tristram, H. (ed.) (1952). The idea of a liberal education: A selection from the works of Newman. London: George G. Harrap and Co Ltd. Walkerdine, V. (1984). 'Developmental psychology and the child-centred pedagogy: The insertion of Piaget into early education', in Henriques et al. Changing the subject: Psychology, social regulation and subjectivity. New York: Methuen.
Part Fourteen Health and Nursing
Foucault Had to Die Shamefully1
This paper is dedicated to Dave Sargent 1952-1985 and Robert Ariss 1962-1994. In its extensive coverage of the death of Michel Foucault in June 1984, the
French newspaper Liberation denied the rumours that he had died of AIDS: As soon as he died, rumours began to circulate.lt is being said that Foucault died of AIDS. As though an exceptional intellectual seemed, because he was also homosexual - a very discreet one it is true - an ideal target for the fashionable disease. Quite apart from the fact that neither the medical files nor the transfer to the neurological ward of professors Castaigne and Sauron provides grounds for saying that Michel Foucault was suffering from a type of cancer which represents scarcely two per cent of patients suffering from this 'modern' illness, one is amazed at the virulence ofthe rumour. As though Foucault had to die shamefully. 2 In retrospect, the proposition that to die from AIDS is shameful seems
remarkably shocking, especially from a progressive newspaper such as Liberation. But even at the time, when AIDS discourse was violent and raw without today's more refined AIDS sensibilities, there was an immediate negative reaction to the obituary. Eribonnotes ofits unidentified author that 'every day of his life he regrets the blunder'. 3 But perhaps being retrospectively smug that we would not commit such a blunder is a little too easy. Liberation's assertion of the fashionability of AIDS retains currency. In Australia, dedicated funding for the National AIDS Strategy has been attacked, and invidious comparisons drawn with breast cancer, on the grounds that AIDS has been over-funded because it is fashionable. As well, Liberation's reference to AIDS as modern pre-figures the substantial literature on both the modernity and the post-modernity of AIDS. There is a great readiness to make AIDS the weightiest signifier of contemporary reality, and together with this temptation, to assign 'Foucault's AIDS' its own deep significance. Eribon himself develops a little idyll of Foucault dreaming of 'living in the Californian paradise. Sunny, magnificent ... But that was precisely where the new plague began to spread its agonising devastation'.4 The theme of the necessary connection between the life work of Foucault and his AIDS death seems irresistible. AIDS has been the most discursively dense of modern diseases. It has provoked a reordering of the relationship between sex and death. It has seen an intensification of the surveillance and government of sexual behaviour. The relationship between doctor, patient and health bureaucrat have been reorganised by the impact of AIDS. What could be a more apposite subject for the historian of sexuality and the archaeologist of the clinic? At issue, is how meaningful is Foucault's AIDS death, and what is its meaning? The temptation is to write the author's life teleologically: the life of the author is understood in 'the death of the author'. James Miller has
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succumbed to precisely this temptation in his biography The Passion of Michel Foucault. The essential argument of that biography is that Foucault's life and work can be understood as the pursuit of a limit experience. Much is made of Foucault's liking of sadomasochistic sex, particularly in his later years. References to de Sade, suicide and facing death are thematised into a continuous and abiding intellectual concern, tied to Foucault's personal concerns and implicitly linked to his death. Miller puts a liberal gloss on his investigations: ... AIDS entered into the story, casting a pall over every page I wrote, giving this life a twist that was not at all the twist that I would have hoped for. The fact that my book was written, and will at first be read, in the shadow of a plague, makes it all too easy to discount the possibility that Foucault, in his radical approach to the body and its pleasures, was in fact a kind of visionary; and that in the future, once the threat of AIDS has receded, men and women, both straight and gay, will renew, without shame or fear, the kind of corporeal experimentation that formed an integral part of his own philosophical quest.s
Miller here echoes Liberation's blunder: only after AIDS will corporeal experimentation be without shame. But I have more fundamental doubts about the politics of the work, which are best illustrated by Miller's originary impulse. The moment the biography began, Miller tells us, was' one evening in the spring of 1987' when a'shocking piece of gossip' was relayed to Miller: 'knowing that he was dying of AIDS, Michel Foucault in 1983 had gone to gay bathhouses in America, and deliberately tried to infect other people with the disease'.6 The biography then becomes an extended investigation of the rumour, discounting it in an immediate and literal sense, but arguing that it might reflect a deeper truth in Foucault's pursuit of the limit experience. I want to put aside the truth or falsity of the rumour, and instead ask about the discursive universe it occupies. What Miller does not seem to realise is that the accusation that an HIV infected person deliberately sought to infect others through anonymous sex is one of the most common tropes of the epidemic. These accusations serve to situate public hyper-anxieties focussed on AIDS, unleashing spectacles of panic. A north Queensland seaside resort, Cardwell, was visited by an HIV positive man whose status became known to police. This visit became a national news story that most of the town's population feared they were infected with HIV following wild orgies of deliberate, vengeful infection. In a small Victorian town early in 1994local police launched an investigation into a man's alleged 'reckless' behaviour with accusations he had unprotected sex while knowing he was HIV positive. The regional newspaper made it a front page story - 'HIV scare: police probe town'. It made the television news for a week, and the sexual prowess of the alleged perpetrator escalated: newspaper reports said he may have infected 400 women. The man was charged by police with reckless conduct endangering life, and the case is still before the courts. The Victorian State government in 1993 passed an amendment to the Crimes Act to create a new 'Crimes HIV' offence of threatening to deliber-
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ately infect someone with HIV. And, to take a US example, Randy Shilts' narrative of the first seven years of the epidemic is threaded through with the story of 'Patient Zero' the airline steward who in Shilts' dramatisation of epidemiology originates AIDS in America. Central to the narrative is Patient Zero's continued sexual activity, even after his AIDS diagnosis, and the linkage Shilts makes in supporting the closure ofbathhouses. 7 The rumour that Foucault had gone to American bathhouses to deliberately spread HIV should be seen for what it is: a commonplace of the demonisation of people with HIV, and an iteration of the standard myths of the malevolent importation of HIV I AIDS. The completely unexceptional natureofthisrumouraboutFoucaulttendstocutthegroundoutfromunder the argument that his contracting AIDS has meaning in relation to his life work. So I want to proceed, ascribing neither meaning nor teleology to Foucault's gay life and AIDS death, to discuss the nature of the AIDS epidemicanditsimpactongaymenandgaymaleidentity.Indoingso,Iwill address both issues of governmentality and of subjectivity. In Australia, the overwhelming impact of HIV I AIDS has been, and continues to be, among gay and other homosexually active men. Some 90% of people with AIDS in Australia have become infected with HIV through sex between men. At least 80% of new HIV infections are still through this route. The impact of death from AIDS has thus been overwhelmingly among gay men. To take one illustration of this impact, looked through the 1981 edition of the Australian journal Gay Information, where the Foucault interview 'Friendship as a lifestyle' received its first English translation I noted that of the six gay men with articles in that issue two are alive and well, one I do not know, and three have died from AIDS. Talking about the real experience of gay men and AIDS I am not seeking access to an authentic or liberated mode of being, somehow outside power relations. I do want to discuss new forms of life, new ways in which subjectivities and relationships are created: 'the productions of subjectivity escapes from the powers and the forms of knowledge (savoirs) of one social apparatus (dispositif) in order to be inserted into another, in forms which are yet to come into being'.s Foucault's discussions of being gay and his interactions with gay liberation placed emphasis on the productive but nonprogrammatic processes of 'becoming gay'. 9 Gay men, and the creation of an identifiable gay community, created the conditions of possibility for the emergence of AIDS. It required an identifiable gay population for the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report of the US Centre for Disease Control to identify the unusual occurrence in 1981 of pneumocystis pneumonia and Kaposi's Sarcoma in gay men. In the early years of the epidemic, from 1981 through to around 1987, the engagement between gay men and the public health apparatus was organised in terms of the confrontation between an oppositional social movement and the state. Gay community responses to AIDS emerged soon after the epidemiological evidence became credible. Initial disbelief that a disease could selectively attack gay men was replaced by the assumption (in advance of supporting scientific evidence) that a sexually transmissible viral agent was the likely cause of AIDS. 'Safe sex rules' to reduce the risk of exposure were formulated and distributed.
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The key issue at this time was whether HIV I AIDS would be treated as a public health issue commensurate with the severity of its impact on the gay community. The gay press and gay community organisations were suspicious of governments and the public health apparatus. After all, gay identity had only recently emerged out of a medicalised discourse. A tension existed within gay responses to AIDS. On the one hand governments and public health authorities seemed willing to ignore AIDS because the gay community did not 'count'. On the other hand, there was an unwillingness to surrender to medical authority, having so recently emerged from its clutches. (This latter perspective was reflected by Foucault in conversation with Berkeley student Philip Horvitz in 1983. He was reportedly 'incensed that a group (gays) who had risked so much are looking to standard authorities in a time of crisis'.)lO There were two, related, tactical manoeuvres out of this dilemma. One was the invention of safe sex, as a'sex positive', gay affirming, set ofHIV risk reduction practices. The invention of safe sex required a self consciousness about gay sex which could only come from within a gay milieu. It also required an understanding of sexual practices as plastic: new practices could be conceived and promoted, and new practices could create new forms of gay subjectivity. To quote from a 1988 leaflet from the Victorian AIDS Council/Gay Men's Health Centre: No matter what sort of person you want to be, there's a safe sex activity for you. Kissing, cuddling, licking, stroking, wanking, fucking with condoms, sex toys, leather are all safe. Fucking without condoms is unsafe. Safe sex is an example of how creative and clever gay men can be,ll
An echo: in a 1982 interview for the gay magazines Body Politic and The Advocate, Foucault talked about gay sexuality, and in particular SIM, in these terms: I think it's a kind of creation, a creative enterprise, which has as one ofits main features what I call the desexualisation of pleasure. The idea that bodily pleasure should always come from sexual pleasure, and the idea that sexual pleasure is the root of all our possible pleasure- I think that's something quite wrong.1 2
Given that sexe in French refers to both sex and the sex organs we can read this as a call for a 'degenitalisation' of pleasure. The second tactic to avoid the remedicalisation of gay identity was to insist on a distinction between risk groups and risk practices in relation to HIV infection. In other words, gay identity was to remain the preserve of gay men acting as a group, resisting their definition by public health authorities as a 'group at risk of HIV infection'. Specific practices, principally unprotected intercourse, were legitimately the preserve of health interventions. Let us recuperate that resistance: by the early 1990s, the tactic outlived its usefulness. In the face of increasing evidence that HIV I AIDS funding was following the imaginary epidemic rather than the real epidemic, and thus that funding directed towards gay men was disproportionately small, gay activists in Britain and Australia began to revive the call for the gay community, as a group at risk of AIDS and as a group with the highest prevalence of HIV, to receive greater attention. And after all, gay men had
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secured their place as one of the standard populations which are the target of public health, along with other 'at risk' populations, such as women, people of non-English speaking backgrounds, youth, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders. Despite the mutual suspicions of gay activists and public health authorities, and after considerable political struggle, by the late 1980s HIV I AIDS had been placed squarely as a public health issue whose good government would require the co-operation of the most affected communities. In Europe13, North America and Australia this meant working with and through gay communities. The social apparatus within which the encounter between gay men and public health was inscribed had changed. There was an alignment of the concerns of gay men and the public health in relation to the governmental objective of reducing the risk of HIV infection. This has entailed a great expansion of the forms of sexual behaviour which have become the targets of administration, and changes the forms of administration of others. So for example, sex between men in beats (known as tearooms in the US and cottages in Britain) has become the subject of educative and therapeutic interventions. In Australia, beat outreach officers, in some cases employed by local health authorities, make arrangements with local police so that their education efforts will not be interfered with by law enforcement. Local councils, whose administrative concern with beats in the past probably mainly involved issues in the design of public toilets to reduce the likelihood of 'unsuitable activities', are instead lobbied to allow toilet walls to be used for safe sex education, and for syringe disposal units to be installed. Similarly, sadomasochistic sex, far from remaining a transgressive form of sexual expression, is made the target of government funded education. In language designed to be as emotionally neutral as possible, safe SM leaflets are produced: 'branding', we are told 'is safe because high temperatures kill HIV'.14 At the outset of the HIV epidemic the boundary between the normal and the pathological was drawn between gay and straight. On occasions it remains so when the cordon sanitaire is again invoked as the appropriate public health strategy for dealing with HIV I AIDS. But in the main, the situation has shifted, with 'good' gay men now on the side of 'the community' in responding to AIDS by making a commitment to safe sex. Taking the place of the old boundary is a new one: This assimilation of all behaviours that might increase risk and their opposition to risk avoiding behaviours changes the dividing line between the normal and the abnormal. The opposition is no longer the 'normal' majority heterosexual behaviour as opposed to perversity. The new dividing line separates the 'reasonable' (highly valued) from the 'irrational' (to be combated) in terms of the criterion of fatal risk. This is the basis for a redefinition of a hygienic approach to sexuality centred around conceptions of selfcontrol and risk management. IS
This new boundary is policed in terms of the search of the 'person who has unsafe sex'. Countless psychological and psycho-social studies are conducted to discover the correlates of unsafe sex and establish a profile of the 'risk taker'. Self esteem is invoked as the underlying cause of unsafe
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behaviour, when all else fails. Negative self esteem, or in supposedly less normative terms, self efficacy, is a nicely circular predictor of unsafe behaviour. The boundary between safe sex practitioner and risk taker is policed both at the level of the creation and monitoring of new subjectivities and at the level of the creation of new populations. The creation of the population of menwhohavesexwithmenhasbeenparticularlyimportanthere. The safe/ unsafe boundary is threatened by unstable sexual identities. Good gay men, whose self esteem and attachment to the gay community has been systematically promoted, are comfortably positioned alongside women, children and the silent category of heterosexual men. Non gay identified men who have sex with men in contrast are deeply problematic. They are represented as pure vectors of transmission, where the boundary between gay and straight metonymically (and nostalgically) stands in for the boundary between safe and unsafe. In their refusal to adopt a sexual identity they threaten to destabilise the techniques through which the purchase of safe sex behaviour is secured. Training packages are developed to assist women to recognise the tell tale signs that their male partners may be 'bisexual'. Organisations are funded to assist these men to embrace their real gay identities. Similarly problematic is the sexual activity of those who are already HIV infected. The therapeutic bargain involved in securing the co-operation of the affected communities in the public health goals of controlling the spread of the epidemic entails that medical care and support will also be provided to those with the disease. But promotion of sexual activity on the part of thosewithHIVismoredifficult. Theprincipledargumentassertingtheright of all gay men, HIV infected or not, to sexual activity is hedged about with qualifications. In most jurisdictions in Australia an HIV infected person is required to declare their status to their sexual partner. (Admittedly, in Western Australia under infectious diseases legislation, people with HIV are also required to declare their status to the driver before boarding a public bus.) Outside this context, though, the assertion of sexuality on the part of HIV positive people quickly generates anxiety. So, for example, despite the much vaunted partnership between government and the community sector in Australia, the Federal Health Minister recently threatened the Australian Federation of AIDS Organisations with defunding when its National AIDS Bulletin featured on the cover an obviously ill and somewhat emaciated man in speedos, with a similarly clad partner with head poised at his crotch. The ostensible cause of Ministerial concern was the implied depiction of oral sex between men. However, given that the Bulletin had used implicitly and explicitly homoerotic material on its cover on previous occasions without attracting comment, it appears that the concern on this occasion was motivated more by the fact that the men depicted were implied to be HIV infected. So far, I have been talking about the forms of gay subjectivity which have emerged in the interaction between public health and AIDS. These are issues which fall within the axis of power in Foucault's tripartite division of 'the historical ontology of ourselves'. I want now to turn to some of the questions
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which belong more to the 'axis of ethics', those which are raised by the question: 'How are we constituted as moral subjects of our own actions?'. 16 Foucault's interviews with the gay press stressed the creative and emergent process of the formation of gay personhood. He was predictably sceptical about claims to liberation as such. He did see productive capacities in the new relationships of self to self being formed in the context of a burgeoning gay culture. Some of these possibilities included ways of performing sex outside the confining bounds of desire and the foregrounding of bodily pleasure. Underlying these concerns was an attempt to envisage a personal ethics based on something other than perversity. Given that our becoming other is not able to be treated historically in the way our present is, Foucault does not spell out a contemporary gay ethics. In a 1984 interview, Foucault was asked whether 'this problematic of the care of the self [could] become the centre of a new philosophical thought, of another kind of politics than the one we are seeing today?' His answer: 'I must admit that I have not gone very far in that direction... the question of an ethical subject does not have much of a place in contemporary political thought. 17 In the ten years since then, and in the twelve years of the AIDS epidemic, we have seen a new ethics of the care of the self develop among gay men. I want to end by reflecting on the significance of two aspects in particular: one is the role of friendship and caring, and the other is an emerging relation with death. For Foucault, the key issue for gay men was friendship. Rather than 'reduce being gay to the question... what is the secret of my desire' he sought to change the emphasis to achieving 'a variety of different types of relationship'.18 Standing in the way of a proliferation of relationships was the problem of friendship between men, something Foucault asserted disappeared around the eighteenth century, concomitant with sex between men becoming a problem. 19 In the latter part of the 1970s and into the 1980s, I think it is possible to identify a new mode of friendship emerging in gay male communities, where sexual relationships were seen clearly as only one mode of relating. If new relationships of friendship were emerging in gay communities in the 1970s, they have been intensified since HIV I AIDS. One of the key modes in which gay communities have responded to HIV I AIDS has been through the provision of care for people with AIDS. Some of the first HIV I AIDS organisations were dedicated to this purpose -like the Shanti program in San Francisco, the Ankali program in Sydney and the Support program of the AIDS Council in Victoria. The development of these programs did not represent a spectacularly new way in which home care is provided to the terminally ill. Its novelty was the extent to which it was self-consciously made a priority in the gay community, on the argument that gay men with AIDS may lack other family supports. As well as the formation of organisations through which care and support can be delivered, there is a growing tendency for personal relationships to be formed, based around caring for someone with HIV I AIDS. These relationships are only slowly coming into view, but they undoubtedly represent a new and significant form of friendship as a way of life. They bring to mind Foucault's remarks on the relationship between men in the First World War:
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We might well wonder what it was, during those absurd and grotesque wars, during that hellish slaughter, that allowed people to pull through in spite of everything. I don't mean that they continued to fight because they were in love with each other. But honour, courage, not losing face, sacrifice, coming out of the trenches at the same time as your mate or in front of him, all that implied a very intense emotional bond.2o
The impact of AIDS on the gay community is closely parallelled in the impact of the First World War on Australian communities where a whole generation of young men went to war. On the European battlefields, monuments to the fallen were erected whose key feature was their listing of all the names of those who had died. The establishment of a bureaucracy to record names and the development of new technologies to inscribe those names in stone began well before the end of the war. 21 In the case of AIDS, the most prominent memorial technology has been the AIDS quilt, known as The Names Project in the US. The inscription of names on quilt panels, and the intonement of the names of those who have died, remains the most emotionally charged of AIDS tributes. The Quilt is one aspect of the new relationship with death which is being forged by gay men, and others with AIDS. If modern medicine focussed its gaze on the corpse, and in doing so made death remote, for gay men, AIDS has reinserted death into life, in the everyday realities of existence from which it had been removed. This changing relationship with death did not begin nor is wholly described in relation to AIDS,22 but is given perhaps its clearest expression here. One aspect of the new relationship is the retrieval of a public and political space for death: The AIDS Quilt and candlelight memorials represent a fin-de-siecle shift, a move away from the interdiction of death characteristic of the twentieth century. They suggest a relocation of death, away from the secluded spaces of the medical centre and the crematorium, back into public spaces, rendering death visible and immediate, re-inserting death into public discourse.23
AIDS has not only relocated death into public spaces, it has also brought it back home. Phil Nott's recent 'Dying at home' manual, published by the Australian Department of Health, represents itself as a resource document designed to 'demystify the dying process'.24 Its central message is that 'Dying at home requires planning'.25 There are useful forms included in the manual to fill out well in advance of death. It even counsels 'The option of voluntary euthanasia or suicide requires careful thought and planning. It is not something to rush into'. 26 There are also sections of the manual about caring for someone dying at home, and its novelty is recognised: 'many carers had not previously assisted anyone dying at home, nor had they seen anyone dead. This did not matter. Most expressed satisfaction in performing what they considered a job well done'. 27 The manual also recognises that unexpected things can disrupt the home death: 'ultimately, all you can do is give it your best shot. If their death does not go as planned it does not constitute failure'.28 What strikes me most about this manual is its everydayness. Death is not romantically aestheticised. It is taken as an activity which needs all the standard attributes of contemporary, self reliant competence. This is not
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'death as limit experience'. There is nothing transgressive about organising the laundry service for soiled linen, or drawing up an enduring power of attorney. One of the modes of becoming gay which HIV I AIDS has imposed on gay men is the reinsertion of death into life. The form in which is has done so has been mundane, rather than a radical reworking of the practices of the self. So, where does this leave the death of Foucault? HIV I AIDS has been a matter of immense importance to gay men, and it has changed fundamentally the forms of life involved in the practices of becoming gay. HIV I AIDS is discursively dense, in the sense that it involves the complex refiguring of relationships, ways of becoming gay and new forms of dying. But precisely because it is discursively dense, we must caution against giving HIV I AIDS, as a thing in itself, the attributes of necessity and teleological pretensions. If we fail to heed this caution, we mistake the effects of HIV I AIDS in their contingency and singularity. In his introduction to the English edition of Canguilhem's The Normal and the Pathological Foucault writes: 'at life's most basic level, the play of code and decoding leaves room for chance, which, before being disease, deficit or monstrosity, is something like perturbation in the information system, something like a "mistake". In the extreme, life is what is capable of error'. 29 In zipping itself into DNA, HIV causes perturbation in the body. It is a 'mistake'. It is error. If we make HIV I AIDS into monstrosity, if we represent it as plague, and if we are fearful and ashamed of its effects, then we do this as part of life. These effects do not come from outside. Because life is what is capable of error, we can claim a will to correction. 1
Acknowledgment: My research is supported by a scholarship from the Australian Government's Commmonwealth AIDS Research Grants scheme.
2
Liberation, 26 June 1984, quoted in David Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault, Hutchinson, London, 1993, pp.474-5.
3
Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault, trans. Betsy Wing, Harvard University Press, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1991, p.327.
4
Ibid, p.316.
5
James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault, Harper Collins, London, 1993, p.8.
6
Ibid, p.375.
7
Randy Shilts, And the band played on, StMartin's Press, New York, 1987.
8
Gilles Deleuze, 'What is a dispositif?' in Michel Foucault Philosopher, trans. T.J. Armstrong, Harvester Wheatsheaf, Hemel Hempstead, 1992, p.162.
9
Michel Foucault (interview), 'Friendship as a Lifestyle', Gay Information No 7, Spring, 1981,p.6.
10 Philip Horvitz, 'Don't cry for me academia', quoted in Macey, 1993, p.463. 11 Victorian AIDS Council/Gay Men's Health Centre, 'Big picture, little stories', educational leaflet, 1988. 12 Michel Foucault, interview by Bob Gallagher and Alexander Wilson, 'Sex, power and the politics of identity', The Advocate 400, August 1984, quoted in Ed Cohen, 'Foucaldian necrologies', Textual Practice, 1988, 2(1), p.96.
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13 Other than Southern Europe, where the dominant mode of transmission has been through injecting drug use. 14 Victorian AIDS Council/Gay Men's Health Centre, 'Safe SM', educational leaflet, 1991. 15 Michal Pollak, 'AIDS: A Problem for Sociological Research', Current Sociology, 40(3) 1992, pp.88-9. 16 Michel Foucault, 'What is Enlightenment?' in P. Rabinow (ed.) The Foucault Reader, Penguin, London, 1991, p.49. 17 Michel Foucault (interview), 'The ethic of care for the self as a practice of freedom', inJ Bernauer and D Rasmussen (eds), The Final Foucault, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1988, pp.13-14. 18 Foucualt, 'Friendship as a lifestyle', 1981, p.4. 19 Michel Foucault, interview by Bob Gallagher and Alexander Wilson, 'Sex, power and thepoliticsofidentity', TheAdvocate400,August1984,quotedinEribon,1991 20 Foucault, 'Friendship as a lifestyle', 1981, p.6 21 Thomas Laquer's recent ananlysis of the technologies of naming the First World War dead, paper delivered at the University of Melbourne Department of History, 1993. 22 Robert Ariss, 'Reinventing death' in R. Aldrich (ed.) Gay Perspectives II, University of Sydney, 1994,p.276 23 Ibid, p.291. 24 Phil Nott, Dying at Home, Commonwealth Department of Human Services and Health, Canberra, 1994, p.10. 25 Ibid, p.ll. 26 Ibid, p.44. 27 Ibid, p.48. 28 Ibid, p.56. 29 Michel Foucault, 'Introduction' in G. Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological, Zone Books, New York, 1991, pp.21-2.
The New Morality: Public Health and Personal Conduct
J1llan Petersen Within the critical literature on public health, there is emerging a new form of critique, inspired particularly by the work of Michel Foucault, which challenges the progressive, rationalist assumptions underlying the socalled new public health and its related health promotion orthodoxy. As commentators have pointed out, the new public health is not what it seems. Notwithstanding the adoption of the vocabulary of the new social movements ('empowerment', 'equity', 'participation', 'self-help', 'sustainable development', and so on), this enterprise is in no way 'alternative' or democratic in its effects. In fact, it represents the extension of techniques of social regulation to an unprecedented extent. Under the banners of 'healthy living' and the need to 'make healthy choices the easy choices', professional health promoters, members of the medical establishment, and a myriad of state agencies have sought to forge new social arrangements and subjectivities in line with official goals. The attempt to widen the scope of interventions (eg. 'inter-sectoral collaboration', 'healthy public policy') and to increase the level of'community participation', rather than serving to democratise 'health and well-being' or at least to facilitate their achievement, has rather multiplied the possibilities for direction and control over private life by professional experts and agents of the state (eg. Bunton 1992; Baum 1993; Stevenson and Burke 1991). This form of critique, I would argue, draws attention to the more obviously repressive aspects of the new public health (the 'technologies of domination'). Although useful to this extent, it reflects a conception of power as negative and prohibitory rather than as positive and productive. It fails to acknowledge that new public health knowledges and practices have created new subject categories (eg. the 'at risk' individual) and assume and have helped shape the active agency of individual and collective subjects. Too little attention has been given to forms of resistance to which power gives rise, and to the potential for self-determination. For those who draw on Foucault's work, this emphasis is perhaps not surprising given the overall emphasis in Foucault's own writings; ie., his tendency to 'privilege discourse over institutions and practices' and 'domination over resistance and self-formation' (Best and Kellner 1991:69). The 'politics of health', for instance, is conceived by Foucault as part of a more general political process that made the 'well-being' of populations an objective of disciplinary power and the rationale for the development of normalising discourses centred on individual bodies and the social body as a whole (Foucault 1975; 1980a; 1980b:Section 5). Foucault never described resistance in the detail that he accorded his analysis of the technologies of domination, and a genealogy of resistance is yet to be written (Best and
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Kellner 1991:70). However, his later work on sexuality made him aware of the need to complement an analysis of the technologies of domination with an analysis of the technologies of the self (see Foucault 1988:19; Hutton 1988:132). The concept of 'technologies of the self' (or 'practices of the self') is adopted in volumes two and three of The History of Sexuality (The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self) and has been elaborated by Foucault in interviews (eg.1988; 1991), and since by others (eg. McNay 1992;Cook 1993). I believe that this concept is useful in directing attention to largely neglected questions pertaining to the power relations of the new public health; viz. the manner and extent to which individuals comply with, and are compelled to comply with, dominant values and prescriptions; forms of resistance to norms; and the implications of this compliance, resistance, etc. for an understanding of how individuals constitute themselves as ethical subjects. However, since Foucault did not fully elaborate his concept of technologies of the self (for instance, by showing how it relates to technologies of domination, or by theorising its implications for political resistance), his work provides a starting point rather than a comprehensive source of reference in addressing such questions.
The concept of technologies of the self How then did Foucault conceive technologies of the self? In interview, he proposed that technologies of the self are: technologies ... which permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality.
Moreover, Foucault distinguished these technologies of the self from three other types of 'technologies': (1) technologies of production, which permit us to produce, transform and manipulate things; (2) 'technologies of sign systems', which permit us to use signs, meanings, symbols, or signification; and (3) technologies of power, which determine the conduct of individuals and submit them to certain ends or domination, and objectivizing of the subject (1988:18).
According to Foucault, each type of technology is associated with different types of domination and each 'implies certain modes of training and modification of individuals, not only in the obvious sense of acquiring certain skills but also in the sense of acquiring certain attitudes'. These techniques, he says, 'hardly ever operate separately' and they interact in different ways in different contexts. He cites, as an example, the case of Karl Marx's Capital which illustrates the relationship between 'manipulating things and domination ... where every technique of production requires modification of individual conduct - not only skills but also attitudes' (1988: 18). As Foucault explains, most of his own efforts have been focussed on technologies of domination and the self, and that 'perhaps I've insisted too much on the technology of domination and power' (1988:19).
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The concept of technologies of the self should not be taken to imply the existence of a fully autonomous subject. As Foucault has pointed out (eg. 1991:11), practices of the self are not invented by the individual him/herself, but rather are suggested or imposed by his or her culture or social group. However, there is no simple causal relation between the social context and the actions of individuals, but rather a complex and dynamic relationship between both. Although, in the final analysis, rules for personal conduct are recommended to the individual by the social context, different contexts provide different degrees of freedom to act and to interpret, negotiate and resist rules. Thus, according to Foucault, while the morality of Christianity has aimed at banishing or stigmatising desire and pleasure through a set of imposed rules and prohibitions, the morality of the ancient Greeks and Romans (or of at least an elite group of Greek and Roman men) aimed at their proper use through moderation and self-control. To each of these forms of morality corresponds different kinds of technologies of the self: in the former case, self knowledge and self-renunciation and, in the latter, 'care of the self' (see McNay 1992:48-62 for a fuller exposition of these points). Foucault's concept of self allows one to acknowledge individual agency and self-determination without abandoning the anti-essentialistview of the subject (McNay 1992:62). Issues of freedom and autonomy become central concerns. As some writers have pointed out, Foucault saw the ancient Greeks and Romans as providing elements of a model (but not an 'alternative') whereby individuals may seek to reinvent themselves in ways that break with the normalising institutions of modernity (Best and Kellner 1991:63; McNay 1992:63, 86). One of the chief virtues of ancient thought, Foucault believed, was that knowledge of oneself, care of oneself, and one's 'style of life' were tightly interwoven and interdependent parts of a whole. The intense preoccupation with the care of the self was bound up with the spiritual quest to transcend the self by transforming one's way of life and should not be confused with the kind of psychologisation that characterises attention to the self in modern society (Davidson 1994). It was Foucault's view that in modern society 'know yourself' has obscured 'take care of yourself', because the dominant morality, which has been influenced particularly by Christian asceticism, 'insists that the self is that which one can reject' (Foucault 1988:22). Nevertheless, Foucault suggests that the idea of morality as obedience to a code of rules is undergoing a decline as part of a general scepticism towards the 'grand narratives' of religion and politics, and that this has created a space for the development of a greater degree of autonomous 'self-stylisation'. The ancient Greeks, he suggests, provide an example of the kind of autonomous existence that might be possible (see Kritzman 1988:49, 249, 253-4). Every era has its own particular technologies of the self, and different relationships between socio-cultural norms and individual ethical behaviour (the nature of prescriptions, the degree of freedom to interpret prescriptions, ways of expressing agency, including resistance). The ways in which these technologies and relationships manifest themselves in different milieu is something which can only be determined through detailed analysis of the particular 'techniques' or 'rationalities of rule' characterising particular contexts.
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Context of the new prevention ethos Within a number of contemporary Western societies, including Australia, there has emerged a new form of rule, identified as 'neo-liberalism' or 'advanced liberalism', which is premised not so much upon welfare interventionism or repression but rather upon the regulated freedom and selfcare of subjects (see for example Burchell1993; Gordon 1991; Rose and Miller 1992; Rose 1993). Neo-liberalism 'entails a reorganisation of programs for the government of social life' in order to create and sustain a 'market'. Through the application of various calculations and techniques, a sphere of freedom is created for autonomous agents to make their decisions in accordance with their preference to maximise the quality and utility of their lives (Rose and Miller 1992:199-201). Rose notes that social regulation employs techniques such as schooling, the family, the asylum and the prison, (and one might add, health institutions) to create individuals who 'will govern themselves, master themselves, care for themselves' (1993:291 ). Individuals are, in effect, 'governed at a distance' through their freedom to choose and to express their active citizenship (1992:201). And this has involved the deployment of expertise in a way that differs from that which was evident within earlier forms of liberalism when expert truth claims were used to define the norms of individual conduct and 'professionals' were involved in face-to-face encounters with their clients. Although expert knowledge is still central to rule, experts now tend to operate at' arms length' from the apparatus of political rule and are located within the market where they themselves are 'governed by the rationalities of competition, accountability and consumer demand' (1993:285). The emergence of new preventative strategies of social administration and the forms of self-regulation and self-care to which they give rise would seem to reflect the consolidation of this new form of rule in a number of societies (Castel1991). According to Castel, the concern has shifted from 'segregating and eliminating undesirable elements from the social body, or reintegrating them more or less forcibly through corrective or therapeutic interventions' towards 'assign[ing] different social destinies to individuals in line with their varying capacity to live up to the requirements of competitiveness and profitability' (Castel 1991:294). Castel is not saying that the older practices have disappeared, but rather that the newer ones have arisen alongside them to allow for a more finely honed means of maximising what is profitable and marginalising what is not. And, for him, the notion of risk, and the construction of individual risk profiles assumes particular importance since it permits individuals to be guided and assigned destinies without their having to be incarcerated. The calculation of risk allows interventions to be legitimated not so much on the basis of the existence of concrete dangers, but rather on the basis of the abstract calculation of the probability that an undesirable event may occur. This would seem to have vastly extended the possibilities for intervention since, to be suspected, one need not manifest symptoms of dangerousness or abnormality, but rather simply display the characteristics that experts responsible for the prevention policy have identified as risk factors (1991:288).
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The significance of the notion of risk for self-regulation and personal conduct in contemporary society cannot be over-stated. Within what has become the health promotion orthodoxy, 'risks' are not purely the result of failure in personal conduct, of 'care-lessness' ('risk-taking'). A conventional criticism of the strand of health promotion that focuses on changing 'risky life-styles' through education is that, because it pays inadequate attention to those structural factors determining health, it serves to 'blame the victim'. However, this kind of criticism tends to overlook the profound impact of health promotion's broad ranging agenda on subjectivity. This agenda, encompassing such areas as community development, personal skills development, the control of advertising 'unhealthy' and dangerous products, the regulation of urban space (eg. 'Healthy Cities' program), intervention in work places, and the monitoring and periodic screening of sub-populations has, in effect, constructed an endless parade of 'at risk' populations and 'risky' scenarios and called forth a plethora of associated preventative and self-care strategies. All manner of interventions and prescriptions (including the demand for 'more care' ) can be deduced and justified on the basis of the calculation of the probability that an undesirable behaviour may occur and can therefore be prevented (Castel1991:287). A recently published public health text, The Health of Populations (Second Edition) illustrates the centrality of the concept of 'risk' within contemporary discourses of public health (Harper, et al. 1994). The book is devoted almost entirely to the analysis of 'risks': historical background to the control of risks (for example those associated with infectious diseases); the identification of contemporary 'risk factors' of personal behaviour and lifestyle (for example smoking, alcohol, diet, exercise, reproductive and sexual behaviour, driving behaviour, social relationships, the occupational environment, pollution, and the built environment); interventions designed to reduce risk (for example the production of less harmful cigarettes, cessation of smoking, changes in diet, driver eduction, legislation and mass media campaigns); the search for effective therapies and changes in health care organisation for managing or alleviating the distress caused by 'risks'; and epidemiological methods of measuring risk. An elaborate body of theory, based upon the science of epidemiology, has been developed to explain associations between health outcomes and predisposing (ie. 'risk') factors. Epidemiology has become so central to the public health endeavour of identifying, reducing exposure to, or eliminating 'risks' that it has become almost synonymous with the public health enterprise itself. It has a broad agenda which makes use of vast number of practices such as case studies, quantitative analyses and laboratory experiments, and contemporary epidemiologists work closely with public policy groups and public health departments to help track risk populations and to educate all populations (Fujimura and Chou 1994:1024). Given the scope of endeavours to identify and manage 'risks' within health promotion, it no longer makes sense to ask who exactly are 'victims' or who is doing the 'blaming', for everyone has, in effect, become a 'victim' and, the health promoters are not clearly seen to directly intervening, or coercing, or punishing. The health promoters indeed see themselves working at a distance through the efforts of others by way offorging collaborative
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ventures (for example 'inter-sectoral collaboration), lobbying for policy change ('healthy public policy'), promoting community action(' community development') and making alliances with the ecology movement ('sustainable development') (Bunton 1992:9). Contemporary health promoters have been at the forefront in the call for efforts to re-organise social institutions, and to implement different kinds and levels of intervention and collaboration involving public and private sectors, in fulfilment of the goal of 'health for all'. In their efforts to identify and control the 'factors of risk', health promoters have taken on the roles of expert administrators, program coordinators, and 'community developers'. The 'factors of risk' which they identify are distributed throughout the social body to the extent that the individual at every turn faces the task of having to monitor, regulate, and change (ie. re-fashion) themselves in line with what he or she has been told, or has come to believe, is required to avoid, modify, controt and/ or eliminate behaviours and situations deemed 'risky'. That the discourses of 'health promotion' assume actively participating individual and collective subjects is evident in the policy statements, charters, and philosophical musings that constitute the new public health literature. For example, a leading figure in the development of the World Health Organisation's health promotion program, Tiona Kickbusch has stated: Health promotion... is the process of enabling people to increase control over, and to improve, their health. This perspective is derived from a conception of 'health' as the extent to which an individual or group is able, on the one hand, to realise aspirations and satisfy needs, and, on the other hand, to change or cope with the environment. Health is, therefore, seen as a resource for everyday life, not the object of living; it is a positive concept emphasising social and personal resources, as well as physical capacities (Kickbusch 1986).
As Kickbusch's comments indicate, health promotion is conceived as an 'enabling' enterprise (that is expressed elsewhere in this article, and by others, as 'how to make healthier choices the easier choices'), that allows individuals to fulfil their potential and to adapt or 'cope' with 'the environment'. Kickbush comments elsewhere in this article that this 'vision of a new health policy' requires, among other things, that health promotion be conceived as 'not just for the healthy (the icing on the cake) but [as] a general approach to lifestyle (societal lifestyle) related issues and aims at developing health potentiat wherever the starting point'. And this entails the development of 'non-medicalized and non-addictive coping strategies which are linked to a new understanding of ourselves and our bodies, which understand that bodies are not just biological but social entities' (1986:324). In other words, it would seem that medical control systems that target individual bodies have been complemented by new forms of regulation which focus both on the social spaces between bodies within the population as a whole and on the body as a subjective entity. As indicated, health has become 'a resource for everyday life' that involves personal, social and physical attributes rather than simply being an objective state (ie. the absence of illness). It has become a way of living one's life rather than simply an outcome of a particular mode of existence.
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The disciplinary self-improvement demonstrated in the pursuit of health and fitness would seem to have become a key means by which the individual can express their agency and constitute themselves in conformity with the demands of a competitive world. To have a healthy body has become 'the mark of distinction that separates those who deserve to succeed from those who will fail' (Crawford 1994:1354). The terms 'healthy' and 'unhealthy' have become signifiers of normal and abnormal identity; of one's moral worth. And one of the implications of this is that the prescribed boundaries of selfhood have become limited to what is seen as the ideal of 'the selfcontained and self-controlled individual' (Crawford 1994:1359).
The complex relationship between public health norms and personal conduct Again, it needs to be emphasised, there is a complex relationship between social structure and the actions of individuals. Norms do not shape individual thoughts and actions in a straightforward way. Some practices impose themselves more than others upon the individual, and there may be conflict between the norms specific to a particular context and more general socio-cultural norms. The norms for personal conduct may also change; often quite dramatically in a short period of time. Public health experts frequently disagree about the nature and origin of 'risks' and about preventative strategies, and present conflicting views on appropriate behaviour. In any event, individuals are likely to express their agency by disregarding, modifying, or resisting any given set of suggested or imposed norms. Examples drawn from the public health area serve to underline some of these complexities, and to demonstrate how suggested practices may be taken up by individuals in constituting themselves as ethical subjects. One of the more enduring and potent norms of the new public health is that the individual should adopt a calculating and prudent attitude in respect to risk and danger. As mentioned, the adoption of 'healthy' (riskaverting) practices has become a key signifier of one's moral worth: attention to diet, regular exercise, avoidance of dangerous behaviours and situations, and so on. And the adoption of 'unhealthy' ('risky') behaviour can serve as testament to a flawed self. The subject categories, 'risk-taker' and 'non-compliant individual', that are created by the discourses of public health, serve to establish the boundary between normal and abnormal identities in relation to the management of risk and bodily harm. There are numerous penalties for 'risk-taking' and 'non-compliance', including ostracism, gossip, loss of privileges, and even incarceration, which operate in various combinations in different contexts. These penalties serve to produce an overall 'normalising' effect. On the other hand, the practices associated with 'risk-taking' and 'non-compliance' are, to some extent, also normative since they are consistent with the more general dictum, 'take control, conduct your life like an enterprise!' At the individual level, these conflicts in norms may result in what appears to be 'inconsistent' action, or a mismatch between expressed views and action, and/ or the violation of norms pertaining to risk-taking. For example, the individual may be aware of and fully subscribe to the public health norm that drink-driving is 'risky' (ie. may endanger their own or
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others' lives), and be concerned about the penalties for being caught for driving after drinking, but still regularly violate the norm. They may do so because, among other reasons, it provides an opportunity for them to demonstrate their self-mastery and ethical worth (and for men, machismo) in front of their peers; to show that one can 'hold one's drink' and still drive. But even where they do not subscribe to and actively resist the norm, 'risktaking' may provide the opportunity to affirm one's ethical self; to demonstrate to others that the norm is 'unfair'. Hence, the drink-driver might ask, why should I show my respect for drink-driving legislation by not driving after drinking when it is obvious that the law is used by the police to discriminate against young offenders, and/ or fails to acknowledge that some individuals can 'hold their drink' and still drive? In both cases, the strength of the more general norms pertaining to the enterprising and ethical self may have more potency in the specific social context than the particular legal code which, in the event, may not be even be enforced. Another example of the complex relationship between the norms of risktaking and individual action can be found in the area of nutrition and dietetics. It has long been recognised by dietitians that individuals do not always eat 'healthy' food, even when they are aware of the public health norms on nutrition. Researchers have found that food choice is influenced by such factors as long-standing personal beliefs about the nutritional value of particular foods (which may be influenced by expert advice given in the past), the preferences of family and friends, financial resources and 'the inertia of habituation' (Santich 1994; Williams et al. 1993). For various population sub-categories, knowledge of expert evaluations of a food's nutritional value or 'healthiness' is often only imperfectly related to values accorded particular foods or to eating habits. Individuals may remain unconvinced that they should change their behaviours or believe that external or non-volitional factors such as 'inconvenience', 'unavailability', or 'liking for the 'wrong' foods' provide insurmountable barriers to change (Crawford and Baghurst 1990; Worsley 1989). Clearly, the way in which the individual expresses their agency in relation to risk management - the practices of the self that they bring to bear upon themselves- is the result of the complex interaction of a variety of factors among which contemporary norms on risk are but one. There is not doubt, however, that public health norms do help shape the nature and range of practices that individuals may adopt in forging their selfidentities. The emergence of new or stronger norms (for example 'random breath-testing' to enforce drink-driving legislation) often lead to the modification of existing practices of the self or the adoption of new ones. With the arrival of random breath-testing of drink-drivers in Australia, in drinking groups there emerged the practice of everyone taking turns as 'the skipper'. This has allowed those within a drinking group to continue to express their agency and ethical worthiness through established drinking practices (for example the demonstration of one's equality with peers in taking turns to buy others drinks; ie. buying drinks 'in rounds') and the person who is the skipper to demonstrate their commitment to their peers (and hence, their ethical worthiness) in acts of self-mastery (abstaining from drinking, and driving the others home 'safely').
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Together, these examples show that while the practices that individuals adopt in order to nurture a particular kind of relationship with oneself and with others are suggested or imposed by the social context, there is no certainty in the ways in which the practices are taken up, or in respect to the kinds of future practices that may emerge. There is much scope for autonomous action, and much uncertainty about the particular combination of practices that may emerge and that may be taken up by individuals. In some contexts, some individuals may seek to demonstrate their agency in undertaking especially 'risky' pursuits; for example, driving fast cars, hang-gliding, parachuting, scuba diving, and rock climbing. But even more commonly indulged 'risky' practices, such as cigarette smoking and excessive alcohol and drug consumption, allow individuals to display their competence in testing fate. The practices that Giddens calls'cultivated risktaking' permits one to demonstrate courage 'as a quality which is placed on trial: the individual submits to a test of integrity by showing the capacity to envisage the" down-side" of the risks being run, and press ahead regardless, even though there is no constraint to do so' (Giddens 1991:133). An important implication of this is that attempts by public health experts to regulate 'risky' behaviours are to some extent bound to fail. The attempt to define and regulate behaviours serves to perpetuate some of those very same, or other, 'risky' behaviours in an endless cycle of attempts and failures (see Hunt and Wickham, forthcoming, especially Ch.4).
Conclusion It should be evident that the view that the new public health is prohibitory
and repressive is a very partial view. While not denying that the new public health has a regulating, constraining influence on individual and collective conduct (ie.limits some avenues for social change and personal transformation), it also has productive effects in that it creates new categories of individuals who are alert to new possibilities for thought and action. The knowledges and practices of the new public health has helped create subjects who are highly attentive to their own bodies, 'life-styles', relations with others (including experts on whom they depend for advice), and to the potential for transforming themselves into a more productive, 'healthier' beings, and for expressing their agency through resistance. The concept of technologies of the self (or practices of the self) as developed by Foucault and his followers provides a means of exploring the complex interplay of the norms of the new public health and personal conduct. It opens up new lines of enquiry hitherto neglected, and in particular makes visible the expressions of agency and resistance that occurs wherever power is exercised. The new public health can be viewed as an important arena for the examination of the operations of new techniques of power that call upon individuals to enter into the process of their own (self-) government.
References Baum, F. (1990). 'The new public health: force for change or reaction', Health Promotion International, 5(2):145-13. Best, S. and Kellner, D. (1991). Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations, The Guilford Press, New York.
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Bunton, R. (1992). 'More than a woolly jumper: health promotion as social regulation', Critical Public Health, 3(2):4-11. Burchell, G. (1993). 'Liberal government and techniques of the self', Economy and Society, 22(3):267-82. Castel, R. (1991). 'From dangerousness to risk', in G. Burchell, C. Gordon and P. Miller (eds) The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, Harvester Wheatsheaf, Hemel Hempstead. Cook, D. (1993). The Subject Finds a Voice: Foucault's Turn Toward Subjectivity, Peter Lang, New York. Crawford, D.A. and Baghurst, K.l. (1990). 'Diet and health: a national survey of beliefs, behaviours and barriers to change in the community',Australian Journal
of Nutrition and Dietetics,47(4):97-104. Crawford, R. (1994). 'The boundaries of the self and the unhealthy other: reflections on health, culture and AIDS', Social Science and Medicine, 38(10):1347-65. Davidson, A.l. (1994). 'Ethics as ascetics: Foucault, the history of ethics, and ancient thought' in G. Gutting (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Foucault, M. (1975). The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, Vintage Books, New York. __ _, (1980a). The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, Vintage Books, New York. __ _, (1980b). 'The politics of health in the eighteenth century' in C. Gordon (ed.) Power/Knowledge: Selected interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, Harvester Wheatsheaf, New York. __ _, (1988). 'Technologies of the self' in L. Martin, H. GutmanandP.H. Hutton (eds) Technologies of the Self A Seminar with Michel Foucault, The University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst. __ _, (1991). 'The ethic of care for the self as a practice of freedom' in J. Bernauer and D. Rasmussen (eds) The Final Foucault, The MIT Press, Cambridge. Fujimura, J.H. and Chou, D.Y. (1994). 'Dissent in science: styles of scientific practice and the controversy over the cause of AIDS', Social Science and Medicine, 38(8):1017-35. Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and Self-Identity: Selfand Society in the Late Modern Age, Stanford University Press, Stanford. Gordon, C. (1991). 'Governmental rationality: an introduction' in G. Burchell, C. Gordon and P. Miller (eds) The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. Harvester Wheatsheaf, Hemel Hempstead. Harper, A. C., Holman, C. D'Arcy J. and Dawes, V.P. (1994). The Health ofPopulations: An Introduction, 2nd edn. Churchill Livingstone, Melbourne. Hunt, A. and Wickham, G. (forthcoming) Law and Governance, Polity Press, London. Hutton, H. (1988). 'Foucault, Freud, and the technologies of the self' in L. Martin, H. Gutman and P.H. Hutton (eds) Technologies of the Self A Seminar with Michel Foucault, The University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst. Kickbusch, I. (1986). 'Health promotion: a global perspective', Canadian Journal of Public Health, 77 (September/October), pp.321-6. Kritzman, L.D. (ed.) (1988). Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture (Interviews and Other Writings 1977-1984), Routledge, New York
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McNay, L. (1992). Foucault and Feminism: Power, Gender and Self, Polity Press, Cambridge. Rose, N. (1993). 'Government, authority and expertise in advanced liberalism', Economy and Society, 22(3):283-99. Rose, N. and Miller (1992). 'Political power beyond the state: problematics of government', British Journal of Sociology, 43(2):173-205. Santich, B. (1994). 'Good for you: beliefs about food and their relation to eating habits', Australian Journal of Nutrition and Dietetics, 51(2):68-73. Stevenson, H.M. and Burke, M. (1991). 'Bureaucratic logic in new social movement clothing: the limits of health promotion research', Health Promotion International, 6(4):321-9. Williams,H.M., Woodward,D.R.,Ball:J.,Cumming,F.J.,Homsby,H.andBoon,J.A. (1993). 'Food perceptions and food consumption among Tasmanian highschool students', Australian Journal of Nutrition and Dietetics, 50(4):156-63. Worsley, A. (1989). 'Australians' food beliefs and behaviours: an overview of five Australian random population studies', Australian Journal of Nutrition and Dietetics, 46(4):94-101.
The Rhetoric of Health Care? Foucault, Health Care Practices and the Docile body 1990s style
Introduction Take responsibility for your own health, avoid sugar and fat in your diet, give up smoking, exercise regularly, in 90 days you can be firmer, fitter and healthier. In short you can look good and feel great! This exemplifies much of the rhetoric associated with contemporary health promotion. While on the surface such rhetoric appears unproblematic, indeed even benevolent, it is important that some of its underlying premises are exposed. Otherwise it may well be the case, that in putting the onus and focus on the individual through practices of self surveillance and monitoring of health, we are in danger of substituting one form of docile body for another - one that is actively created and sustained by the individual themself. In exploring issues such as these, this paper uses Foucauldian analyses to question the premises on which much of contemporary health care is founded. It asks whether or not the diagnostic tests and screening procedures that seem to endlessly proliferate, along with the promotion of self examination and self disciplinary techniques, are yet more forms of surveillance. Indeed, is much of contemporary health care, including health promotion, actually part of disciplinary regimes and techniques designed to promote normalisation and the production of a docile body?
The Notion of Discourse To begin our exploration of these questions we will draw on Foucault's concept of discourse. Discourse is a certain way of thinking or talking that, whilst it allows for some possibilities precludes others. At any point in time we can write, speak or think about a given social object or practice (madness for example) only in certain specific ways not others. A 'discourse' then would be whatever constrains- but also enables- writing, speaking and thinking within such specific historical limits (McHoul and Grace 1993:31). Discourses are products of the time in which they are located. As such, they do not evolve in an historically continuous manner. Rather, each discourse is the product of political, social, historical and other structural influences all of which shape the history of the present. Thus Foucault (1977) alludes to himself as an historian of the present. Yet discourses are not only a product of the time in which they are situated, rather, discourses actually work to produce meanings and understandings for those who are the subjects of, and subject to, such discursive frameworks. As Davies (1993:11) puts it: 'each discourse provides concepts, ideas, explanatory systems, definitions of what is knowable and sayable and through these constitutes the relations and positions of the people who are made relevant within that discourse'.
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If discourses are able to constrain or limit possibilities of thinking and acting in order to constitute relations and dispositions of individuals, then it follows that discourses are intimately connected to notions of power. Indeed, Hollway (1983:131) asserts that discourse is a 'product of powers and practices, rather than an individual's sets of ideas'. At any one moment there are a number of competing discourses possible or even in operation (Gavey 1989). Yet not all of these discourses or discursive frameworks are afforded equal authority. Foucault (1973) posits that in Western industrial society the discourse of the scientific/medical has come to dominate and exclude other possibilities. This is particularly true of the health care arena with its attendant practices premised as they are on the scientific/medical models.
Presence and Knowledge Claims If all discourses are not equal in authority then how is such authority and relative authority determined? Who decides and on what premise? How does one discourse maintain its authority? The exploration of questions such as these highlights the link between knowledge as reflected in the discursive framework or the' ability to claim presence'; power in terms of the ability to create and maintain the privileging of one form of discourse over another, thatisthe'presencewhichisclaimed' (Fox 1994:9);and truth, in that truth is in effect the product of dominant discourses whose power gives individuals the right to generate questions, give answers and recognise truth. For example the ability to claim presence, and the presence which is claimed, is evident in a study we did which examined discourses present within hospital case notes in a rehabilitation setting. We found that the notes were constituted by the objective and rational frameworks of medical and legal dogma (Cheek and Rudge 1994). Such was the power of these discursive frameworks that some health workers, such as physiotherapists and occupational therapists, mimicked the form of reporting used by the doctors, even though this largely ignored the legal parameters set for such reporting. Other workers, for example nurses, were constrained by these frameworks to the extent that their 'documentation' recounted only those aspects of their 'presence' which could safely be considered under the umbrella of objective, rational reporting. Consequently a large part of the nursing presence, knowledge claims and discourses were rendered invisible within such notes. Furthermore, while the actual presence of the doctors in the wards, and in contact with the patient, can be figured in minutes per day, the 24 hour presence of the nurses with the patient was reduced to observation of the patient for the doctor (reporting of biological parameters and medical condition) or the often trivial aspects of the patient's day (Pt [patient] watched TV until 2400 hours). The ability to claim presence is inextricably linked to the knowledge/power claims that so strongly shape the notes.
Normalising Discourse and the Body The human body has long been the object of the authority of scientific/ medical discourses. Foucault (1977) highlights the relentless quest to normalise the functioning of the human body. There are 'normal' functions of
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the human body and health care is oriented towards restoring the normal as defined by the discourse of powerful groups such as doctors and other health care professionals. There is a 'normal' way of dealing with illness, disease and indeed wellness. Other discourses are relegated to the realm of 'alternative' and are not afforded the same authority as those scientifically founded. Norms for weight, height, temperature, behaviour, and body shape for example, are established and disciplinary regimes are applied in order to achieve them. Such regimes can include diets, exercise, drugs, and a myriad of other procedures that have within them various forms of surveillance, monitoring and remedial practices designed to attain and maintain the norm as defined by dominant discourse. In commenting on the effect of such normalising discursive constructions on bodies, Fox (1994:26) observes, 'how important the surface of the body has become in the West, how visible it has become ... how beauty, fitness, couture, coiffure, diet, gesture and posture and sexual arousal inscribe bodies, marking them and enabling them to serve as marked'. Contemporary health care practices involve the individual being under the constant gaze of 'experts' as exponents of dominant health care discourse. Foucault uses the metaphor of the Panopticon, a circular prison in which all the cells were open and faced towards a central guard tower thus placing the prisoners under the potential gaze of the guard at any time, to explore the surveillance and gaze that much of contemporary health care is premised on. Indeed the examination of individuals by health care'experts' is a central premise of Western health care. Yet as Foucault points out, technologies of power are masked in this process of examination, disguised as they are by the 'benevolence' of the practitioner and sustained by the notion of being in 'the patient's best interest'. In this process, the individual is dematerialised, or perhaps decorporealised, within the webs of documentation formed by the experts' examinations. The individual comes to be constituted as a disease, or in this case, a rehabilitation entity who is delimited in terms of the diagnostic structures of medical science. The body of the patient is represented by the experts' diagnoses. The picture of the patient thus constituted is from the perspectives of the health professionals. Yet it is evident from analysis of case notes, that through constant examination of the patient and the duplication of such examinations by each group of 'health experts', that what is being constituted are claims to different forms of presence. However, while each group of health experts ostensibly develops its own forms of assessment and diagnoses which signal deviations from the norm, such is the power of medical discourses that some voices register presence more strongly and claim presence more insistently than others. While other perspectives are apparent, the discourses of the scientific/medical prevail. In this manner, the authoritarian as opposed to authoritative (Code 1991) premises of scientific/medical discourse are used to constitute relations about the human body.
The Collision of Bodies Foucault (1977) referred to the outcome of the effect of such health care discourses as the production of the 'docile body'. As Fox asserts, in such analysis bodies themselves are texts that are written on or inscribed by the
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discourse of powerful groups in society and the health care system. Yet it is not simply the anatomical body that is in question here- medical/ scientific discursive frameworks do not simply address the physical and the biological. Deleuze and Guattari (1984; 1988) have used the notion of a bodywithout-organs to capture the idea of the body that is being inscribed as being a non-organic, political surface which is 'territorialised by these discourses of knowledge' (Fox 1994:24). Such a body-without-organs is fabricated by human activity and practices. It is a political surface constituting, and constituted by, the collision between human biology and social practices. As Deleuze and Guattari (1988:149-150) assert, 'you make one, you can't desire without making one. And it awaits you: it is an inevitable exercise or experimentation, already accomplished the moment you undertake it, unaccomplished as long as you don't... You never reach the Bodywithout-Organs, you can't reach it, you are forever attaining it, it is a limit'. While this analysis focuses on the constitution of the body-without-organs at an individual level, it is possible to comprehend such activity occurring in the health setting. This becomes evident if we examine how women's bodies have been inscribed by the discursive frameworks of health. Fox (1994) outlines how discourses on pain management territorialise the body of the patient through the politics of inscription embedded within analyses of the' experience' of pain. In the process of 'pain management', the discourses of pain depict the patient as trapped by their body, victimised by the pain of a particular disease, and by explanations which are predicated on the discovery of 'the experience' of pain as an internalised experience. He argues that the portrayal of pain as an individual 'experience' fails to recognise how pain is constituted in terms of the political body constructed by medicine. Fox (1994:24) states that, 'it is this political body which is the locus for the politics of health-talk not the anatomical body which medicine and its adjunct disciplines have fabricated'. A further illustration of this form of politics of health-talk is the portrayal of the condition of anorexia nervosa in women. Bordo (1993), in an analysis of various women's conditions, considers that certain illnesses at certain times have become emblematic for women. It is evident that women's body size and contours are effected by panoptic techniques which involve the use of self surveillance and monitoring techniques: women define themselves in terms of an anonymous patriarchal Other, a panoptic male connoisseur (Bartky: 1988). The contest over how anorexia nervosa is portrayed has much to say about inscription on women's bodies-without-organs. The portrayal of anorexia within the health arena and various forms of media texts is contested and this contest is played out over the political body of women. Recently in the media, the story of twin sisters affected by this condition is illustrative of this point. The portrayal of their fight with this condition was portrayed as a personal battle with weight loss and the effects of starvation with the death of one of the twins viewed as the release of the other from the starvation pact entered into during their adolescence. The treatment focused on the weight gain, food and physical needs of these women, seemingly ignoring how women constitute their bodies according to definition by an anonymous panoptic connoisseur.
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Govemmentality, Resistance and Health-Talk It would be misleading to portray a picture of the passive body-without-
organs unable to resist the panoptic apparatus of the health care system. Indeed the body-without-organs is a contested realm, one which is constantly subject to inscription but also one which is capable of resisting. Indeed Deleuze and Guattari (1984; 1988) argue that desire, which they see as a productive force, is able to deterritoralise the body inscribed 'enabling it to become other than it is, and to thereby resist' (Fox 1994:67). The type of health care envisaged here is not that which appropriates the patient's body through the exercise of medical techniques. Instead, in the case of the twins with anorexia, their care would take notice of their definition of their situation, and would allow them to also recognise the powerful sociopolitical forces which led to them taking this way of controlling their lives. Such treatment resists the medical definition in terms of individualised treatment and the focus on food and weight, all of which deny the political aspects to the constitution of the disease. The parallels of this analysis with Foucault's notion of the capillary nature of the exercise of power are apparent. The focus is on power at its sites of action, that is the surface of the body-without-organs. Foucault's concept of governmentality is useful to our analysis at this point. Governmentality according to Foucault (1979; 1988) reinforces the 'community' whilst at the same time (somewhat paradoxically) increasing individualisation. Fox (1994:32) offers the following definition of governmentality as 'a subtle, comprehensive management of life drawing both from a top-down exercise of power over conduct ... with a subjectivity constituted in a sense of personal responsibility, rights, freedoms and dependencies'. In such a conception, power is diffuse, anonymous and subtle with its associated disciplinary regimes and techniques producing individuality. The individual is the site of the operation of powerful discourse and is in effect a product of the inscription of such discourses. This is evident if we consider for example some of the rhetoric concerning the promotion of healthy lifestyles. The current ideology in health care is to promote the individual's responsibility for their health, and in many cases for their return to health as well. On the face of it, this looks like an empowering and responsible focus for health prevention and health care. Our responsibilities to care for ourselves become a' social contract' of health. The various forms of self-improvement which must be undertaken are defined by health statistics and 'population' data such as causes of deaths; and by current knowledge on disease causes, nutritional requirements and in some case social impacts on health. Health promotion for the prevention of cancer can illustrate this point. In mortality statistics, cancer figures as a major cause of death. To avoid cancer, we are 'advised' to avoid fat, eat fruit and vegetables, take adequate fibre, avoid the sun, avoid certain toxic chemicals, not to smoke, and in the case of men not to drink too much beer. If we are defined as being'at risk' (familial and genetic tendencies to particular cancers) then we must institute not only self-monitoring of the above elements but must also ensure, through screening techniques such as mammography, colonoscopies and the like, that any cancers that develop are 'caught' in time.
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All of these 'individual' techniques are predicated on population data and epidemiological studies as to the likely causes of certain cancers. However, the onus and rights as to certain forms of prevention and screening (remembering that screening is not about prevention but about preventing death by early diagnosis) are set by current medical knowledge and health-talk. They inscribe the human body as a site of 'potential' disease and evoke the 'individual' as the primary mechanism for 'cancer's' eradication and control. Fox (1994) suggests that such health promotion techniques, while constituting the individual as the site of various health practices, meet various forms of resistance. While this is often portrayed as individual failure, 'non-compliance' may be produced by the desire to be other than that defined by others.
Conclusion Central to our understanding of how health talk, texts, discourses and their concomitant practices constitute the docile body is how the body-withoutorgans comes to be inscribed by the power /knowledge of such discourses. Many contemporary health practices are premised on the individualisation of health care practices, and yet paradoxically, the individual comes to be constituted as subject of, and subject to, dominant discourses. In this process the individual is constituted according to the normalising tendencies embedded in the discourses of health talk. Even those discourses premised on the so-called empowerment of the client, such as those in health promotion, are based on powerful discourses which actually disempower. Individuality within such frameworks does not mean freedom from constraint, but instead constitutes the individual in terms of certain rights, obligations and freedoms with regard to their health. Suchindividualityisdelimitedbypowerfuldiscoursesofgovernmentality within the health arena. The docile body, 1990s style, is produced by these political discourses of health. Moreover, the individual is not passive, but rather is active, in the production of such docility in the body-withoutorgans sense, in that the docility is as much politicat as it is physical. As Fox (1994) posits, the docile body is the site of the collision between the biological body and 'the social': it is an effect of health-talk and practices. In analysing discourses of health it is necessary to deconstruct how such discourses delimit and territorialise the individual. Furthermore, such analysis has a greater potential to open up possibilities for resistance for individuals trapped within the discourses of health and illness. It is the hope that in resisting closure that such analyses are not affirmations; they are more questions to which it is not possible to reply; they must be left in suspense, where they pose themselves, only with the knowledge that the possibility of posing them may well open the way to future thought. (Foucault 1970:386)
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References Bartky, S. (1988). Foucault, femininity and the modernisation of patriarchal power, in I. Diamond and L. Quinby (eds), Feminism and Foucault, pp.61-86. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Bordo, S. (1993). Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body. Berkeley: University of California Press. Cheek, J. and Rudge, T. The Panopticon Re-visited?: Deconstructing aspects of the social and political dimensions of contemporary Australian health care. International Journal of Nursing Studies (Forthcoming). Code, L. (1991). What Can She Know? Feminist theory and the construction ofknowledge. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Davies, B. (1993). Frogs and Snails and Feminist Tales. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1984). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. London: Athlone. __ _, (1988). A Thousand Plateaux. London: Athlone. Foucault, M. (1970). The Order of Things. London: Tavistock. ___ , (1973). The Birth of the Clinic. London: Tavistock. ___ , (1977). Discipline and Punish. London: Tavistock. __ _, (1979). Governmentality. I & C, 5: 5-21. ___ , (1980). Power/Knowledge, C. Gordon (ed.). Brighton: Harvester Press. ___ , (1988). Technologies of the self, in L. Martin, H. Gutman and P. Hutton (eds) Technologies of the Self, pp.16-49. London: Tavistock. Fox, N. (1994). Postmodernism, Sociology and Health. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Gavey, N. (1989). Feminist poststructuralism and discourse analysis: Contributions to feminist psychology. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 13, pp.459-475. Hollway, W. (1983). Heterosexual sex: Power and desire for the other. InS. Cartledge and J. Ryan (eds. ). Sex and Love: New Thoughts on Old Contradictions, pp.124-140, London: Women's Press. McHoul, A. and Grace, W. (1993). A Foucault Primer: Discourse, power and the subject. Carlton: Melbourne University Press.
Using Foucauldian Ideas to Analyse a Problem Concerning Women and the Environment1 l£faine Stratfort! This collection of work is about Foucault's legacy. I have been wondering how he might react to our discussions about his ideas, actions and life. Would he venture into his labyrinth (Foucault 1972) to avoid potential and possibly erroneous assertions about his leaving us a corpus of works? Or would he join us to hear how we might give meanings to the multiple signs that he left? Be this speculation as it may, the task undertaken in this paper is to present a preliminary overview of how some of Foucault's insights influence investigation in contemporary environmental studies. The research in which I am engaged examines how the feminine, the home and nature have been discursively constituted in public health debates in two periods of Australian history. Specifically, I am referring to the 1890s and the 1980s, although in this paper the focus is on the 1890s. I wantto bracket these three signs - the feminine, the home and nature, and I want to question the prevailing attitude within environmental studies that these signs are stable. I will accentuate how genealogy can help in this destabilising (Barrett and Phillips 1992), particularly by the application of methodological scepticism to normative categories of historical research (Barker 1993). The sites and meanings which constitute the home should be radicalised within environmental studies since, with few exceptions, home has been given marginal analytical space in this field of knowledge. There is also a particular set of historical associations connecting the feminine, nature and the home as subordinate to the masculine, culture and the public sphere (for two disparate formulations of this association see Gilman 1898; Ortner 1974). Recently these connections have been challenged in environmental studies and in certain kinds of ecofeminism2 that celebrate and sometimes serve to reify the connection between women and nature in ways that could be construed as problematically essentialist (see Fuss 1989). Even so, the feminine, the home and nature are more than social constructions. Sander Gilman (1988:9) notes that 'realities [are] mirrored in and conceptualised through the pressures of social forces and psychological models'. Given this observation, the analysis of the feminine, the home and nature must account both for the textual and the corporeal that constitute each category. As Gail Reekie (1994) argues in this volume, certain effects emerge from the application of foucaultian ideas to historical analysis, not least of which is the question about whether we should or can'abandon the female subject of history- "real" women'. Indeed, it is also important to ask if we should or can abandon a realist conception of nature. In Western philosophy, connections that typically have been made among the feminine, the home, and the natural relegate all three to the object/ other. Perhaps it is
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time both to extend subjectivities to categories that are conceptualised as lying outside anthropocentric barriers, and to write and speak of the home and nature as polyvalent subjects. These issues deserve much more thought than they have received in environmental studies, particularly because of the continuing 'crisis' which has come to be accepted as forming the (con)text between people and environment. Part of the brief of environmental studies has been to examine (and arguably to construct facets of) the nexus among people, environment and health. Typically, these three are taken to be objective: measurable, manipulable, and normally responsive in at least some predictable ways to specific social practices and interventions. Yet this formula is insufficient. Three steps to an alternative conceptualisation are possible. First, in the same way that Turner (1992) speaks of the 'medicalised body' as a site for the enactment of regulatory exercises, so too it is possible to conceive of the colonised earth as a locale for the enactment of regulation. Second, if this 'medicalised body' is a terrain in which disease and health are partly constituted, then it is arguable that the earth is another body which exhibits signs that we can and do read as an index of the earth's health. Even so, this analysis needs to avoid monolithic and totalising accounts of gender and nature, creating instead a space for the political expressions of difference (Gunew and Yeatman 1993). Finally, any analysis of the feminine, the home and nature needs to ask how health and sickness are understood in relation to other normative constructions about male and female bodies or about masculine culture and feminine nature. It then becomes possible to explore whether other connections exist among the feminine, the natural and conceptions of health that are not usually explicit in public health discourses, particularly those stemming from professions with vested interests in maintaining the dominance of docile bodies in health service and delivery (see Foucault 1973; 1984). The linkage between the feminine, nature and health has already been made in diverse fields of knowledge, as will be explored below. This association implicates the home as a singular and essential site for the enactment of relations among the feminine, the natural and issues of health. Clearly, there is a risk in articulating and exploring this connection; to posit these categories as fixed or without significant 'internal' differences is to perpetuate narrow ideas about each. It becomes crucial to seek con(texts) in which normative understandings of these categories are ruptured. How then, and with what effects, do we constitute the feminine, the home, and nature as linked to issues of health? In the 1890s, and throughout Britain, North America and Australia, the public health gaze was cast in many directions, including into the homes of private citizens conceived of as individual bodies on whom both disease and health operated. This gaze also penetrated collective populations through the application of such practices as the inspection of homes and factories, the use of demographic analysis, or the implementation of slum clearance. Additionally, much that comprised the public health debates at this time was constituted in the public realm and among men, and much of it implicitly dealt with the intricacies of manipulating nature to carry deep
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drainage, to absorb effluvia, to provide healthful food and drink, or to give resources for healthy and moral national progress (Bates 1983; Ehrenreich and English 1988; Riley 1987; Smith 1979). What about the gaze from the home back out to the realm of public expertise? First, there is considerable archival evidence from the 1890s to suggest that women were patently aware that the feminine had come to signify, among other things, morally-based health in the home. Second, women influenced the public realm from the private sphere through the exercise of micro-political power that was partly constituted in middle class discourses on the naturalness of (white) feminine moral superiority. Third, by extending the accepted boundaries of feminine moral work, women started to consolidate direct entry into the public sphere to make that realm their business in new discourses, and in new social practices and institutions. In effect, women were claiming the natural(ised) right to comment on the public health of individual bodies and populations, since such issues consistently affected the constitution of discourses and practices on the home, alleged and typically accepted to be their (most) natural province. There was not, however, merely one discourse linked to the feminine. Women's emergence into the public sphere was and remains mediated by other organising processes such as age, class, ethnicity, sexuality and political leaning (see Jolly 1994). Indeed, many discursive positions and social practices within the public health debates contributed to the multiple construction of the feminine, and its links to the home and nature at that time. Moreover, there was no unified public health debate that concerned all women, although connections were made between the health of (female) bodies and the health of nature, suggesting an essential(ist) link between them, and positing a central responsibility for women in the provision of healthy environments for the family as a primary organisational unit of society. Donzelot (1979) produces a particularly insightful analysis of the way in which this family unit came to be part of the productive technology of disciplining bodies. Examining marriage, philanthropy, hygiene, industry and psychoanalysis as the five strategic 'lines' of mutation that make up the terrain that is the family within the social, Donzelot poses one significant question whose effects impinge on environmental matters: How did we pass from a usage of 'the social' understood as the problem of poverty, the problem of others, to its current definition in terms of a general solidarity and the production of a life-style; what enabled it to be made into a showcase of development, whose defense comes before all else, something to be offered to the world at whatever cost? (1979:xxvii, emphasis added).
What of the archival evidence? Some women were concerned to disrupt normative ideas about food and focussed on its adulteration, on vegetarianism or on safe supply of milk and meat. Others were determined to challenge women's slavishness to fashion and the cruelty inflicted on the bodies of women and animals in the pursuit of prescribed images of femininity. Still others were committed to promulgating scientific principles of management in the home, including the introduction of safe sanitation, ventilation and sensible architectural design, which served to discipline nature. Often relying on the input of masculine expertise, a range of discursive positions
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existed on all these subjects including dissenting viewpoints that celebrated the chemical treatment of food, the use of animal products for women's fashion, or the excessive styles of Victoriana in the home. Many texts contained antithetical positions within the same covers, providing no unitary position that could be construed as archetypally feminine. Given these initial observations, and on the basis of Foucault's ideas about surveillance and power, I am arguing that many of the discursive fields that specifically constituted Australian public health debates in the 1890s employed strategies and techniques of the gaze. Furthermore, I am concerned to examine how networks of power /knowledge emerged in the discourses, the social practices and the interstices of these public health debates. How did such networks both support and challenge modern bourgeois ideas of the feminine, nature and the home? Where did they operate? The answer is that these debates functioned across diverse fields of knowledge: in medicine, psychiatry and psychology; in economics and politics; in architecture, building and engineering; in religious and secular exhortations about sexual and social morality; in education; within social Darwinism and the progressive movement; in commentaries produced within the burgeoning new disciplines of the academy, and in the popular press. The debate was constituted, normalised and challenged at the hearth, in the office, the shop, the factory, the legislature and judiciary, the clinic, the social club, the union, the universities, and the rooms of newspaper reporters and editors. It involved the strategic use of legal and administrative tools, statistics, moral principles, and both factual and metaphorical accounts of terrible fates and fabulous miracles of recovery. It was represented in fiction, painting, song, and the everyday actions of subjects whose bodies and lives were constituted around, through and in resistance to this and other debates. These public health debates also operated so that the gaze of expertise fell onto individual bodies and populations, contributing to the constitution of particular understandings of the body. In several texts, Foucault referred to some of these practices of surveillance as discursive networks that formed around bio-power, and he wrote of both an anatomo-politics of the body and a biopolitics of the population. Using genealogy, Foucault has traced the emergence of these two specific regimes. In Discipline and Punish (1975) he analyses the emergence of discipline among military and other groups. In The History of Sexuality: Volume 1: An Introduction (1976),he examines the 'Right ofDeathand Power over Life'. One passage from this latter work provides an excellent summary of these two threads: In concrete terms, starting in the seventeenth century, this power over life
evolved in two basic forms; these forms were not antithetical, however; they constituted rather two poles of development linked together by a whole intermediary cluster of relations. One of these poles -the first to be formed, it seems- centred on the body as a machine: its disciplining, the optimization of its capabilities, the extortion of its forces, the parallel increase of its usefulness and its docility, its integration into systems of efficient and economic controls, all this was ensured by the procedures of power that characterized the disciplines: an anatomo-politics of the human body. The second, formed somewhat later, focused on the species body, the body imbued with
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the mechanisms of life and serving as the basis of the biological processes: propagation, births and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity, with all the conditions that can cause these to vary. Their supervision was effected through an entire series of interventions and regulatory controls: a biopolitics of the population. The disciplines of the body and the regulations of the population constituted the two poles around which the organization of power over life was deployed (1976:139, original emphasis).
Genealogy is critically engaged with its subject matter and with tracing the exercise of power /knowledge upon bodies and populations. The task of genealogy is to assess the emergence of orthodox and established theories and practices, and to question how these came to engender the power effects that they do, marginalising alternative and oppositional discourses in the process (Jana Sawicki 1992). Thus, the use of genealogy as a methodological tool involves asking how we govern ourselves through the production of truths. Foucault's driving purpose was to effect an 'insurrection of subjugated knowledges' (Sawicki 1992: 57) and to use genealogy as part of his dedicated program ofbroadly emancipatory exercises around issues such as prison reform or the breakdown of taboos on sexuality (see Foucault 1975; Eribon 1992). The methodology is one well-suited to exposing how notions of the feminine, nature and the home were constituted, privatised and commodified through public health debates in the late nineteenth century. In the January 1895 edition of Australian Farm and Home an article appears onthe'AdulterationofHumanFood',takenfromanaddressbyoneDrH.W. Wiley, from the United States Department of Agriculture: With regard to their effect on the health of the community, materials used to adulterate food may be divided into those which are poisonous, and those which, though themselves harmless, injure to a greater or lesser extent the food adulterated, and diminish its value as food. In the first class we have the bona fide poisons introduced intentionally into the food for some purpose or other, such as the salts of zinc and copper, arsenic, etc ... Then we have drugs, such as salicylic acid, which is used to preserve food from decay. This is not a poison, but neither is it a food. It is a medicine, and its constant use must be deleterious to health. Lead is frequently found in canned goods. This is not put there intentionally, but is admitted through carelessness in soldering. And every time a drop of lead gets into the goods there is a danger of lead poisoning... (1985:17).
In The Australian Woman's Sphere of May 1901 there is an article entitled 'Murderous Millinery'. The first third of the article is a brief introduction to the topic, and the rest is quoted from a Mr Gilbert Pearson who describes how feathers are obtained for women's fashion: The Society for the Protection of Birds, of which the Duchess of Portland is President, is doing good work in England in detailing the horrible cruelty inflicted every year on birds, whose lives are ruthlessly sacrificed on the altar of fashion. The men who provide the beautiful feathers and plumes that we see in the shops and the women who wear them, are really guilty of the 'murder of His most harmless beings'. The graceful aigrette- the drooping feathers of the heron- which decks the hat of the woman of fashion is procurable only in the breeding season, and the following description by Mr Gilbert Pearson, the well-known scientist, of the result of a heron hunt, should be sufficient to
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make women for ever eschew the aigrette ... Young herons had been left by the scores in the nests to perish from exposure and starvation. These little sufferers, too weak to rise, reach their heads over the nest, and faintly called for the food which their dead mothers could never bring ... Women who know ofthe cruelty necessary to procure the feathers they wear on their hats should stop wearing them, and exert their influence to make other women see how cruel and wicked they are ... (1901:72).
In a monograph entitled The Architecture of Healthy Homes, read first as a paper before the Australian Health Society, on the 4th of October 1902, Walter Butler notes: And here in the outset, I would point out that the word 'home' means something more than a 'flat' or lodging-house; it means the one spot above all others that we should become endeared to, should love to live in, and live to love in; and having this in mind, we should spare no effort to accomplish those things which science indicates are necessary to a healthy house ... There are two constituent elements of health that we must provide for in the building of our healthy home- pure air and abundance of sunshine ... Under conditions of impure air and lack of sunshine, zymotic diseases, such as fevers, cholera, dysentry [sic], etc, are most intensely active ... nor must we forget that whereas it is the man's part to be in the field, the counting house, or the surgery, it is the woman's place to be in her home, and it is her comfort, her convenience we should study most, and her labour that it is our business to lighten; for in our home, be it palace or cottage, woman must live in pleasure, or the place will be unworthy of the name of home (1902:1, 15).
There is a lot of information about public health in these extracts, although some of it remains in the interstices of the texts. For instance, there is an interesting confluence between the constitution of women as consumers (Ewen 1988; Featherstone 1990; Reekie 1993) and as health monitors. The choice to use adulterated food becomes a moral issue. In turn, this issue of morality maps out a problematic terrain implicating women as guardians of health on one hand and, on the other, as the producers of foods desired by household members but also requiring the use of adulterated ingredients. The twin demand on women to provide healthful food and food with other appeals necessitated quite complex and unstable moral (con)texts in order for women to produce the material of domesticated femininity and natural health. The constitution of the feminine, the home and nature as corporeal is further evidenced in the extract about the heron. As Sandra Bartky (1988) has pointed out in another context, women constitute themselves, in part, in relation to patriarchal scripts about the 'nature' of the 'feminine'. In some measure, and especially among heterosexual(ised) women, these brands of femininity are adopted to secure patronage (although there is no suggestion that this scripting involves a totalising conception of women as victims). So, being feminine involves the commodification of the body, which necessitates the consumption of the bodies of others- the consumption of the body of nature, in order to be read, like a text, as an appropriate commodity for masculine consumption and domestication. What is significant here is that part of this constellation of social practices rests on an understanding that mature and normal (read healthy) women are married mothers unproblematically accepting the naturalness of their domestication. Cos-
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metics, fur and feathers - the trappings of fashion signify these things. Yet, in this text on the slaughter of herons is another difficult terrain: a protest about the cruelty to animals that seems required by fashion, and the bloody removal of the mother from the child, whose fate is also to perish. There is in this text the pronouncement of a moral imperative: women are to police their own actions and those of other women in order to save them from wickedness. These ethical injunctions open a space in which tension exists about how to be feminine and domesticated, and about what value to attribute to 'things' in nature. In some measure, this dilemma brings the natural into the gaze of the private sphere, challenging this outside/inside binary. Normative ideas about what it means to be feminine rupture in the process, requiring women to (con)textualise their subjectivities again (see McNay 1992). Women must reject prescribed (if changeable) notions of feminine fashion in order to uphold other ideas of feminine morality. They risk becoming a category of otherness within the feminine both for challenging fashion codes and for following certain moral scripts. Finally, in the extract from Butler home is constituted as a body that can be, or can cause the other bodies that reside in it to be healthy or sick. Moreover, nature's light and air can be captured and commodified in appropriate amounts to be included in the body of the home so that health may be maintained. Implicit in the idea thatthewomanis the prize to beheld and treasured in the home are two profoundly normative assumptions about the feminine and the natural. First there is the idea that the design of the body of the home is the natural task of the masculine cultural sphere- of men. Second there is an understanding that, once they are captivated, it is the natural task of women to ensure that the home (and the harvested elements of nature within it) are themselves kept healthy. So there is a complexity of (con)texts in these various debates in which the masculine and feminine, the public and private, the cultural and natural, and the healthy and sick are constituted as differentially marked categories. It is clear that these categories are far from stable in their conception or in the effects of power flowing from them. Whether examining issues about food, fashion or home (and even if texts that uphold the use of chemicals, feathers, and risky building practices had been chosen from the archives) this constellation of discourses is concerned with notions of health, disease, and bodies. These discourses contribute to the construction of individual bodies in general, and women's bodies in particular, as problematic or archetypal sites to be gazed at, commodified, and disciplined. Moreover, the home itself becomes just such a body, whose inner recesses must be probed in order to drive out any trace of miasma or zymotic disease, and in order to secure and domesticate idealised nature. Throughout these texts, there is also the implication that nature is yet another commodified body, from which we take our resources. What is being constituted here is a body politic, concerned to promote notions as purity, morality, and light, cleanliness, health, and scientific expertise, and stable forms of gendered subjectivity. More than that, however, in these nineteenth century discourses we are witnessing the emergence of social practices and institutions where the exercise of power/
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knowledge starts to rupture normative understandings of the public and the private, the cultural and the natural, and the masculine and the feminine as separate spheres. Moreover, we are seeing the rise of early forms of feminist environmentalism that have hitherto been largely ignored. While power 'is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society' (Foucault 1976:93), and despite the foregoing observations, it is also clear that any disruption to the idea of separate spheres has been only partial. By the 1890s, women had become the moral guardians and health monitors of small sites such as their bodies, the bodies of their families, and the bodies of their homes. They were also the physical objects and property of the masculine. In the late twentieth century, women are now also constituted, and partially construct themselves, as the feminine ecological guardians of larger sites, such as a feminised earth. Women are also often constituted as being opposed to masculine explorations of the earth's body. Arguably, the feminine remains partly constituted by concerns for physical health, for fashion, and for domestic well-being as well as by modes of thought that rupture these same images. More broadly, however, women are now both contributing to and challenging the constitution of environmental discourses that gender the planet, discuss 'her' ills, detail methods by which 'she' can get better, and make 'her' a metaphor for home. The planet has become a feminised and naturalised domicile at which we gaze, and 'she' has been problematised and reified. It is my on-going project to apply the tools that Foucault developed in order to analyse a constellation of discourses on public health so that I can ask how the feminine, nature and the home are constituted in and around these debates. 1
Thanks are due to Clare O'Farrell and to Phil Barker and Tim Doyle for comments on drafts of this paper. Particular thanks go to Philip and Lewis Hutch for their continued support on the home front.
2
As with most contemporary discourses, the amount of literature generated on environmentalism and ecofeminism is vast. No particular texts are cited here, and it is acknowledged that not all versions of these fields are totalising. However, it is not in the purview of this paper to pursue these matters in any complex way.
References Adulteration of Human Food, Australian Farm and Home, January 1895, p.17. Barker, Philip (1993). Michel Foucault: subversions of the subject, Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Barrett, Michele and Phillips, Anne (eds) (1992). Destabilizing Theory: Contemporary Feminist Debates, Oxford: Polity Press. Bartky, Sandra Lee (1988). 'Foucault, femininity and the modernization of patriarchal power', in Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby (eds.) Feminism and Foucault: reflections on resistance, Boston: Northeastern University Press, pp.61-86. Bates, Erica M. (1983). Health Systems and Public Scrutiny: Australia, Britain and the United States, Canberra: Croom Helm.
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Butler, Walter (1902). The Architecture of Healthy Homes, Paper read before the Australian Health Society, 4 October. Donzelot, Jacques (1979). The Policing of Families: Welfare versus the State, London: Hutchinson University Library. Ehrenreich, Barbara and English, Deidre (1988 ). (reprint) For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts' Advice to Women, London: Pluto Press. Eribon, Didier (1992). Michel Foucault, trans. Betsy Wing, London: Faber and Faber. Ewen, Stuart (1988). All Consuming Images, New York: Basic Books. Featherstone, Michael (1990). Perspectives on consumer culture, Sociology, 24(1):522. Foucault, Michel (1972). The Archaeology of Knowledge, New York: Random House. __ _, (1973). The Birth of the Clinic, London: Tavistock. __ _, (1975). Discipline and Punish - the birth of the prison, trans. A. Sheridan, Melbourne: Penguin. __ _, (1976). The History of Sexuality: Volume 1: Introduction, Melbourne: Penguin. __ _, (1984). 'The politics of health in the eighteenth century',inPaul Rabinow (ed.) The Foucault Reader, New York: Random House. Fuss, Diana (1989). Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature, and Difference, New York: Routledge. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins (1898). Women and Economics, Boston: Source Books. Gilman, Sander (1988). Disease and Representation: images of illness from madness to AIDS, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Gunew, Sneja and Yeatman, Anna (eds) (1993). 'Introduction', Feminism and the Politics of Difference, Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Jolly,Margaret(1993).'Colonizingwomen:thematernalbodyandempire',in,Sneja Gunew and Anna Yeatman (eds), Feminism and the Politics of Difference, Sydney: Allen and Unwin. McNay, Lois (1992). Foucault and Feminism: power, gender and the self, Oxford: Polity Press. Murderous Millinery, The Australian Women's Sphere, May 1901, p.72 Ortner, Sherry (1974). 'Is female to male as nature is to culture?' in Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (eds), Women, Culture and Society, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Reekie, Gail (1993). Temptations: Sex, Selling and the Department Store, Sydney: Allen and Unwin. __ _, (1997). 'Feminist history after Foucault', Foucault: the Legacy, Conference Proceedings, 4-6 July, QUT, Brisbane. Riley, James C. (1987). The Eighteenth Century Campaigns to Avoid Disease, London: Macmillan. Sawicki, Jana (1991). Disciplining Foucault: Feminism, power and the body, London: Routledge. Smith, F.B. (1979). The People's Health 1830-1910, Canberra: Australian National University Press. Turner, Bryan S. (1992). Regulating Bodies: Essays in medical sociology, London: Routledge.
The Health of Our Children: A National Efficiency Framework for a Nation Janet Sclimitzer Foucault's Framework of Control This paper will argue that medical doctors aspired to two goals; first, they influenced, through the educational system, children in the acquisition of the skill of efficiency; a skill which would, in the future become productive and result in industrious workers for a proud nation. Secondly; by directly controlling the behaviour of children they would indirectly control their families' behaviour in the area of health and hygiene. This, in fact, would assist in the development of the goal of national efficiency, but of greater significance was the development of medical doctors as experts occupying positions of complete authority. This development occurred most dramatically in the early twentieth century from 1900-1939, when the health and hygiene agenda focussing on the development of the primary public school child began to develop the importance of cleanliness and industriousness and secondly, on the prevention of disease that would lead to the improvement of living conditions. Roe and Lewis demonstrate that there was a struggle for power between the Commonwealth and States, public opinion, school teachers and teaching, medical and societal intervention. 1 This created a novel situation for educators and community alike, with health and hygiene being the instrument for control within a framework that was known as a social efficiency. The meticulous way in which regulations were put into place in schools, the attention to detail, with inspections conducted in class, and the degree of supervision over teaching the young was to provide, 'an economic rationality for this mystical calculus of the infinitesimal and the infinite.2 The educational teachings of health and hygiene to children cannot be viewed, within the framework of efficiency, in isolation from the entity of the Australian family and that of the health of the community. B. Hyams et al., for example, argue that education 'must be comprehended with reference to the social setting'. 3 The characteristics and the pattern of education determined to a large extent the interaction of complex social forces and the elements of controversial issues. 4 Foucault's framework features certain characteristics that are applicable to the efficiency model. These include several techniques. First, discipline required enclosure: 5 The model schools demonstrated this clearly in a homogeneous and well defined environment. Secondly, the principle of enclosure was to be neither constant nor indispensable. Each individual was given their own place and each place an individual in the classroom. This control set up useful communications, but more importantly assessed individuals and as a result medical doctors could calculate their qualities or merits. It was a 'procedure aimed at knowing, mastering and using'. 6
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Thirdly, the rule of functional sites: medical doctors saw the school was a place to treat, 'but in order to do this they had to filter, a mechanism that pins down and partitions; it must provide a hold over this whole mobile, swarming mass, by dissipating the immorality and evil? The individual assigned a place and a place set aside for the individual meant importance was not on domination nor residence but on rank, the classification of the individual. Foucault found that, 'discipline is an art of rank, a technique for the transformation of arrangements. It individualised bodies by a location that does not give them a fixed position, but distributes them and circulates them in a network of relations'.s In treating the problem of health and hygiene in schools, the medical profession was assisted by social workers and school medical health teams. The education of children was to reflect efficiency and industriousness, using the health and hygiene instrument. By thus educating the children it was thought that more general change could occur in social conditions in the community. It was a community which according to the medical profession was marked by racial slide, national decadence, invasion threats, epidemics, poor standards of living, population decrease, poor health and physical and mental underdevelopment of children. The variable factors were attitudes, both positive and negative, held by teachers, administrators, medical doctors themselves, and society. Traditional methods of teaching did not address the subject of health and hygiene but with the introduction of the new education based on the new psychology, an opportunity was seized. Support from educational leaders furthered the momentum and projected it into the curriculum in each state and territory. The framework of control reflected national efficiency; and central to the framework was the child. This became the critical factor for success. The desired outcome was a behavioural change towards health and hygiene. As part of the strategy to implement the new education as an efficient method of teaching and learning, the notion of child research became imperative.
Child Research In the quest for public health, pride and social efficiency child research was
to figure predominantly in education and was to be investigated over this period of time. Research into physical development was carried out in all schools through the guise of measurements and observations recorded at frequent intervals on the primary school child. Research also focussed on specific illnesses and nutritional requirements of not only the child but of the general population. Research also raised the controversial issues social class and sex education.9 Garton indicates that a new class emerged from the initial origins of health, welfare, and science affecting social life in Australia. 1oHe highlights the fact that the instrument for change was health and hygiene. Garton along with Reiger, Matthews, Davison, Bourke, and Deacon all express the common theme that the health and hygiene movement was,' a new order' which gave rise to a new class of professionals. 11 These were, 'hygienists, doctors, psychiatrists, psychologists, town planners, slum clearers, statisticians, managers, bureaucrats, educationists, all concerned with national efficiency, racial hygiene and scientific management'. 12 Garton concludes that
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there had been an, 'expanded influence in many areas of social policy. Doctors had successfully persuaded the public and professional authorities that they had an important role to play ... ' 13 The role was to be one of authority based on humanitarian and moral values with an involvement in social problems. This, however, as Garton points out was problematic.14 Traditional attitudes in society about the value of education and medical care or cures were still entrenched and were compounded by a fear not only of change but of other outside influences. Turney acknowledges that, 'government inertia and departmental complacency' in some states slowed down progress.15 Medical men, however, sought to implement changes as they were envisaged as experts and were able to influence leaders in government and education. They proposed ideological changes which would require a shift in attitudes by society, towards living conditions and moralistic values which differed greatly from those of Victorian times. Educational circles were not so easily convinced and Anderson, the Queensland Undersecretary, in 1904 remarked on his retirement and on the new syllabus to Barlow, the Minister, that: Modem ideas seem to wish that everything should be altered - that there should be a departure from the past. But ... the present system of education ... in operation he did not think it had done so badly .... But now the pupils must be taken out to study grubs and plants and bees, and examine them under a microscope; that was the new teaching. But the teaching of the power of the mind belonged to the past time .. .16
Queensland during the first decade lacked the essential leadership to implement reform. The ideals which medical and educational leaders in the early twentieth century vehemently strove to attain were brought about by the desire to improve social conditions. They advocated that health and hygiene of the child was due to the responsibility of the school and were encouraged by community involvement. This ultimately led to significant changes in the family situation.
Country Life One change was the introduction of the rural ideal into the syllabus which was supported by the country life movement. Rodwell also notes that support came from the mediaP Changes were influenced by individuals and communities through education policies and instruction and were seen to be positive. 1s The most powerful influence for change in the education of the child was due to the combined efforts of directors of education and medical health teams. The vivacity of Peter Board, William McCoy, Frank Tate, John Hartley, William Neale, Alfred Williams and the efforts of their medical officers wielded power to bring about social reform of the nation. The medical profession felt that it was their duty to monopolise change on behalf of the people. It became more than their duty to improve the health status of the people of the Empire. They sought to prevent such atrocities as illiteracy, backwardness, feeble mindedness, disease and poor health that they thought had resulted in an apathetic nation. One attempt to improve pupil learning was by physical development. Medical officers saw real value in the introduction of military training then in the area of physical education. As Hart argues these highly motivated
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'medicos' were a significant influence over popular and political consciousness.19 The public during the years from 1900 to 1940 regarded medicine as being synonymous with health. 20 But a number of authors such as Hart and Reiger aruge that the medical experts were not entirely responsible for the changes in perception of health and hygiene.21
Conclusion Medical doctors had developed standing and power within the school community and society with their knowledge. This brought about social efficiency in the general community. World events and the ideals and concerns of medical doctors from 1900 unti11939, moulded such a framework. Teaching health and hygiene to schoolchildren, as well as improving their teaching environment affected living conditions and more significantly and dramatically, changed the family unit. Australians were brought closer to the goal of a national social efficiency. This was to equip the rising generation with an improved health status and opportunities to become industrious,haveprideintheircountryandbeconsciousofchange.Foucault's philosophy demonstrates that control for directing the school community was the underlying agenda for school medical doctors. Hyams and Bessant, Roe, Rodwell, Connell, Selleck and Petersen recognise that progressive leaders, influenced by medical doctors in education, created a watershed in their quest for efficiency. These idealists shared a conviction that the educational system should have a balance of community involvement as well as a centralised state administration which should be controlled. Changes in the educational system had implications for the community. As a result, Australians throughout the country were able to start benefitting from improved health status, living conditions and lifestyle. This outcome was founded by conservative and radical thinkers who believed in the need for change, in spite of resistance from the community. These medical doctors were altruistic in their aim to improve the Australian way of life but at the same time were establishing a framework that would continue to allow them to control health for future generations. 1
M. Roe, Nine Australian Progressives: Vitalism and Bourgeois Social Thought 18901960, St Lucia, University of Queensland Press, 1984, p. 190; M.J. Lewis, (ed.), Health and Disease in Australia, A History, Canberra, AGPS, p.9
2
M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish The Birth of the Prison, Middlesex, Penguin, 1977p.140.
3
B. Hyams, L. Trethewey, B. Condon, M. Vick, and D. Grundy, Learning and Other Things, Sources for a Social History in South Australia, South Australia, Government Printer, 1988, p.l.
4
See also H. McQueen, Social Sketches of Australia, Melbourne, Penguin 1991, p.6.
5
Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 1977, p.142.
6
Ibid.
7
Ibid, p.144.
8
Ibid, p.146.
9
Roe, Nine Australian Progressives, 1984, p.14.
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10 S. Garton, 'The Tyranny of Doctors: the Citizen's Liberty League in New South Wales 1929-1939', Australian Historical Studies, October,24(97) 1991 p.340. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid, p.358. 14 Ibid. 15 C. Tumey, Pioneers of Australian Education, Sydney University Press, 1983, p.S. 16 Queensland Annual Report for 1904 cited in L.A. Mandelson, Australian Primary Education, 1919-1939: A Study in Inertai, Continuity and Change in State Controlled Schooling, Ph.D. thesis, University of Sydney, 1974, p.13. 17 G. W. Rodwell, With Zealous Efficiency: Progressivism and Tasmanian State Primary Education 1900-20, Darwin William Michael Press, 1992, p.178 18 Hyams et al., Learning and Other Things, 1988, p.IX. 19 N. Hart, The Sociology of Health and Medicine, Themes and Perspectives in Sociology, Lancashire, Causeway Press, 1985, p.l. 20 Ibid, p.5. 21 Ibid, pp.5, 8: K.M. Reiger, The Disenchantment of the Home, Modernising the Australian Family 1880-1960, Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1985, p.44.
Foucault and Gerontological Knowledge: The Making of the Aged Body Steplien ~tz Michel Foucault, that subverter of conventions of human universality, and old age, where encumbering conventions await to be subverted, seem well suited to each other. Indeed, if one inserts the word, 'age' into Foucault's captivating phrases on sex and sexuality, the prospects of a Foucauldian gerontology become quickly apparent. For example, substituting age for sex in the following statement from The History of Sexuality: 'Age appeared as an extremely unstable pathological field; a surface of repercussion for other ailments, but also the focus of a specific nosography, that of instincts, tendencies, images, pleasure, and conduct' (1980a:67). Or substituting age for sexuality in a subsequent line: 'Age is not the most intractable element in power relations, but rather one of those endowed with the greatest instrumentality; useful for the greatest number of manoeuvres and capable of serving as a point of support, as a linchpin, for the most varied strategies' (1980a:103). Unfortunately, the promise of the match between Foucault and old age has not been developed. Foucault said little about old age and one can only speculate as to the ingenuity, of his insights on the subject had he lived, into elderhood. Few of Foucault's associates and critics, despite their instructive treatments of medicine (Arney and Bergen 1984; Osborne 1993; Rupp 1992; Spitzack 1992), risk (Ewald 1991, Singer 1993; Scott et al. 1992), and welfare policy (Dean 1991; Hewitt 1991), break the age barrier either. Notable exceptions are David Armstrong's look at geriatrics' surveys (1983), Bryan Turner's observations on the regulation of bodies, particularly the rationalisation of diet (1992), and Mike Featherstone and Mike Hepworth's work on the postmodern life course (1991). Gerontology, for its part, is piloted by its instrumentalism and positivism. Thus it eschews Foucault's work because it eschews theoretical innovation in general, except for a small but growing number of gerontologists who write more reflexively about their profession by seeking inspiration in contemporary feminism, critical theory and poststructuralism. However, while such writers publishing in recently minted innovative journals as Journal ofAging Studies and Journal of Women and Aging, and in collections of 'critical gerontology' (Kenyon et al. 1991; Minkler and Estes 1991; Cole et al. 1992; Cole et al. 1993), favourably quote Habermas (Moody 1993), Gramsci (Hendricks and Leedham 1991), and Bourdieu (Gubrium 1993), Foucault's name usually draws more fire. A case in point is Jan Baars' article, 'The Challenge of Critical Gerontology: The Problem of Social Constitution' (1991). On the one hand, Baars commends a Foucauldian perspective because it would show that "'the elderly" as a category are constituted by the intellectual strategies of gerontology, which function as a legitimation for
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social practice institution that deal with "the elderly"'. On the other, Baars dismisses Foucault because his critique of power 'leaves no way out' (1991:234), a sentiment echoed in other gerontological considerations of Foucault. In those rare cases where a Foucauldian framework is utilised in gerontology, such as Ann Robertson's study of Alzheimer's disease (1990), the effort is highly worthwhile. Two foundations of Foucault's corpus would provide points of intervention into aging studies. First, power driven assemblages, such as disciplines or technologies, and worldview constituting knowledges, such as the human sciences, together recreate bodies and populations as fields of subjectivity (see Foucault 1983). Second, power /knowledge dynamics are most successful where they refigure personal existence as a realm of self-rule and bury truth in the depths of consciousness, the psyche or the soul. To upset this facade, Foucault exercises what David Shumway calls a strategy of 'exteriority', which 'does not stem from a claim about the true being plain and visible, but from a rejection of the claim that the true is systematically disguised' (1989:26). These elements present the analysis of old age with new parameters: the aged body and the elderly population as terminal points of power rather than ahistorical entities of a calculable nature; gerontology and geriatrics as disciplinary knowledges rather than progressive research sciences; the aged person as a kind of subject rather than a homogeneous individual or consciousness. More specific questions might also be raised: what kinds of genealogical episodes made geriatrics and gerontology possible? What kinds of governmental practices made the elderly a demographic force whose growth became envisioned as a social problem? A more extended study than time permits here could also lead us to a Foucauldian tracing of how the soul of the new senior citizen is imprisoned in an ever-active, postmodem lifestyle set against the more traditional rewards of a restful late life. However, when Foucault's theoretical toolbox is unpacked in the face of old age, the most appealing item is his work on the medicalisation of the body (1975; 1980a; 1980b). Although in other work, I have made a strong case for examining the elderly population as a power /knowledge construct (Katz 1992), Foucault's elaboration of the medicalised body forces us to rethink the means by which subjects of old age were primarily constituted in bodily terms. Three points become particularly salient. First, modem medical science organised the body, as a coherent symbolic system whose signs were taken to reflect the natural decline and inevitable difference of old age. Second, medical rationality, based on the master binary of normal/ pathological, bound elderly persons to their bodies as subjects of old age. Third, those medical practices that facilitated social regulation did not simply negate the aged body, but rendered its energies, vulnerabilities, and peculiarities visible to scientific scrutiny and the temporalising power of insurance, retirement, pension, and more recently, lifestyle, industries. I wish to compact these points into a more specific inquiry that contemplates, in a Foucauldian way, the medical making of the aged body as a kind of subject-body. While the terms 'geriatrics' and 'gerontology' were not coined until the early twentieth century, historians have shown that well
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before that time and especially in France in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, medical research developed the clinical basis for what can be called a discourse of senescence. The discourse of senescence was a new organisation of ideas and practices that captured the aged body through three commanding perceptions. 1. The aged body as a system of signification. Rejecting older humoural nosologies, medicine mapped disease within specific boundaries of the body. The body became a signification system running from its surface to its microscopic interior, a generalised site where meanings could be localised. A pathologist's task, therefore, was to examine, probe and spatialise the body and determine how visible surface signs masked inner states of disorder. That medical perception itself has a history is a central theme of Foucault's Birth of Clinic. Adding to it, Barbara Stafford details how anatomical research exemplified the very logic of investigation during the Enlightenment, geared as it was to the practices of probing, dissecting, fathoming, magnifying, codifying, and classifying natural phenomena of every variety (Stafford 1991). 2. The aged body as separate. Medicine recreated the aged body as a consistent articulation point for a distinct pathological anatomy. Whereas previous treatments for disease took little notice of age, modern treatments would depend upon it. In this regard, it is interesting to note the history of the term 'senile'. 'Senectitude' in 1481 originally meant old age; 'senescence' was used in 1695 to mean to grow old; and 'senile' was used in 1661 to mean that which was suited to old age. The term 'senility' was used in 1791 to mean a state of being old or infirm due to old age. However, by 1848 senile meant weakness, and by the late nineteenth century it had come to signify a pathological state (Covey 1988:294; Haber 1983:73-71; Kirk 1992:491). The term has taken on greater medical and negative connotations ever since. 1 3. The aged body as dying. European historians Philippe Aries and Norbert Elias note that in premodern society death was portrayed as a mysterious, unpredictable force ranging outside the boundaries of bodily life. Modern clinical research relocated death as a traceable presence within the body. By putting death into the living organs, tissues and cells, medicine reinvented the aging process as a constant dying. Physical degeneration and the meanings of old age seemed condemned to signify each other in perpetuity. These three perceptions- the aged body as signifying system, as separate and as dying- allowed late eighteenth century Parisian medical researchers, such as Xavier Bichat (1771-1802) and Fran~ois-Joseph-Victor Broussais (1772-1838), to establish a binding relationship between aging and pathology. While they did not intend to study the aging process or old age as such, they introduced a clinical foundation to old age that gave those who wrote about it a new authority (Gelfand 1980; Haber 1983:58-60; Staum 1980; Troyansky 1989:122). For example, Bichat, in his text, Recherches physiologiques sur la vie et la mort (1801), resignified the tissue as the articulating principle of vitalism at its smallest observable level (Haigh 1984). The life of the tissue was life itself in miniature; embattling disease and withstanding death.
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About this aspect of Bichat's work Foucault says, 'Bichat relativised the concept of death, bringing it down from that absolute in which it appeared as an indivisible, decisive, irrecoverable event: he volatilised it, distributed it throughout life in the form of separate, partial, progressive deaths, deaths thataresoslowinoccurringthattheyextendbeyonddeathitsel£'(1975:144). The distinct constellation of physiological states and anatomical signs that Bichat and his associates saw in the aged body was also validated by how they saw it, that is, the medical gaze itself. As Foucault suggests, the medical gaze was adaptable to probing ever finer and deeper levels of the body's mysteries. In Eloge de Pierre-Joseph Desault (1798) to his teacher, Bichat encapsulates the methodological centrality of the gaze: It is a picture that they [surgeons] paint rather than things which they learn.
They must see more than meditate, penetrate the depths less than stop at the surfaces. Their goal is attained when the opaque envelopes which cover our parts are no longer to their skilled eyes anything but a transparent veil which leaves revealed the whole and its relationships (quoted in Gelfand 1980:185).
Modern medicine further legitimated the discourse of senescence by incorporating it within its binary framework of the normal and the pathological. Previous centuries had separated health from disease and life from death. Medicine in the nineteenth century abandoned these distinctions and replaced them with a single grid of perception that unified pathology and normality. As Georges Canguilhem, one of Foucault's mentors, explains, the 'normal' physiological state is not synonymous with the 'healthy' physiological state. Normal is a constraining concept and a state of singularity; healthy is an open concept and a state of plurality. Therapy is invented to compensate for the deficiency or excess each state of normality or pathology induces in the other. As is known as well, concepts of norms, normality and pathology migrated from medicine to became the moral and statistical standards by which human relations in general would be governed. Thus the aged medicalised body was neither diseased nor healthy, but both normal and pathological since both conditions in old age were expressions of the same physiological laws. Eventually, geriatrics and gerontology would see it as their task to maintain the symmetry between normality and pathology across all spheres of late life. Foucault (1973, 1979) repeatedly asserted that thehumansciences emerged in tandem with the disciplinary practices that institutionalised subpopulations, the hospital being the most prominent institution. Geriatrics and gerontology are no exceptions. While hospitals indiscriminately housed the indigent, orphaned, mad, and the delinquent, the bodies of their inmate populations provided the research material for medicine in the nineteenth century. Bichat worked at the Hotel-Dieu in Montpellier, and later, Jean Martin Charcot conducted his research at the Salpetriere in Paris as its chief medical officer from 1862 until his death in 1883. His observations on old age, collected in Clinical Lectures on the Diseases of Old Age (1881) are akin to Bichat's medicine of the body. Charcot comments that besides the 'lunatics, idiots, and epileptics' the rest of the population were women of whom there were two classes. The first class were women of every, age afflicted with chronic and incurable diseases. More significantly were the women of the
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second class, 'who are, in general, over seventy years of age - for the administrative statutes have so decided it- but who, in all respects, enjoy an habitual. good health, although misery or desertion has put them under the protection of public aid. Here ... is where we shall find the materials which will serve us in making a clinical history of the affections of the senile period of life' (p.17). It is this second class of elderly women- destitute, confined but generally healthy- who constituted the study group for the establishment of geriatric principles. On the basis of his observations of these poor women. Charcot says, 'that the textural changes which old age induces in the organism sometimes attain such a point that the physiological and the pathological states seem to mingle by an imperceptible transition, and to be no longer sharply distinguishable' (Charcot and Loomis 1881:20). Charcot's text is considered a pioneering work in the development of gerontological knowledge, yet it offered little in the way of therapeutics (Haber 1983:62). Indeed, the more medical researchers probed the body's depth to discover the signs of senescence and degeneration, the less able were they to deter their pathological effects. This contradictory movement -the distribution of disease throughout the aged body combined with the limitations of healing it- raised one of the founding questions for geriatrics and gerontology in the twentieth century: how does one distinguish between diseases of old age and diseases in old age? Diseases of old age are incurable, however, diseases in old age, as with diseases in any age, can be managed and even alleviated. Ignatz Nascher, considered to be the father of geriatrics, writes in Geriatrics: The Diseases of Old Age (1914:51) that the job of the geriatrician is to 'separate the manifestations of normal senile processes from the symptoms of disease'. If the two are mistaken, then 'we will treat an incurable, progressive, physiological degeneration while the disease is killing the patient'. By the time geriatrics and gerontology emerged as fields of study, the agenda to separate old age from disease and create models of subjectivity based on healthy, successful and active aging became pivotal. In the postwar period, geriatrics remained more of a medical specialty and gerontology expanded the study of aging to biographical, psychological, demographic and sociological horizons. Thus the aged body, as a subjectbody first condemned to difference and then confounding the disease model that marked such difference, became the condition of possibility for these intellectual developments. Finally, Foucault's feminist critics, whether they dismiss his work for its lack of attention to gender inequality and women's history, or accept it with certain qualifications, have refined our understanding of how bodily life is the terrain on which power hierarchies can be opposed (Bartsky 1988; Bordo 1989; Hartsock 1990; McNay 1993; Sawicki 1991; Weedon 1987). Judith Butler writes that the body, binds women to a series of fictional feminine attributes such that the repetition of ritualised bodily performances constitutes 'the illusion of an abiding gendered self' (1990:140). Once the arbitrary nature of these performances is understood, then the body becomes the basis for deconstructive performances that expose 'the phantasmatic effect of abiding identity as a politically tenuous construction' (1990:141). The issue of body agency and subject formation is also germane to old age. What
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happens when elderly people see their bodies as a basis to refuse to be aged subjects? What happens when bodily lack of control is harnessed as a tactic of resistance? Ethnographic research has already documented this process in local situations. For example, Haim Hazan, in his case study of a London Day Centre for older persons (1986:320), records that a beauty class was poorly attended, as were fitness classes, 'because members preferred to be engaged in activities where competition and testing out of achievements were not required' (1986:317). As the aging population grows to new peaks, I imagine bodily rebellion to be a major force of cultural upheaval into the next millennium, one to which a Foucauldian gerontology will no doubt contribute. Here too await opportunities to bridge the gap between critical gerontologists who would borrow creatively from Foucault's genealogical entanglements of power, knowledge and discipline, and Foucauldian scholars who would enliven their studies by including old age in their general critique of regimes of truth and the politics of difference. 1 For general discussions on the development of gerontological language see Achenbaum 1985; Fischer 1978:90-4; Nuessel1982 and Von Kondratowitz 1991.
References Achenbaum, W. Andrew (1985). Societal Perceptions of Aging and the Aged', in Robert H. Binstock and Ethel (eds) Handbook of Aging and the Social Sciences. Shanas, 129-48. New York: Nostrand Reinhold. Aries, Phillippe (1981). The Hour of Our Death. Trans. Helen Weaver. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Armstrong, David (1983). Political Anatomy of the Body. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Arney, William Ray, and Bernard J. Bergen (1984). Medicine and the Management of Living: Taming the Last Great Beast. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Baars Jan (1991). 'The Challenge of Critical Gerontology: The Problem of Social Constitution'. Journal of Aging Studies 5(3):219-43. Bartky, Sandra Lee (1988). 'Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power', in Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby (eds), Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance, pp.61-86. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Bordo, Susan R. (1989). 'The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity: A Feminist Appropriation of Foucault', in Alison M. Jaggar and Susan R. Bordo (eds), Gender/Body/Knowledge: Feminist Reconstructions of Being and Knowing, pp.13-33. New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press. Butler, Judith (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Canguilhem, Georges (1978). On the Normal and the Pathological, trans. Carolyn R. Fawcett and introduction by Michel Foucault. Dordrecht: D. Reidel. Charcot, J.M., and Alfred L. Loomis (1881 ). Clinical Lectures on the Diseases ofOld Age, trans. Leigh H. Hunt. New York: William Wood. Cole, Thomas R., Van Tassel, David D. and Kastenbaum, Robert (eds) (1992). Handbook of the Humanities and Aging. New York: Springer. Cole, Thomas R., Achenbaum, W. Andrew, Jakobi, Patricia L. and Kastenbaum, Robert (eds) (1993). Voices and Visions of Aging: Toward a Critical Gerontology. New York: Springer.
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Covey, Herbert C. (1988). Historical Terminology Used to Represent Older People. The Gerontologist 28(3):291-97. Dean, Mitchell (1991). The Constitution of Poverty: Toward a Genealogy of Liberal Governance. London: Routledge. Elias, Norbert (1985). The Loneliness of the Dying, trans. Edmund Jephcott. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Ewald, Fran~ois (1991 ). 'Insurance and Risk', in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (eds), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, pp.197-210. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Featherstone, Mike, and Mike Hepworth (1991). 'The Mask of Ageing and the Postmodem Life Course', in Mike Featherstone, Mike Hepworth, and BryanS. Turner, The Body: Social Process and Cultural Theory, pp.371-89. London: Sage. Fischer, David Hackett (1978). Growing Old In America. Oxford: University Press. Foucault, Michel (1961; 1973). Madness and Civilization, trans. Richard Howard. New York: Vintage Books. __ _, (1963; 1975). The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. Trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Vintage Books. __ _, (1975; 1979). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books. __ _, (1976; 1980a). The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books. __ _, ((1980b ). 'The Politics of Health in the Eighteenth Century', in Colin Gordon (ed.), Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, pp.16682. New York: Pantheon Books. __ _, (1983). 'The Subject and Power', in Hubert L. Dreyfus and Haul Rabinow (eds), Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, pp.208-26. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Gelfand, Toby (1980). Professionalizing Modern Medicine: Paris Surgeons and Medical Science and Institutions in the 18th Century. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press. Gubrium, Jaber F (1993). Voice and Context in a New Gerontology', in Thomas B. Cole, W. Andrew Achenbaum, Patricia L Jakobi, and Robert Kastenbaum (eds), Voices and Visions of Aging: Toward a Critical Gerontology, pp.16-63. New York: Springer. Haber, Carole (1983). Beyond Sixty-Five: The Dilemma of Old Age in America's Past. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. __ _, (1986). 'Geriatrics: ASpecialityinSearchofSpecialists',in David Van Tassel and Peter N. Steams (eds), Old Age in Bureaucratic Society: The Elderly, The Experts, and the State in American History, pp.66-84. Westport, CT.: Greenwood Press. Haigh, Elizabeth (1984). Xavier Bichat and the Medical Theory of the Century. London: Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine. Hartsock, Nancy (1990). 'Foucault on Power: A Theory for Women?', in Linda L Nicholson (ed.) Feminism/Postmodernism, pp.157-75. New York: Routledge. Hazan, Haim (1986). 'Body Image and Temporality Among the Aged: A Case Study of an Ambivalent Symbol'. Symbolic Interaction 7(1):305-29. Hendricks, Jon and Cynthia A. Leedham (1991).'Dependency or Empowerment? Toward Moral and Political Economy of Aging', in Minkler, Meredith and CarrolL. Estes (eds ), Critical Perspectives ofAging: The Political and Moral Economy of Growing Old, pp.51-61. NY: Baywood. Hewitt, Martin (1991). 'Bio-politics and Social Policy: Foucault's Account of Welfare', in Featherstone et al. (ed.), The Body: Social Process and Cultural Theory, pp.225-55. London: Sage Publications
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Katz, Stephen (1992). 'Alarmist Demography: Power, Knowledge, and the Elderly Population'. Journal of Aging Studies 6(3):203-25. Kenyon, Gary M.,JamesE. Birren,andJohannesJ. F. Schroots (eds) (1991).Metaphors of Aging in Science and the Humanities. New York: Springer. Kirk, Henning (1992). 'Geriatric Medicine and the Categorisation of Old Age - The Historical Linkage'. Ageing and Society 12(4):183-97. McNay, Lois (1993). Foucault and Feminism. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Minkler, Meredith, and Carroll L. Estes (1991). Critical Perspectives on Aging: The Political and Moral Economy of Growing Old. Amityville, NY: Baywood Publishing. Moody, Harry R. (1993). 'Overview: What is Critical Gerontology and Why is it Important?', in Thomas R. Cole, W. Andrew Achenbaum, Patricia L. Jakobi, and Robert Kastenbaum (eds), Voices and Visions ofAging: Toward a Critical Gerontology, pp.xv-xli. New York: Springer. Nascher, Ignatius L. [1914] (1919). Geriatrics: The Diseases of Old Age and Their Treatment, 2nd edn rev. London: Kegan Paul, French, Trubner. Neussel, Frank (1982). 'The Language of Ageism'. The Gerontologist 22(3):273-6. Osborne, Thomas (1992). 'Medicine and Epistemology: Michel Foucault and the Liberality of Clinical Reason'. History of the Human Sciences, 5(2):63-93. Robertson, Ann (1990). 'The Politics of Alzheimer's Disease: A Case Study in Apocalyptic Demography'. International Journal of Health Services, 20(3):429-42. Rupp, Jan C.C. (1992). 'Michel Foucault: Body Politics and the Rise and Expansion of Modem Anatomy'. Journal of Historical Sociology, 5(1):31-59. Sawicki, Jana (1991). Disciplining Foucault: Feminism, Power, and the Body. New York: Routledge. Scott, Sue et al. (eds) (1992). Public Risks and Private Dangers. Aldershot: Avebury. Shumway, David R. (1989). Michel Foucault. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Singer, L. (1993). Erotic Welfare: Sexual Theory and Politics in the Age of Epidemic. New York: Routledge. Spitzack, Carole (1992). 'Foucault's Political Body in Medical. Praxis', in Drew Leder (ed.) The Body in Medical Thought and Practice, pp.51-68. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Stafford, Barbara Maria (1991). Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Staum, MartinS. (1980). Cabanis: Enlightenment and Medical Philosophy in the French Revolution. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Stearns, Peter N. (1980). 'Old Women: Some Historical Observations'. Journal of Family History 5(1):44-57. Troyansky, David G. (1989). Old Age in the Old Regime: Image and Experience in Eighteenth Century France. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Turner Bryan S. (1992). Regulating Bodies: Essays in Medical Sociology. London: Routledge. Von Kondratowitz, Hans-Joachim (1991). The Medicalization of Old Age: Continuity and Change in Germany from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century', in Margaret Pelling and Richard M. Smith (eds), Life, Death and the Elderly: Historical Perspectives, pp.134-64. London: Routledge.
Action Research in a Nursing Home: Theorising Critical Incidents Arising from Action Through a Foucauldian View of Institutional Power Sue Crane This paper will describe how some of the 'critical incidents' arising from engaging in a participatory action research project in a nursing home during 1993 (Crane 1994a; 1994b), have been theorised through a Foucauldian view of the history of institutions and the nature of modern power (Foucault 1977) to give rise to new understandings of the nature of nursing, caring and gender within this context for participants. This critical participatory action research project was developed with guidance from the work of Wilfred Carr, Stephen Kemmis and Robin McTaggart (Carr and Kemmis 1986; Kemmis and McTaggart 1988;McTaggart 1989) and personal guidance from the latter two authors and most particularly Marie Brennan as part of supervision of a PhD Thesis through the Faculty of Education at Deakin University (Geelong). In keeping with the critical and feminist philosophies from which this research has been shaped, this paper has been written with the support of, and validation from, the other research participants, towards whom thanks is also extended, and the author will now begin to engage in dialogue with the reader through the use of the first person rather than the third. The project has been running since May 1993 and involves the participation of about a third of the total staff (ie. 15 people) of a nursing home in Melbourne, including representatives from nurses, care assistants, managers, domestics and activities staff. All the participants are women as a consequence of all the staff, except for one part-time cook and one cleaner, being women. This nursing home has thirty elderly residents who are in the main debilitated through experiencing various levels and types of dementias, which has been a limiting factor in their ability to participate in the action research processes. During the initial three months the participants developed their own ways of experiencing what it means to learn collectively and produce their own knowledge within the project, having commenced with simple introductory remarks, put down on paper through various drafts until it came across in a language which was theirs rather than in my academically driven style, plus a set of 'Principles for Participatory Action Research' written by Robin McTaggart (1989) and a diagrammatic representation of what action research might look like for a group of people put forward by Yolande Wadsworth's publications (1991a; 1991b). Concurrently my role in facilitating and participating in the project was developed. The other participants initially felt apprehensive about my
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presence wondering about my motives and whether or not a 'spy' for the Director of Nursing had been planted in their midst! The hierarchical division of labour is starkly evident in most health care organisational units -made apparent through a person's role and the uniform they weardepicting the extent of their legitimated knowledgeable skill base and authority over decision making. This was discernible within the nursing home and the nursing staff were segregated too: either being Registered Nurses (who were always 'in charge') or Enrolled Nurses who, with the Care Assistants, engaged in most of the actual 'hands-on' interactions with residents, ie. daily personal hygiene and grooming. Therefore having a nursing academic engaging in practice alongside all staff, nursing and nonnursing, was most unusual for them. As a consequence, the discussions arising in weekly meetings of this project came to be valued by all staff because they were coming together for the first time in a forum which everyone could access with an equal voice. In this way, shared and renewed understandings of each other's roles within the nursing home developed which have fostered less stressful working relationships.
The nature of modem power Foucault has presented us with a very different way of viewing the nature of modern power within a medical institution in his work Discipline and Punish, Foucault describes how medical institutions developed as one of several 'disciplinary institutions' during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in response to the need to organise and control the functioning of large numbers of people (Foucault 1977:136-9). This new form of power is more subtle in operation and operates continuously through the lowest levels of an institution or 'power /knowledge' regime, more so through the interconnecting social practices of people than through their ideological beliefs. Coupled with the participatory action research processes, viewing power from this perspective has opened new avenues of self awareness and growth for the majority of participants, although the Director of Nursing and the Registered Nurses have experienced the most difficulty in moving with the shifts in thinking and changes in relationships. Thus the complex web or matrix of social practices within the nursing home could be viewed from the perspective of Foucault's claims about the interplay between power and knowledge or social constraint and discourse (framed by medical discourses). The objects of inquiry of these social practices are the residents, the diseases they have and the ways in which information about them is collated, stored and used. Another object of inquiry is the managerial functioning of the nursing home through established policies and procedures for operation, the use and storage of equipment, the provision and maintenance of space within with social practices occur and the training of staff, the uniforms they wear, the roles/responsibilities they enact, the routines they engage in, etc. Medical and managerial knowledge is produced and legitimated within this context without any questioning of truth or validity... that is until the staff collectively began to engage in critical participatory action research.
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Critical incidents, theorising action and cultural shifts A particular description of an event occurring during the research project became defined as a' critical incident' (Measor 1986; Walker 1985). There are numerous ways in which I began to theorise the emerging questions and issues arising for me from many of these 'critical incidents' of the overall project. These have been fed back to inform the research in the broad areas of action research, gender, and nursing the elderly as well as nursing per se. One incident has been selected within the following discussion in order to present new personal insights into power relationships in nursing and selfsurveillance as a disciplinary mechanism in nursing I caring practices gained from a beginning exploration of Foucault's work. This incident is chosen as it was the trigger for this particular theoretical pathway to be followed. The incident occurred when I bathed an elderly woman resident, who I will refer to as Cath, using essential oils with my developing knowledge of aromatherapy. This incident was described in one of the research meetings in detail including the observable reactions of Cath (who was well known for calling out loudly and repetitively ...becoming calm with the aromatic bathing), and became viewed as 'critical' in the research process as it drew staff together in a more cohesive way to examine their social practices within the nursing home in a 'safe way' ie. as aroma therapy represented for them the development of new practices rather than the questioning of their own current practices. This critical incident provides a possible model for nurses and other health care workers to tap into learning by engaging in participatory action research through theorising new action in the first instance rather than emphasising reflection on existing action. For example, the demonstrated use of aromatherapy by myself led to staff questioning the validity of incorporating aromatherapy within their own practices, to the extent that they then reflected on current practices and the value of the medical 'power I knowledge regime'. If I had merely asked them to reflect on their practice and determine how aroma therapy might be useful within a research group meeting, the feedback would have been one about time constraints limiting their exploration of this question any further. Although the focus of the critical incident is my practice as a nurse, from the collective and progressive learning around the uses of aromatherapy, the staff participating in the research meetings seemed much more at ease in not only reflecting on and planning for positive changes within the practices which were viewed as being within their domain and control, such as wound care and general care of the skin of residents, but also in addressing those within the managerial domain with the managers, such as the monitoring of staff breaks (an incident which I will come back to) and the introduction of a new catering system. All of these changes were captured in other critical incidents. Shifts occurred making it possible for participants to create their own directions for the research, rather than seeking it from myself, and thus towards valuing themselves: their roles and responsibilities, their voices, and recognising their ability to collaboratively recreate the 'power I knowledge regime' so that an alternative web of social practices might emerge.
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The spin offs for individual residents have been varied and numerous with changes in social practices and interactions between staff and residents towards an ethic of caring which encompasses pleasurable experiences and well-being rather than merely being kept comfortable. Why were these essential aspects of caring not evident in the first place you might ask? But where within the Commonwealth Government's CAM/SAM Funding scheme for Nursing Homes is there a category for the funding of alternative healing practices? On reviewing Cath's situation, as the resident in the critical incident, it would seem that aromatherapy could offer her more in this instance than medical therapies. In another situation a Registered Nurse decided that a massage with essential oils would have greater therapeutic benefit for an anxious resident rather than using medically prescribed drugs. When one reviews individual residents of the nursing home and examines what medicine can and has offered them, the research has thrown out many examples of residents whose discomfort, physically or psychologically, has not been addressed by medical therapies in a satisfactory way (ie alleviating the discomfort to a tolerable level for the resident). One wonders whether any single health therapy can fully address the complexities of gerontological nursing care, or whether a combination of therapies might enhance the well-being of elderly people.
Visibility and 'self-surveillance' If we return to Foucault historical account of the development of institutions, individual bodies became spatially arranged within institutions so that overseeing the population within became unproblematic. Individual bodies also became open to greater scrutiny, which Foucault refers respectively to as new synoptic and individualising visibility. The Panopticon model for a prison, as developed by Bentham in 1843, is put forward by Foucault as an example (1977:195-209) which he uses to further develop his explication of the ways in which modern power operates. The hospital design of the nineteenth century with the wards being long and open in a 'Nightingale' style was still being used until very recently in the planning of hospitals. The nursing home in this research project was opened in the early 1970s having been a reception centre which was refurbished in a style still currently in vogue in hospital design - ie. the formation of several single, four and six bed rooms within a 'ward' area. Self-surveillance as a disciplining mechanism Foucault describes as developing within the formation and functioning of institutions (1977:201-5). Within the Nightingale ward, the positioning of the desk or office of the nurse in charge of the ward would be at one end, from where, due to the effects of lighting and shade, all patients and all employees would be able to be supervised, without these supervisees being able necessarily to see whether or not they were in fact at any one moment being observed. The effect induced by this mechanism or technology of power became the internalisation of surveillance so that: the efficiency of power, its constraining force have, in a sense, passed over to the other side - to the side of its surface of application. He [sic] who is subjected to a field of visibility, and knows it, assumes responsibility for the
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j'oucau{t: 'IFte Legacy constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection (Foucault 1977:202-3).
On considering the change of spatial arrangement of residents' beds within the more modern design of the nursing home, the operation of self-surveillance, following Foucault's definition, will remain unaltered. When thinking about the issues of gender and caring arising from the aromatherapy critical incident and the changes that followed, the 'legitimate' power I knowledge regime is very much framed by medical and managerial objects of inquiry. However the early changes in the project around the use of aromatherapy were introduced in ways which the research participants have seen as being able to effect and control without frustrating the other disciplines. Is this the way that women who view themselves as being devalued within their social context can create their own space for control over social practices which they I others would view as their domain, for example caring for others, particularly the aged? If so, within this research project I should begin to ask what other discursive practices of the staff are evident? This brings us to another question: 'is caring internalised by women as a self-surveillance mechanism in society?' The women workers within the action research process have constantly raised stories of caring for their family members as interjections of discussions centred around caring for the residents in the nursing home. These types of stories were prominent within discourses during the process of introducing aromatherapy into the nursing home, and concurrently into the care for self and more so for family members. Such communications were in evidence in the corridors of the nursing home at tea breaks as well as during the research meetings, being a dialectical exploration of caring between the workplace and home. Thus the responsibility of a caring role of these women extends beyond their contribution within the home to the way they view their contribution within the nursing home and formed the focus for their discourse only in informal exchanges, until valued within group research meetings.
Claiming a political voice Nancy Fraser extends Foucault's work on the nature of modern power in a pro-active way for women, so they might take up her challenge of claiming a voice in the politics of social welfare which directly affects them: Foucault enables us to understand power very broadly, and yet very finely, as anchored in the multiplicity of what he calls 'micropractices', the social practices that constitute everyday life in modern societies. This positive conception of power has the general but unmistakable implication of a call for a 'politics of everyday life' (Fraser 1989:18).
Fraser (1989:144-6) calls upon feminists to engage in research which serves to structurally and ideologically enlighten social debates and policy creation in welfare, as women are predominantly the recipients and employees of the welfare system in all capitalist welfare states, namely Western Europe and North America- however Australasian countries can also be included. As women are the ones who gain from the existence of health and welfare
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programs, they also stand to lose the most through financial cuts to these publicly provided services. Fraser describes how these funds are allocated throughframingtheneedsofthecommunityinwayswhicharequantitative in nature and ignore the value that the input of employees and/ or recipients of services may add to the debate over allocation of resources. As she states: More importantly, it takes for granted the definition of the needs in question, as if that were self-evident and beyond dispute. It therefore occludes the fact that the interpretation of people's needs is itself a political stake, indeed sometimes the political stake. Clearly, this way of framing issues poses obstacles for feminist politics, since at the heart of such politics lie questions about what various groups of women really need and whose interpretations of women's needs should be authoritative. Only in terms of a discourse orientated to the politics of need interpretation can feminists meaningly intervene in the coming welfare wars. But this requires a challenge to the dominant policy framework (Fraser 1989:145).
I want to argue that this form of social research can provide women and recipients of welfare, specifically in this project the staff, and potentially the residents, of a nursing home, with a voice. A voice in the form of what they really need with respect to financial support in order to fully attain a professional level of nursing care, and care all round from the staff, which is of clear therapeutic value for the residents. This research project has demonstrated that through action research collaborative processes of decision making can be valued and actively encouraged. Between Christmas 1993 and the New Year the staff of this nursing home received a memorandum from the Director of Nursing and her Manager which relayed to staff a decision about the timing of staff breaks on the morning shift. The staff felt that they should have been consulted about this change and approached the Manager for approval to set up a staff meeting with him whereby they could have the chance to share their views and also fully acknowledge the reason behind issuing the memo. This meeting did go ahead, after the 'day staff' (with support from the Director of Nursing) organised a date, time, venue and agenda as well as putting a notice around the nursing home and actively encouraging staff from other shifts to come in. The result was that all the people involved in this meeting felt that they were able to have a voice and they received an apology from the Manager. The Manager also agreed that such meetings were a welcome change and offered to attend future meetings if he was invited. When asked what had created the change- the action research process or the memo, the staff in the research groups felt that it was a combination of both, as the research process has helped them to develop confidence in sharing their ideas and concerns around their practices in the nursing home, as well as learning how to organise and run meetings in a way which the Management of the nursing home are responsive to. This event also indicates that having gained confidence in exploring and questioning their own practices through theorising for example the aromatherapy incident, thus developing a new 'power /knowledge regime', they are now extending themselves beyond this to addressing the managerial 'power/knowledge regime' in a way which is non-threatening or confrontational. As the
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Director of Nursing commented about the incident of the memo- in the past staff would have gone directly to their trade union to complain about this situation, rather than address it collectively for themselves. Correspondingly the boundaries of their self-surveillance may be shifting also. In summary, this paper has represented a mere snippet of a view of how critical incidents arising from practices in a nursing home within an participatory action research project have reflexively directed an exploration of Foucault's work, around the production of institutional power and selfsurveillance mechanisms, which in turn have raised new understandings of caring and nursing for research participants in the nursing home.
References Carr, W. and Kemmis, S. (1986). Becoming Critical: Knowing Through Action Research, Deakin University Press ,Geelong, Victoria. Crane, S. (1994a). 'Action Research In A Nursing Home: Critical And Feminist Perspectives Arising', paper presented at the conference 'Fifth Annual Critical and Feminist Perspectives in Nursing Conference', March 11-13th, St. Thomas Conference Centre, Bothell, Washington, USA. Crane, S. (1994b). 'Participatory Action Research in a Nursing Home: A New Frontier for Nursing Research', paper presented at the 'Third National Nursing Forum- Frontiers of Nursing', Royal College of Nursing, Australia, 24-25th May 1994, Darwin, Australia. Fraser, N. (1989). Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory, Polity Press, Cambridge. Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish, The Birth of the Prison, Alan Sheridan (translator), Vintage Books, New York. Kemrnis, S. and. McTaggart, R. (1988). The Action Research Planner, Deakin University Press, Geelong, Victoria. McTaggart, R. (1989). 'Principles for Participatory Action Research', a paper presented to the 3er Encuentro Mundial Investigaction Participativa (The Third World Encounter on Participatory Research), Managua, Nicaragua, September 3-9, 1989,ascitedin Wadsworth, Y. (1991) Everyday Evaluation on the Run, Action Research Issues Association Inc., Melbourne. Wadsworth, Y. (1991a). Do It Yourself Social Research, Victorian Council of Social Service and Melbourne Family Care Organisation/ Allen and Unwin, Collingwood, Victoria. Wadsworth, Y. (1991b). Everyday Evaluation On The Run, Action Research Issues Association (Inc), Melbourne. Walker, R. (1985). Doing Research, A Handbook for Teachers, Routledge, London.
Toward a Critical Ontology: Nursing and the Problem of the Modem Subject
Situating the 'I': Speaking/Writing 'the Self'. In giving this paper the title that I have a certain imperative compels me to
situatemyselfwhichiwilldonotsomuchin termsof'whoami?'butrather, 'what am I?' Foucault's response to that very same question in an interview late in his life was at once evasive and yet curiously confessional; I make it my own: I don't feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you would say in the end, do you thinkthatyouwouldhavethecouragetowriteit?Whatistrueforwritingand a love relationship is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don't know what will be the end (Foucault in Martin 1988:9).
Foucault's thoughts here encourage me to adopt a peculiar and personal 'attitude'-' a mode of relating to contemporary reality; a voluntary choice ... a way of thinking and feeling ... of acting and behaving that at the one and the same time marks a relation of belonging and marks itself a task' (Foucault 1984:39). I begin my paper then, with taking a certain attitude, where 'to think the self with attitude is to think in a doubled way; the question of "what are we" marks the exigencies of acting and behaving and belonging within the present as it problematises the task of contemporary cultural criticism' (Probyn 1993:109). And since this is something of the task before me now I want to position myself and come at the politics of the 'modern' nurse 'from behind', and 'cut across it on the diagonal' as Foucault (1984:375-6) would say. For it is precisely my specific history as a nurse, a history, I suspect, share however partially and incompletely, with many other nurses, which urges that I 'trouble' the ways in which we have been marginalised and silenced through structures and relations of violence and negation by forcing on these things a certain opacity; by deliberately exposing the transparency of our situatedness in modernity's discourses of control, domination and ultimately, subjection. My task here is to disturb the unity, coherence and stability of the 'humanist' and therefore generic identity of the 'nurse' - she who is always a nurse without a name - and to articulate a politics that 'take[s] ... all those secret and impossible stories [nurses tell], recognise[s] what has been made out on the margins, and then recognising it, refuse[s] to celebrate it; a politics that will, watching that past say: "so what"; and abandon it to the dark' (Steedman in Probyn 1993:109). Foucault's notion that the significant issue in work and life is to 'become someone you were not in the beginning' begged me to ask of our culture of nursing, 'what might it mean to be a nurse?' Having spent nearly twenty
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years immersed in a culture, sustained yet fractured by certain technologies of discipline, morality and desire, it seemed to me if 'what we are in our actuality', as subjects enmeshed in patriarchal signifying systems which invariably work to render mute our voices, then a study of those 'regimes of truth and practice' most disabling of our lived experiences as nurses was in order. Sharing Foucault's 'optimism' that 'so many things can be changed, fragile as they are, bound up more with circumstances than necessities, more arbitrary than self-evident, more a matter of complex, but temporary, historical circumstances than with inevitable anthropological constants' (in Kritzman 1988:156)- this paper speaks to something of the 'truth effects' of that particularly 'grand' narrative of legitimation -liberal-humanism- as these effects are enfleshed (McLaren 1988a) by practising nurses in and though the discourse of caring.
The Problem of Experience: 'Naturalising' the Contingent and the Ephemeral? 'Foucault was concerned, above all else of course, with the problem of experience. This he defined as three modes of objectification (fields of knowledge with concepts; dividing practices or rules; the relationship to oneself) through which individuals become subjects' (Kritzman 1988: xviii). In my research I was concerned only with the first and second of these modes. Nurses who worked in the rough and tumble of everyday life in the hospital ward 0Nalker 1993)- a geo-political space discursively constructed in the specific relations of power /knowledge configured most broadly in whatwemightliketo call 'modernity'- shared their stories with me and each other in an ethnographic journey over nine months. A central assumption which drove the research was that 'if experience is understood through language, and language shapes how we see and act with and on the world, then it follows that experience itself does not guarantee truth since it is always open to conflicting or contradictory interpretations (Weedon in McLaren 1988b:3). To lapse into a such flaccid 'appeal to experience as uncontestable evidence and as an originary point of explanation - as a foundation upon which analysis is based' (Scott 1992:24) denies the 'constructed nature of experience ... the evidence of experience, whether conceived through a metaphorofvisibilityorinanyotherwaythattakesmeaningastransparent, reproduces rather than contests given ideological systems' (1992:25). It was my intention to argue that 'it is not individuals who have experience, but subjects who are constituted through experience' (1992:26). Indeed the 'authority' of experience as 'foundation' for what passes as 'truth' and 'knowledge' in and of the world is perhaps the most potent and pervasive 'truth effect' of the discourses of both liberal-humanism and science, but I am somewhat pre-emptive of my argument here. To best convey something of that journey the research participants and I took together in pursuit of what I now might call a' critical ontology', I shall explicate, augment and refine an argument developed in the thesis which held that the master discourses of science and liberal-humanism have shaped all but indelibly the ways nurses are able to think of themselves as
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human agents. I will inflect that argument here through a more explicitly genealogical critique of the 'effects of power' at work in the 'regime of practices' we name 'caring'. It is a critique designed to help us 'understand how [as nurses] we govern ourselves and others by the production of truth'. The experience of caring then, those 'constellation[s] or configurations of meaning effects' (de Lauretis 1984:18) must be thought as always constituted for nurses in those 'places where what is said and done, [the] rules imposed and reasons given, the planned and the taken for granted meet and intersect' (Foucault in Kritzman 1988:103). I am claiming that the experience of caring as a practice, rather than being aninnocent,benignandinnatelyhumanactivity,isalltoooftenencountered (indeed engaged) by nurses as a technology of power. The practice of caring can be thought even more specifically, as a technology of gender and morality which works sometimes to efface and at times erase a nurse's sense of herself as a critical human agent. Indeed the practice of caring often subverts and destabilises the meanings she can derive from her experiences in the ways it inscribes her 'body I subject' (McLaren 1988a) with a complex of signs and symbols that mark her as politically quiescent and degrade her capacity to resist the exercise of power as it is confronted in the exigencies of daily life as 'just a nurse'. It does this through techniques of deferral and displacement which cathect a nurse's subjectivity(s) with a certain docility and passivity. The particular 'technique of sensibility' (Eagleton 1985 I 1986) I will interrogate here can be described as the 'tyranny of niceness' (Street 1992a; Walker 1993). Such a tyranny is an 'effect of power' in the 'regime of truth' (Foucault 1980) I call caring, through which the nurse's sense of herself as a significant 'other' is diminished as is inflicted on her with the subtle yet pernicious violence of the dominant' other's' dismissal of her critical agency and as she herself colludes with this dismissal because her history has taught her that it is not appropriate or safe to do otherwise. The discourse of caring is one constituted, and then legitimated and invested with extraordinary authority in the culture of nursing (indeed in the entire culture of Westernised health care) primarily through the self-referential and circuitous logic of humanist discourses. I am positioned then as unashamedly sceptical and ruthlessly critical of 'both the ontological claims and the ethical values which humanist systems of thought invest in the notion of subjectivity' (Gordon 1980:239).
Tracing the beginnings of the modem 'caring nurse': Religious patriarchy and liberal feminism The myth of the 'modern' nurse can be traced back to that most (in)famous of icons, namely Florence Nightingale. Her legacy endures and resists deconstruction in our culture with a tenacity unprecedented in any other non scientific tradition we might have inherited along the way. Nightingale spoke from and through the discourses of religious patriarchy and an incipient liberal feminist movement (Walker 1993; Street 1992b). Unfortunately the former regime of truth has left its mark rather more profoundly in nursing culture than the latter. Nightingale tirelessly promoted a particular version of the 'good' nurse that I will not reiterate here (see for example
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Hazelton 1993; Gamarnikow 1978; Wolf 1986; Colliere 1986). The essentialist and humanist discourses of nineteenth century liberal-feminism coupled with those of the 'suffering servant' came to expression through Nightingale as she strove to secure a place for nursing as both important (and necessarily women's work); as a profession worthy of inclusion in the public sphere of paid work.
The Miracles of Modernity: The Dazzling Discourses of Science and Liberal-Humanism Nurses since Nightingale's era have invested much intellectual energy in constructing nursing as a fundamentally humanist endeavour; to this day they passionately espouse the humanist doctrine of man (and I use that word advisedly) as the 'sole source and free agent of [his] actions ... [they defend an adherence to] 'methodological individualism' (Sarup 1994:76), and generally believe that the Enlightenment project of emancipation from ignorance and oppression (Lyotard 1992) is one decidedly incomplete. This project is fuelled by the truth claims of science which work in collusion with those of humanism to reciprocally validate each of these regimes' position in nursing. Modern nurses argue that each of these things forms a foundation for a stable and secure identity for nursing (see for example, Benner 1984; Benner and Wrubel1989; Parse 1987; Thompson 1983). Martha Rogers, an intellectual of 'universal' proportions in nursing, exemplifies the ways in which liberal-humanism and science can be made to fudge at their discursive exteriors (Laclau and Mouffe 1985) to produce theories of nursing appealing to the 'truths' of each regime. Rogers' work which is produced under the rubric of a 'unitary science of human beings' insists on an 'autonomous individualism', a personhood innately endowed with 'natural rights', a subject who is 'self-directive', 'potentially fully conscious', and a 'socio-political human who produces her life' (Lather 1991:161). Nursing for Rogers 'is the study of unitary, irreducible, indivisible human and environmental fields' (Rogers in Barrett 1990:6). Furthermore, 'nursing's focus on unitary human beings and their world as defined in [the organised body of nursing's knowledge] is unique to nursing' (1990:6). A rather grand claim this. But in asserting a rampantly humanist subject, Rogers also imbues this individual with properties drawn from quantum physics and electromagnetic theories which posit energy fields and dynamic interconnectedness between self and outer world. Modernist assumptions of the inexorably linear nature of 'progress' are also overtly displayed in her work: 'the evolution of life exhibits an invariant one-way trend ... the future, like the past, is part of the evolutionary story of the universe. The irreversible and unidirectional nature of the life process is bound inextricably with the unfolding of the physical world. Increasing complexity and innovation mark the passing of time (Rogers 1970:55, 59). Rogers' work is but one example from a lineage of scholars who wrote from the early 50s through the mid 80s in search of a 'grand' narrative with which nursing could legitimate its place in the hierarchy of those academic and practice disciplines of health care. Nurses have continued to reinscribe her ideas in the canonical texts of our culture and thus hegemonise the
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discourses of humanism at the expense of alternate modes of understanding. Thinking this history as itself an effect of modernity's particular power I knowledge configurations is, in light of my critique here is 'not [so much] to question the reality of "the past" but to [allow me to more fully] interrogate the rationality of "the present"' (Foucault in Gordon 1980:242).
Caring as commonsense Activity: Knowledge, Experience, Gender and Humanism Tracing a legacy of caring that ascends through Nightingale's impassioned pleas that nursing be valorised as women's work, an inheritance reworked through our twentieth century scholars' wholesale commitment to humanistic and scientistic theories, allows us to better come at the problem of caring as a technology of gender and morality which positions women and nurses on the great flabby underbelly of patriarchy. It urges us to open up to interrogation those theories of caring generated and circulated in our 'modern' times. It did not take me long to discover that the discourse of caring in nursing is one fabricated in essentialist theories of gender (see for example Leinenger 1984; Watson 1985; Parse 1985). They have served to homogenise and sanitise caring as something beautiful possessed by women and to locate it as a form of commonsense for nursing. Following Chris Weedon however, I argue that the 'the degree to which particular theories of gender can be assimilated into common-sense discourse varies since [as I pointed out earlier] common-sense itself tends to privilege conscious knowledge and experience, more often than not reproducing the liberalhumanist version of subjectivity' (1987:75). Caring is constructed 'commonsensically' as women's work because the knowledges which inhere in such activity are 'naturally' located in the domestic, private and hence relatively inaccessible sphere of 'women's' work. Nurses' experiences of caring are more often than not wound in and around their experiences as women - mothering, nurturing, soothing, touching, feeling- all these activities are gendered female and carry a certain cultural and symbolic capital (Bourdieu in McCall 1992) in nursing. As Minh-ha (1988:74) confirms, 'it is often assumed ... that 'women's' enemy is the intellect, that their apprehension of life can only unwind around a cooking pot, baby's diaper, or matters of the heart'. Such notions 'offer a sense of security to individual subjects. If [women] accept that [their] individuality and ... femininity are fixed qualities which constitute [their] very nature, then [they] are likely to assume in advance what [they] can achieve' (Weedon 1987:83). But the circuitous logic of humanism while presenting experience as a neutral and transparent category with a stable and permanent referent in the' self-coheringindividual who is free to initiate actions and take control of her life' (Morton and Zavazadeh 1988:160) only (re)constitutes 'experience in 'its weakest form' (Probyn 1993). Unfortunately of course, 'given the complexity of its articulation, and the fact that experience is always conjunctural, located in the backwardness and forwardness of the historical present, it is not surprising that the experience of being within certain circumscribed modes of existence sometimes serves to obscure the connections between structures' (Probyn 1993:21). As I will
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come to elaborate, the structures and relations which inhere in those technologies of gender and morality with which I am concerned, construct the experience of caring 'in its weakest form'- that is, as expressed through essentialist theories of gender and reinforced through humanist assumptions about the 'nature' of human agency. For experience in this form 'also serve[s] to mask the construction of its own ground' (Probyn 1993:21). This is perhaps the most sinister 'truth effect' of the discourse of caring because it stealthily (re)constitutes nurses' subject positions in ways that disguise the those very constituting effects in the name of something virtually inviolable called 'caring'. The credo bequeathed by Nightingale and set into the text of our culture by twentieth century nurses is enunciated thus: 'caring is the central concept in nursing and is uniquely known and expressed in nursing (Boykin and Schoenhofer 1990:149) ... it is 'the essence ... the dominant and unifying feature of nursing' (Morse et al. after Leininger 1991:119). These statements are etched on modern nurses' bodies, inscribed in their very flesh and sinews; they penetrate their skeletal frameworks and mark a position for the 'modern' nurse from which she seemingly cannot escape. Caring assumes the status of an ontological and epistemological a priori. Nurses care because they are human beings for whom caring is the Archimedean point of their existence. Nursing equals caring equals nursing. A monstrous tautology, self-referential and self-legitimating in its essentialising and universalising assumptions; theories of caring in nursing have become enshrined as dogma. As a totalising and monolithic body of work such theories have effectively installed 'caring' as the raison d'etre of a nurse's existence.
Nursing as a discourse of service: Ontological imperatives When I came to critique the ways in which women live and experience nursing in the hurly-burly of hospital life it became apparent that the scholars' version of caring patently was not what nurse practitioners lived and felt it to be. Such a critical mome nt led me to theorise how caring as a moral technology might come to expression across the busy surfaces of working nurses lives; I asked, how might caring be spoken and heard as it is engaged within nursing practice? How might the discourse of caring intersect a nurse's sense of herself as a nurse, as someone who is a kind and gentle woman, and work to undermine her capacity to critically investigate that sense she has of herself as a 'caring' woman? Despite what I have just been saying about the scholarly culture of nursing, nursing is constructed in our Western societies primarily as a 'regime of practices' that form and are formed from a discourse of service. That is to say the imperative to provide a nursing service to the sick and needy constitutes a 'will to care'- a sort of ontological exigency which impels nurses to subjugate their own needs and desires to those of the 'others' in their care. Such a discourse of service indeed constructs and is constructed in those local, naive, popular and unscientific modes of production Foucault (1980) refers to as'subjugated knowledges'. The mandate 'to serve' is in turn fuelled by the bureaucratic and institutional demands of the health care agencies whose expansive humanistic and scientistic rhetorical slogans
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trumpet the provision of 'holistic and quality' care and deftly compose a thinly disguised and philosophically bankrupt strategy to seduce the consumers of health care into complicity with their agenda. Such a strategy also serves to infuse (and thereby delude) health care providers with a strong sense of their self importance. The 'real' world of nursing practice takes place on a site of struggle hazardous in its complexity and vexed by its complicity with capitalist and bourgeois ethics. I discovered in my analyses of stories from practice that the nurse could be forgiven for thinking that her work world is a site of harmony and only superficial conflict and contradiction - the 'tyranny of niceness' (Street 1992a) works stealthily to ensure that the surface of everyday life as a nurse is seldom broken and the fractious and deeply embedded asymmetrical relations of power and privilege which traverse such a life, never exposed.
The tyranny of niceness: A technique of sensibility forged in the canonical literature and lived in the world of practice While I was early in the data collection phase my supervisor (Street 1992a) uncovered some interesting material indeed. In some local participatory action research projects in a large urban hospital each of the nurses she spoke to agreed that the ward they worked on was a 'happy place where everyone was nice' (1992a:2). But there was a problem. Each nurse it seemed, without exception, also 'claimed to be an outsider, someone who didn't really fit in with the rest of the ward' (1992a:2). She 'heard the same litany of concerns [from each nurse] which stemmed from a lack of significant relationship with others in the team. This shallow level of relation meant that individual nurses felt unable to express their real fears or their anger at the things that they encountered in their daily work' (Street 1992a:2). Street discovered that these women often blamed themselves for issues arising directly from the material and social conditions of their work; they took home their frustrations of not being able to care effectively for their patients, and they often felt they should have been able to do better both in particular situations and in their general work organisation. The nurses who felt this way 'were negating their genuine experiences and feelings by the need to be seen to fit into the ward stereotype of a nice caring person. They were being tyrannised by the ward culture and they were participating in policing their own oppression in a desire to be regarded as "someone who is caring'" (Street 1992a:2). It seemed to me that these women were unable to put forward alternative interpretations of their experiences because their subject positions denied them the opportunity to do so. Liberal-humanism always places the responsibility for our inability to feel as if we are in control of our lives firmly back on our own shoulders (McLaren 1988b). More problematically, however, for those of us who are nurses, humanism, as it insinuates itself in and through the discourse of caring presupposes an embodied existence for each of us in which our identities are neatly sutured and contained in a package hermetically sealed from the structures and relations of violence in the world. In my analyses of Street's work I found that caring as a technology of gender and morality works through specific 'techniques of sensibility' (Eagleton 1985/1986) in which caring comes to expression as 'being nice',
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and which can be discovered in attitudes and behaviours such as 'not making a fuss' and 'smiling a lot'. Such 'techniques of sensibility' insert themselves in our practices as nurses and can be heard in statements such as 'I find myself speaking in a sympathetic voice to a patient and then going away and complaining about that person afterwards'; or, 'I am often putting the other person first even when I know they are a "user"'. Such statements bespeak a mode of caring altogether different from those found in the romanticised and aestheticised quasi-poetical and lyrically sentimental incantations of the 'caring theorists' whose texts now form an enormous repository of scholarly literature in nursing. In this literature on caring can be heard statements such as 'caring is ... risking being with someone towards a moment of joy... the beingness is risking, which includes having the courage to be authentic in a situation. Through being with another, connectedness occurs and moments of joy are experienced by both the one caring and the one being cared for' (Parse in BoykinandSchoenhofer 1990:150). These words are saturated with modernist ontological references to a putatively unique and privileged freely choosing human agent who is unfettered by the material and social necessities of ordinary life. Notions of 'risking our beingness' are drawn from the eloquent ramblings of existentialist philosophers whose understandings were concocted from their own deep seated anxieties about the frailty and finitude of the human condition. While such thoughts are not in themselves harmful, when misappropriated, as I believe they have been in nurse scholars' attempts to create an 'ontology of caring' for nursing, they tend to cut across and into the practice of caring as it is encountered and made sense of in that chaotic and dishevelled theatre of everyday life on the hospital ward, and thereby work to disrupt these sense making activities with their idealised and fetishised notions of what caring 'ought' to be. In the stories of everyday life as a nurse, I heard little that resonated with such notions of caring. While indeed I heard stories in which caring came to language through significant and meaningful practices of engagement with and concern for the sick and the needy, I also heard narratives in which caring practices stifled and diminished a nurse's capacity to secure the material social conditions necessary for her to do her work in ways enlivening and productive of her critical agency as a nurse. These things led me to theorise that the conflation of 'caring' as it is brought to language in the canonical literature with commonsense notions derived from practice where caring means 'being nice' - serves to create a tension between how nurses actually live and feel their lives and their relationships with patients and each other and how they perceive they are supposed to live and feel their lives. Such a tension engenders a powerful symbolic space between nurses themselves and those in whose name their caring is constructed. This space serves to confound and disturb an individual nurse's identity. The agonism between being 'caring' and 'being nice' initiates a tyranny in which the nurse's sense of herself conflicts between her need to be liked and to live up to the image she (and others) have of her as a good and gentle woman at the same moment as she is denied a form of agency in which she can 'speak for and of herself' without fear of being silenced or diminished in any way. The
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literature reinforces how a nurse should feel as a 'caring' woman but experiences in practice all too often contradict such constructions. The nurses in my study, just as those in Street's, closely and uncritically identified with each other as 'caring women' for whom 'being nice' cohered with their sense of themselves as' good' nurses. Caring as a practice in which 'the "field of practice is a broken and uneven place", heavily inscribed with habit and sedimented understandings' (Spivak 1991:177) positions nurses in a contradictory relation with themselves and locks them into uncomfortable spaces from which they have little chance of escaping while they continue to remain in thrall to humanist constructions of human agency.
Last words: Caring as a technology of gender and morality The 'truth effects' of a humanism widely dispersed and cleverly concealed with/ in a 'normative' frame of reference for those who seek guidance and direction in the day to day activities of a practice life can be seen and heard, indeed, are lived and felt by nurses whose sense of themselves as 'caring' women is as transparent as the language they appropriate to bring such a mode of sensibility to meaning. In an ironic move, caring when thought as a technology of gender and morality stifles any critique of caring through the 'tyranny of niceness', that particular technique of deferral and displacement that works to silence both academics and clinicians because to speak against caring in nursing is hereticat it is not 'being nice' and is I suspect a decidedly dangerous thing to do for a nurse who is also, a man. But it is in this very way, I contend, that caring secures itself as a regime of truth declaring the ways nurses might come to understand themselves in and through very specific modes of representation. Technologies of gender such as those public and pervasive representations of nurses as young and pretty women soothing the fevered brow, of the sick and the suffering and the everyday narratives of life as a nurse in which a nurse's identities are ceaselessly constituted and re-constituted interlock with technologies of morality- the language of caring that is both abstract and theoretical and as it is found in the vernacular of clinical nurses, perhaps most acutely heard in the now famous aphorism 'TLC - Tender Loving Care'. These technologies work symbiotically to produce 'certain forms of subjectivity judged appropriate to the society in question' (Eagleton 1985 I 1986:96). In our particular society of health care, the 'forms of subjectivity' precipitated by the discourse of caring are those which too often position nurses as socially submissive and politically inert, as 'nice' women who often find themselves silenced by their own understandings of themselves as both socially submissive and politically inert. The regime of truth of humanism is one which deceives human subjects into believing that they produce themselves (Eagleton 1985/1986). This subject is 'free from any particular rigorous ends hence drastically de-politicised, and hence in thrall to the dominant social order' (1985/1986:101). The 'truth effects' of the discourse of caring I found to be both historically and culturally conditioned, as they were both directed at and mediated by the body I subjects of nurses. Caring shackles women and nurses to particular 'interested truths'. Such truths ultimately subordinate women to men and nurses to doctors
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and other male health professionals for it is they of course, who constitute the 'dominant social order' in health care. It is then, absolutely timely 'at the centuries edge' (Bhabha 1994:1) to consider how we might (re)think our relation to the discourse of caring in ways that are not confining and demeaning of our sense that what we do as nurses is important and worthwhile. A Foucauldian genealogical critique can help us dismantle that 'frame of constructed visibility' (Lather 1993a) inaugurated by modernity's insistence on the uncontestable viability of the humanist subject. It cannot I believe, despite Foucault's later work which moved beyond an analysis of the' games of truth' (Kroker 1987) in which the modern subject is both player and the played upon, help us forge new understandings of how caring might be thought differently with/in a postmodern sensibility. Indeed, I am inclined to agree with Arthur Kroker that if we come to think of Foucault's work in literary, rather than philosophical or political terms, (and it is for me, as a nurse who struggles everyday to make his ideas accessible to those very nurses in whose name his intellectual work is done, often difficult to do otherwise than think of it this way) then his legacy would be 'that he is the latest of the elegant tombstones of the dying days of aestheticised liberalism. If he could be so deeply evocative, it is because his entire theorisation with its brilliant meditations on the cynical analytics of power, sexuality, truth and madness is also a clonal after-image of an age that has already ceased to exist' (1987:10). What this means for me then, is that the work before those of us who are nurses and 'cultural workers' is to write those' alternative histories of the excluded' (Bhabha 1994:6), to occupy the' space ofrefusal, where [we] can say no to the coloniser' (hooks 1990:150), and in 'refusing what we are' (Foucault, 1984), 'move from what Derrida refers to as the "novelty of the same" which invents "the possible from the possible" to" an architecture of the impossible" the" altogether-other" of our invention, the surprise of what is not yet possible in the histories of the spaces in which we find ourselves' (Lather 1993b:687).
Bibliography Barrett, E.A.M. (ed.) (1990). Visions ofRogers' Science-based Nursing, National League for Nursing, New York. Benner (1984). From Novice to Expert: Excellence and Power in Clinical Nursing Practice, Addison-Wesley, Maenlo Park. Benner: and Wrubel, J. (1989). The Primacy of Caring, Addison-Wesley, Maenlo Park. Bhabha, H.K. (1994). The Location of Culture, Routledge, London. Boykin, A. and Schoenhofer, S. (1990). 'Caring in Nursing: Analysis of extant theory', Nursing Science Quarterly, 3(4):149-155. Colliere, M.F. (1986). 'Invisible care and invisible women as health-care providers', International Journal of Health Care Studies, 23(2):95-112. de Lauretis, T. (1984). Alice Doesn't? Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema, Indiana University Press, Bloomington. Eagleton, T. (1985/1986). 'The subject of literature', Cultural Critique, 2:95-104.
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Foucault, M. (1980). Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 19721977, C. Gordon (ed.), Pantheon Books, New York. __ _, (1984). The Foucault Reader, P. Rabinow (ed.) Pantheon Books, New York. Gamamikow, E. 'Sexual division of labour: The case of nursing' in A. Kuhn and A. Wolf (eds), Feminism and Materialism, Routledge, London. Gordon, C. (1980). 'Afterword' in C. Gordon (ed.), Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-197, Pantheon Books, New York:. Hazelton,M.J. (1993). 'The historyofthepresent: Nursing and critical historiography' a paper presented at the Third National Conference of the Australian Society of the History of Medicine, Hobart, February 10-14. hooks, b. (1990). 'Choosing the margin as a space of radical openness' in Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, South End Press, Boston, MA. Kritzman, L.D. (ed.) (1988). Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture. Interviews and Other Writings, A. Sheridan, trans., Routledge, London. Kroker, A. (1987). 'The games of Foucault'. Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory/Revue canadienne de theorie politique et sociale, XI(3):1-10. Laclau, E. and Mouffe, C. (1985). Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, trans. W. Moore and P Cammack, Verso, London. Lather (1991). Getting Smart: Feminist Research and Pedagogy With/In the Postmodern, Routledge, London. __ _, (1993a). 'The politics and ethics of feminist research: Researching the lives of women with HIV I AIDS', paper prepared for Ethnography and Education Research Forum, Philadelphia, PA. __ _, (1993b ). 'Fertile Obsession: Validity after Poststructuralism'. The Socio-logical Quarterly, 34(4):673-693. Leininger, M.M. (1984). Care: The Essence of Nursing and Health, Charles B. Slack, Thorofare, NJ. Lyotard, J.F. (1992). The Postmodern Explained to Children: Correspondence 1982-1985, trans. J. Pefanis and M. Thomas, Power Publications, Sydney. Martin, L.H., Gutman, H. and Hutton:H. (eds) (1988. Technologies ofthe Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, The University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst. McCall, L. (1992). 'Does gender fit? Bourdieu, feminism, and conceptions of social order',Theory and Society, 21:837-867. McLaren, P. (1988a). 'Schooling the postmodem body: Critical pedagogy and the politics of enfleshment', Journal of Education, 170(3):53-83. __ _, (1988b ). 'Language, social structure and the production of subjectivity', Critical Pedagogy Networker, May /June vols. 1 and 2, pp.1-10. Minh-ha, T.T. (1988). 'Not you/like you: Post-colonial women and the interlocking questions of identity and difference', Inscriptions,3/4, pp.71-77. Morse, J.M., Bottorf,J., Neander, W. and Solberg, S. (1991). 'Comparative analysis of conceptualisations and theories of caring', IMAGE: Journal of Nursing Scholarship, 23(2):110-26. Parse, R.R. (1985). Man- Living- Health, John Wiley and Sons, New York. __ _, (ed.) (1990). Nursing Science: Major Paradigms, Theories, and Critiques, Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders.
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Probyn, E. (1993). Sexing the Self Gendered Positions in Cultural Studies, Routledge, London:. Rogers, M.E. (1970). An introduction to the Theoretical basis of Nursing, F.A. Davis Company, Philadelphia. Sarup, M. (1994). An Introductory Guide to Post-Structuralism and Postmodernism, Harvester Wheatsheaf, London:. Scott, J.W. (1992). 'Experience' in J. Butler and J.W. Scott (eds) Feminists Theorise the Political, Routledge, New York:. Spivak, G.C. (1991). 'Theory in the margin: Coetzee's Foe reading Defoe's Crusoe/ Roxana' in Consequences of Theory, J. Arac and B. Johnson (eds) The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore. Street, A. (1992a). 'Being caring: Getting beyond thetyrannyofniceness inhealthcare', paper presented to the 14th annual Caring Conference, Human Caring: a Global Agenda, 8-10 July, Melbourne, Australia. __ _, (1992b ). Inside Nursing: A Critical Ethnography of Clinical Nursing Practice, State University of New York Press, Albany, New York. Thompson, J. (1983). 'Toward a critical nursing process: Nursing praxis', unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Utah, Salt Lake City. Walker, K.N. (1993). 'On what it might mean to be a nurse: A discursive ethnography', unpublished doctoral dissertation, LaTrobe University, Melbourne. Watson, J. (1985). Nursing: Human Science and Human Care. A Theory of Nursing, National League for Nursing, New York. Weedon, C. (1987). Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory, Basil Blackwell, Oxford. Wolf, Z.R. (1986). 'Nurses' work: The sacred and the profane', Holistic Nursing Practice, 1(1):29-35.
Repositioning the Nurse Suzanne (joopy Why study the past? Simply because I am interested in the past? No, if one means by that writing a history of the past in terms of the present. Yes, if one means writing the history of the present (Foucault 1979:31).
To this same end it is the intention of this paper to question the relationship between nursing, and 'self' in relation to education and ethics. The present support for critical'self-reflection' on nursing practice and professionalism is symptomatic of a desire within nursing for (re)definition of its status as professional. Nurses are now taught to concern themselves with issues surrounding the complete cultivation of the 'whole' person. The ethics implicit in more traditional nursing practice, for example constancy and deportment, as we shall see, are considered to be restrictive and oppressive to the development of the 'new' professional nurse. The question of the professionalisation of nursing seen a resurgence among nurses, especially since the sixties. There has been an increase in the perceived need for the redefinition of the nurse as a 'new' professional. I propose that the notion of 'self' is the key to this recent dramatic change in the official and popular view of the professional status of the nurse. Does this mean then, that nursing must, as it seems to be doing, disregard its historical past and practices in its search for a definition? This point is central to my argument as it is my intention to demonstrate that the historical past and those 'mundane' tasks which the nurse performs, play significant roles in the positioning of nursing and the defining of its status.
Nursing and 'Self' The notion of 'self', as a focal point around which the question of professional nurse status circulates, cannot be adequately understood as the essential and only way to ensure the full development and realisation of the truly professional nurse. Drawing on the works of Michel Foucault and Nikolas Rose, and their understandings of the phenomena of 'self' it is possible to argue that the direction taken by the professionalisation of nursing is yet another example of the invention and deployment of the contemporary technologies of 'self' in which the fostering of 'self'-regulation and autonomy play key organising roles.l As Rose argues, the domain of the contemporary concept of 'self' and its technologies have, from the post-war period onwards, been 'intimately bound up with a profound mutation in the rationales and techniques of government' (1990:213). Nursing's reformulation ofits 'self' image is to be found within its general criticism and devaluation of nurses in their capacity as 'mere technicians'. In the new ethos that nursing has adopted the nurse is required to take on the attributes of the 'critical humanistic intellectual'. That is to say nurses are now to be viewed as those whose rule of life is, in principle, never to take anything as true on the basis of authority, but to reason out courses of action for themselves, and to define their sources as 'self'-determining subjects
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whose attributes can never be determined by their occupancy of a given institutional status (Hunter 1993). We find evidence of the desirability of such a nurse in Griffith University's School of Nursing curriculum document. Here the romantic elements in liberal education continue to shape educational thinking about the nurse: '[the] increasing complexity of health care requires nurses who can think critically and creatively, and who have a substantial education in nursing, related sciences and liberal arts' (Division of Health and Behavioural Sciences 1990:11). That is to say that in its quest for the professional nurse under the guise of the critical 'self'-reflecting practitioner, nursing has drawn on a rhetoric of absolute and dialectical oppositions- the oppositions for example, between the technician's objective problems and the humanist's subjective experiences. What is of interest here, is the way in which these notions define a profession. Nursing has tried over the past thirty years in particular to define itself by the same means as newer professions. But, if we consider an historical definition of professionalism, then we can see how that which defines a group as professional does not necessarily need to be reducible to a set of principles which determine a single universal truth. Further, the celebration of the 'self-acting individual which apparently transcends every profession and is in fact its 'point of honour', is historically determined in definition and as such highly peculiar to its own purposes.2 In response to the search for a 'new' professional nurse there has been an increase, particularly over the past three decades, in new educational programs which highlight the techniques and values aimed at the government of the 'self' of the nurse as a critical reflective individual. One result of this is exemplified in the following remark in which we find a devaluation of nursing's historical and philological past: ...reflecting on the past and contemplating the future in regard to the development and application of professional nursing ethics in Australia... enable[s] us to contemplate how far we have come and how much further we have yet to go in terms of our ability, as nurses, to maximise and protect the significant moral interests of those requiring and/ or those receiving nursing care Gohnstone 1993:46).
Liberal Education - Re-formation of the Nurse To develop this point a little further I contend that the techniques of caring which provide the nurse with the means of being autonomous within a particular setting are now replaced with techniques which are seen to foster theindividual'sautonomy.Adesiretoemancipatethenurseinawaywhich situates nursing as a highly subjective 'discipline', in which nurses themselves are 'self-reflecting, 'self'-actualising individuals, is evidenced in today's nursing curriculum (School of Nursing 1994; School of Nursing 1993). This acts effectively to construct what is arguably a philosophical opposition to the historical and contingent nature of nursing.3 In so doing the focus of the nurse, as defined as a professional has been relocated to a general political romantic discourse. Here, the concern is not so much with what the nurse actually does and how this may give definition to the status of the nurse and nursing as a profession, but rather what the nurse is thought to do in her capacity as a critical 'self-reflective individual: 'we are inter-
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ested in the individual goal of self-actualisation because we believe nurses themselves have inherent self-actualisation tendencies just as do their patients' (Lindberg et al. 1990:67). 'Creativity, critical thinking, reflection, logic and intuition are inherent in the practice of professional nursing... Understanding of the discipline of nursing is best developed by analytic, creative and reflective interpretation of personal experience' (Division of Nursing and Health Sciences 1991:15). From this perspective, the ethical position formed through the education system and the perceived alteration in occupational responsibilities, urges nurses away from the more pragmatic and technically proficiency based definition of their position in favour of taking on a definition in which they are able to view themselves as 'human individuals conceptualised in terms of their subjectivity' (Minson 1993:8). Hence, the emergence of a new professional discourse in nursing can be said to be formulated, not in terms of what nurses actually do, but rather as the site of romantic techniques of 'self'-formation. Nursing has set itself within a dichotomy between nursing as it is, that is problematically based in proficiency, and nursing as it might be, that is based in an humanities ideal of the cultivation of the whole individual. There remains however, even in the 'new' nursing approach to liberal education, a dialectical structure of nursing ethos. Indeed Scott, commenting on the ethos relating to the humanities, offers to also furnish nursing with the peculiar basis that it seeks as a means to its own identification: ...the search for truth and cultivation and transmission of the reflective attitudes, as they are embodied institutionally [in the humanities] need protection from the government and from other interferences both because such outside bodies know too little about the concrete reality of the quest and because history shows that they are likely to have malevolent or dangerous interventions (1988:19).
In its search for justification of its professional status and its desire for autonomy nursing has found much solace in such ideals. But, just why is this approach so unquestioningly aspired to? I suggest that the reason for its popularity lies in the fact that liberal education, as defined here, offers a justification as a means to an end for nursing to gain specific identification. That is to say that it offers nursing a way of being which is autonomous and professional in the most modern of senses. For in adopting such an approach nursing has been provided with the means to discover the 'self'. In accepting this as the key approach to repositioning the nurse, a number of major considerations have been overlooked. First, the question of the ethos, which is appropriate to the specific nature of nursing with its highly specific techniques of caring, is not addressed. Second, nursing unquestioningly accepts those tenets of a liberal education which discredit the technical terms of reference of nursing itself as they offer to provide nursing with the autonomy and 'new' professionalism it seeks. With the move of nurse education to the tertiary setting, liberal educational ideals have clearly emerged within the nursing curriculum. The notion of androgogy (Knowles 1970; 1979; 1980; 1984) has become increasingly popular within the ranks of higher education in general and in
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particular in nursing education. As Darbyshire argues ' ... androgogy is not simply accepted but actively promoted and espoused as educational philosophy which will give nursing education... credibility and respectability' (1993:328). The key tenets of this 'philosophy' are found in standard romantic, 'critical' educational theory, especially as this refers to adult education. As a mature human being, and as such endowed with reason, will and hence the capacity to set his/her own goals, the adult learns best as a self-directed, problem-solving individual. That is to say that adults, and here in particular nurses, as students do not need to be subjected to teaching techniques which are appropriate only to children. The adult knows what is best for them and what they need to know and the educator has minimal input into this. But what are the implications for this in the practical occupation of nursing?
Psychotherapeutic Techniques- The Nurse Within Once the inner freedom to be truly herself was added to the outer freedom of running her own life as she saw fit, which she had gained during her years of analysis, she no longer needed the help of an analyst... she has become a stranger to her analyst, but not a stranger to psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis ...will remain with her all her life (Bettelheim cited in Rose 1990:240).
Rose discusses the emergence and the huge expression in the twentieth century of an array of psychology based techniques employed in order to address an equally heterogenous array of social, personal and organisational problems, for example, motivation at work, problem children in schools and team building in the military. To this end, Rose argues that these ways of 'governing the soul' work by constructing a particular type of 'self' willing and able to reflect on and 'own up' to its inner states and its social context: 'in compelling, persuading and inciting subjects to disclose themselves, finer and more intimate regions of personal and interpersonal life come under surveillance and are opened up for expert judgement, and normative evaluation, for classification and correction' (Rose 1990:240). The adoption of techniques of psychotherapeutics is apparent in nursing education's use of androgogy. With its emphasis on individuals setting personal goals for learning and the neeq for them to reflect on their work and contributions, the student is called upon to adopt techniques of 'self'reflection. In many ways, this is similar to what Foucault (1979) refers to as techniques of confession. Here, students are called upon to treat themselves as problematic individuals that need to discover truth as a condition for their own 'self' development. For example, in an individual assessment item entitled 'The Good Death', third year nursing students are to provide ' ... a short discussion... outlining the extentto which [they] have obtained, shared and used information with members of [their] group' (School of Nursing 1993). Here, it is not the testing of information or analysis that is essential but rather the ethical development of a 'sharing' kind of person. In the case of this style of learning we find that the university lecturer is not so much considered as an expert but rather as a personal-'political' therapist. Indeed the large degree to which psychotherapeutics have come to play an essential
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role in the education of the nurse is directly related to the role and technologies of government which necessitate the 'self' governing of the individual -in this case the nurse. However, in the light of this, the problematics of a devaluation of the highly practical and technical aspects which make up so much of nursing at the 'coal face' must be bought to question: The fact remains that the purpose and practice of nursing are derived from the needs of patients and families (Scott cited in Maloney 1992). ' ... At a critical time ... [when] there is competition from other health fields, the profession lacks consensus concerning the appropriate level and type of preparation [that the nurse receives]' (Cabinet in Nursing Education 1983:2). The move into tertiary education, as discussed above, calls on nursing to take responsibility for itself in an ethical sense. But, rather than nursing utilising this opportunity to value its history, knowledge and techniques, as a means of procuring its autonomous and professional status, nursing has chosen to search for its status under the guise of professionalism itself. Nursing's prolific search for autonomy and professionalism has situated it significantly within the domain of psychotherapeutics and its techniques. As such, the learning and mastering of techniques such as 'self-reflection, 'self'knowledge and 'self-examination comprise much of the nursing curriculum which has chosen to 'play down' those techniques of caring which are generally associated with technical rather than professional behaviour: 'the prestige in the occupations that are aspiring to recognition as professions goes to those whose careers are removed from practice, where as in older professions this is not the case' (Aydelotte 1990:12).
A Question of History The identification of the professionalisation of nursing, with the nurturing of both inward-seeking, 'self'-reflective consciousness and a distrust of institutional authority, has coincided with a persistent tendency to cast aspersion upon that which is specifically the history of nursing. Seen from the perspective of the romantic aesthetic ethic which informs this conception of professionalisation, all of the historical contributions that have lent support to the past professional status of nurses are undermined as being 'soulless' oppressive technical drudgery. For example, the work of Australian nurse ethicist, Johnstone displays a tendency towards what I term a 'professional amnesia' surrounding certain historical facts in relation to the ethical status of nursing. Johnstone questions the very existence of any ethical dimensions in early Australian nursing. Claiming that the terms ethics and etiquette were used interchangeably, she fails to recognise the close relationship between these two areas and as such weakly argues that this 'confusion' has had a negative effect on the emergence of a nursing perspective on ethics. If we accept Johnstone's approach then we are stuck believing that ethics can never arise as a result of behaviours pertaining to customary or habitual components of a technical training, but only as the result of an individual's experimental capacity for seeing things as they really are. Suppose however, that we recognise the existence of a plurality of ways in which people may form themselves ethically (Foucault 1984), then, if we refrain from judging all
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nursing ethics, past and present, in terms of the norms and values of nursing ethics in the 1990s and reorient ourselves, to the world of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, then we may be better able to understand the aspects of the professional formation of nurses. Nursing has long been considered women's work, but this has not always been the case. There are many instances of the devoted work of monks who cared for the sick in medieval hospices (Norton 1988; Seymer 1957). For example, St. Bartholomew's and St. Thomas's in London have their origins as hospices founded by the Augustinian monks in the twelfth century (Burchill1992). It was not until much later that various sisterhoods became associated with the work of the monks and the care of the ill fell to them (Seymer 1957). However, by the start of the nineteenth century, especially in England, male and female 'attendants' had been employed to care for the poor and the sick. As Burchill (1992) reports, the pay was low and both the institutions and their 'attendants' grew more and more ignominious. Such 'attendants' had no education or training and were generally of the same standing as the domestic servant. It may be evidenced by the work of Charles Dickens that by the first half of the nineteenth century these institutions (infirmaries or hospitals) had generally declined to deplorable standards. 4 By this stage nurses were usually regarded as lowly, drunken, promiscuous, ignorant and slatternly (Huxley 1975).5 It was at this point in time that Florence Nightingale, the 'well educated gentlewoman', set about reforming and establishing nursing as a 'reputable profession' (Huxley 1975; Woodham-Smith 1951). Such an ambition called for the harnessing of forces in productive directions, the remoulding of conduct, dress, appearance and comportment, in other words, the disciplining of individuals' morals and ethical practices. Such disciplinary habits instituted reforms which were reflective of the types of 'manners' associated with the concept of a profession as they are discussed in these historical discourses:6 In the attempts which have been made, and are still being made for the improvement of nursing, on common object is kept in view by those interested in the success of the experiment, namely, the selection of a class of woman of good character ... (Guy's Hospital Reports 1871 cited in Williams 1980:61-62). A nurse is responsible[ ... ]for the maintenance of all the cleanliness and purity of her ward, and of the bedding, dressings and persons of the sick, for proper ventilation and the regulation of temperature ... (StJohn's House Sisterhood cited in Williams 1980:68).
Here, the aim of nursing lies in its establishment of a certain kind of ethos, one which is largely determined by the inseparability of 'good' character and' good' manners. The claim that expectations such as those set out above are negative and detrimental to nursing's development (Johnstone 1993; 1989) is not merely a denouncement of the technical elements of nursing but also the ethical elements. For, if we consider just what it is that the nurse does, then do not the attributes of discipline, reliability and sensitivity to the needsofthepatient,bymeansofthecultivationofhabitssuchaspunctuality and personal hygiene, assert themselves as highly desirable (nursing) ethics?
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The Implications of Repositioning the Nurse Ethics are not inherent in the individual and one's morality and ethics (that is, ones mode of behaviour acceptable to a particular situation) depends greatly on one's social, cultural, familial and educational background (Foucault 1984). However, ethics is generally identified as pertaining to individual subjects as defined independently of any official or institutional ties, but, there are also forms of ethics which are formed by and are highly specific to the habitus in which the ethics exist (Weber 1946). In other words, the environment in which the nurse can work as a professional needs to exist in order for a specific nursing ethos to exist. This environment sets the parameters in which the nurse works by defining the type of work the nurse is able to do and the way in which the nurse then goes about performing this work. Needless to say, significant intellectual and political penalties are incurred by the nursing profession as a result of it sticking so strongly to the philosophy of the romantic aesthetic as a means of defining the nurse as professional. The examples put forward here are by no means exhaustive in their number or their discussion. My aim has been to show how historically complex the question of nursing is. By identifying the professionalisation of the nurse with the complete cultivation of the individual and at the same time restricting the pursuit of knowledge to within the limits set by a liberal approach to education and a restricted reading of nursing's ethical history, we have seen the potential which exists for nursing to render itself autonomous of history. To this end, I wish to suggest that those 'mundane' tasks which the nurse, often unthinkingly, carries out on a day-to-day basis play a significant role in the positioning of nursing as a unique occupation autonomous and professional in status because of, rather than in spite of, these chores. 1
2
Contemporary technologies of 'self' differ from previous technologies of 'self' insofar as their basis lies within psychotherapy, its languages and techniques (Rose 1990). 'Every profession has its point of honour and its system of manners; the merchant has punctuality and fair dealing; the statesman his capacity and address; the man of society his good breeding and wit. Every station has a carriage, a dress, a ceremonial' (Ferguson [1767] 1980:189).
3 4
A similar conclusion regarding the humanities is argued by Hunter (1991). Oliver Twist (1837) depicts the horrors experienced by paupers in crowded workhouses and their infirmaries and Martin Chuzzlewit (1884) satirises the midwifenurse of the day in its portrayal of Sarah Gamp - at best merely ignorant and illiterate; at worst brutal and immoral.
5
Although as Summers (1989) argues this was in some ways an unfounded claim, having been derived largely from the Dickens' nineteenth century characters of Sarah Gamp and Betsy Prig, such character representations did set the scene for this positioning of the nurse and the rapid endorsement of such a view on nursing by society at large.
6
Minson (1985; 1993) draws similar conclusions regarding the relationship between the 'manners' of profession and the historical development of police.
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Reference List Aydelotte, M.K. (1990). 'The Evolving Profession: The Role of the Professional Organisation' in Chaska, N. L. (ed.) The Nursing Profession: Turning Points, St. Louis: The C.V. Mosby Company. Burchill, E. (1992). Australian Nurses Since Florence Nightingale 1860-1990, Richmond, Victoria: Spectrum Publications. Cabinet on Nursing Education (1983). Education for Nursing Practice in the context of the 1980s (Pub. No.: NE 115M 4183), Kansas City, Mo: American Nurses Association. Darbyshire (1993). 'In Defence of Pedagogy: A Critique of theNotion of Androgogy', Nurse Education Today 13, pp.328-35. Dickens, C. ([1884] 1973). Martin Chuzzlewit, London: Dent. __ _, ([1837] 1966). Oliver Twist, London: Longman. Division of Nursing and Health Sciences (1991) Submission for the accreditation of Bachelor of Nursing (pre-registration), Gold Coast: Griffith University Ferguson, A. ([1767] 1980). An Essay on the History of Civil Society, New Brunswick: Transaction. Foucault, M. (1984). The History of Sexuality, Volume 2, Bungay, Suffolk: Richard Clay (The Chaucer Press). __ _, (1979). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, New York: Vintage Books. Hunter,!. (1991 ). 'Personality as a Vocation: the Political Rationality of the Humanities', in I. Hunter; D. Meredyth; B. Smith and G. Stokes (eds), Accounting for the Humanities: The Language of Culture and the Logic of Government, Brisbane: Institute of Cultural Policy Studies Publications. Huxley, E. (1975). Florence Nightingale, London: Weindenfeld and Nicholson. Johnstone, M. (1993). 'The Development of Nursing Ethics in Australia: An Historical overview', First National History Conference, Melbourne: Royal College of Nursing. __ _, (1989). Bioethics: A Nursing Perspective, Sydney: Harcourt Brace Jovanich. Knowles, M.S. (1970). The Modern Practice of Adult Education: Androgogy versus Pedagogy, New York: Association Press. __ _, (1979). 'Androgogy Revisited Part II', Adult Education 30(1):52-3. __ _, (1980). The Modern Practice of Adult Education: From Pedagogy to Androgogy, Chicago: Association Press. __ _, (1984). Androgogy in Action: Applying Modern Principles of Adult Learning, San Francisco: Jossey Bass. Lindberg, J.B., Hunter, M.L. and Kruszeuski, A.Z. (1990). Introduction to Nursing: Concepts, Issues and Opportunities, Philadelphia: J.P. Lippincott. Maloney, M. M. (1992). Professionalization of Nursing: Current Issues and Trends, Philadelphia, J. B. Lippincott Company. Minson, J.P. (1993). Questions of Conduct: Sexual Harassment, Citizenship, Government, London; Macmillan. __ _, (1985). Genealogies of Morals: Nietzsche, Foucault, Donzelot and the Eccentricity of Ethics, London: Macmillan. Norton, D. (1988). 'Care Provision through the Ages: Part 1- Primeval and Medieval Times', Geriatric Nursing and Home Care 8(1):20-2.
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Rose, N. (1990). The Governing of the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self, London: Routledge. School of Nursing (1994). Lifespan, Health and Wellness- Item 3, PN11001 Assessment Items, Brisbane: Griffith University. __ _, (1993). The Good Death- PN13002Assessment Items, Brisbane: Griffith University. Scott, R. (1988). 'The New Biniarism?: Staffing Aspects of the Green Paper', Australian Universities Review 31(1):12-15. Seymer, L.R. (1957). A General History of Nursing, London: Faber and Faber. Summers, A. (1989). 'The Mysterious Demise of Sarah Gamp: The Domiciliary Nurse and Her Detractors, c.1830-1860', Victorian Studies, Spring, pp.123-136. Weber, M. (1946). 'Science as a Vocation', in H.H. Gerth and C.W. Mills (eds), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, New York: Oxford University Press Williams, K. (1980). 'From Sarah Gamp to Florence Nightingale: A Critical Study of hospital Nursing Systems from 1840 to 1897', in C. Davis (ed.) Rewriting Nursing History, London: Croom Helm Woodham-Smith, C. (1951). Florence Nightingale, London: Constable
Part Fifteen Marketing Foucault
The Name of the Author Cfare 0 ~arre[[ In his thoroughly scurrilous but beautifully written novel A l'ami qui ne m'a
pas sauve la vie, Herve Guibert explains that in later years Foucault drastically reduced the number of his friends and when he did get around to inviting one of these few remaining friends to a restaurant, he would almost knock them over in his rush for a chair with its back to the rest of the restaurant, before quickly collecting himself and politely offering his guest the chair he did not want. As Guibert says 'Paris prevented him from going out, he felt he was too well known'. 1 At Berkeley, invited to run a small reading group, the organisers noticed him turn white, when he opened the door and found two hundred people crammed into the room. These incidents are not merely of anecdotal interest. In all of his pronouncements on the intellectual, the great writer and the author there is an insistence on the question of anonymity, the intellectual without a name. At the same time however, as his recent biographies demonstrate, Foucault was very effective, sometimes ruthlessly effective in manipulating his very elite educational background and intelligence to promote and market his ideas in the media as well as in the academic publishing market. 2 There are notable instances where Foucault although happy to promote his ideas is reticent about promoting his name. The first of these was Foucault's appearance on the French television book show Apostrophes in 1976, which watched by a vast number of viewers allowed invited authors to talk about and promote their own books. Foucault perversely refused to talk about his own recently published History of Sexuality and instead discussed a book called Un Proces ordinaire en URSS by imprisoned Russian dissident Mikhail Stern. Later he explained that he felt that he had enjoyed enough media exposure and wanted to use the occasion to inform the viewers of something 'useful and unknown'. He certainly succeeded on this occasion and partly as a result of his intervention, Stern's case became famous and he was later released. 3 A second instance of this refusal to promote his name was the appearance of an issue of the journal L'Arc a journal which specialises in publishing issues on particular writers and thinkers. The only issue not to display a name on its cover is precisely the one on Foucault.4 Much was made of this deviation from L'Arc's usual practice both at the time and since. A third notable instance of 'anonymity' is the anonymous interview titled 'The Masked Philosopher' which appeared in Le Monde in 1980.5 It is interesting to note, however, how these events have been framed and recuperated. In a very real sense, they merely serve to make Foucault's name even more visible- in his very deviation from the accepted norms of self promotion. One might also note that Foucault's appearances in the above forums are in themselves the result of the fact that his name has already been granted recognition. The journalist's introduction to the 1980 interview introduces the anonymous philosopher as a French writer of some
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renown and ends by remarking that 'the mystery will probably be solved by our most perceptive readers'. Foucault's desire for anonymity in all these exercises has thus been thoroughly neutralised and was already neutralised from the outset. Since Foucault's death we have also begun to see those very processes of consecration that he describes himself in 'What is an author?' We are in short currently witnessing the canonisation of Saint Foucault. In 'What is an author?', Foucault notes 'in order to "rediscover" an author in a work, modern criticism uses methods similar to those of Christian exegesis employed when trying to prove the value of a text by its author's saintliness'. 6 The controversies that have arisen around James Miller's biography The Passion of Michel Foucault engage in exactly this type of exercise. 7 Can we really respect the thought of a man involved in such dubious s I m practices? Scandalous rumours circulate as to Foucault's activities just before his death. Did he really set out to give as many people as possible AIDS after the diagnosis of his illness?8 This suggestion has met with cries of outrage and the usual vigorous discussions have ensued- as with Heidegger- about the relation between an author's life and his work. Foucault himself made it clear on several occasions, notably in The Archaeology ofKnowledge as well as in his article 'What is an author?' that he found these kinds of questions intensely irritating. 9 But there has been a shift in the kind of focus brought to bear on the 'name'. ltisnotonlythesanctityoftheauthor's person whichisatstake, but the functioning of his or her name as a kind of brand. The 'Foucault' brand is the guarantee of a certain quality, it is the guarantee that we are being served 'subversion' in its purest and most unadulterated form. This brand sells books, it sells ideas. But I am not advocating here the usual thesis that marketing is a 'bad thing', immoral and generally something no truly 'transgressive' intellectual should engage in. If, as many have pointed out before me, the highest value, the pinnacle of contemporary human aspiration is accumulation and exchange, it is difficult to see how ideas and cultural artefacts can be excluded. Indeed, if they are not included in this circuit they have a rather disturbing tendency to simply vanish altogether. The simple fact of the matter is that in order to communicate, to be heard, to have any kind of influence, an intellectual is obliged to play by the rules of the marketplace. It is in fact the job of the intellectual to have a public profile, to be a 'name'. There can be no such thing as an anonymous intellectual - anonymous researchers perhaps, but not intellectuals. To be heard- an intellectual must be visible. In order not to be anonymous, the intellectuals must in a very real sense market themselves, be entrepreneurs in selling themselves- or at least have powerful patrons or a powerful institutional background to do this for them. Intellectual brilliance, although not essential, is an added advantage. A combination of all three factors is, of course, the ideal situation and as the recent biographies reveal, Foucault's fame and influence was not due to his intellectual genius alone. He had the patrons, the institutional backing and the ability to market himself and used all of these very effectively.
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Atthesametime,however,itisseenasfundamentallydistastefultomany working in the intellectual arena that this should be the case. Why this tension? On the one hand, if intellectuals are going to communicate their ideas they have no option but to engage in the market place. But this engagement conflicts with an even longer tradition of the intellectual as philosopher, as contemplative. Such a person must retire into the wilderness and communicate with God, alone, apart from the common run of ordinary mortals. Those who wish to hear their words must make the difficult journey into the desert themselves. This tension and ambiguity emerges in both Foucault's work and life- the long solitary hours of research in the library versus the very public media persona. Indeed, perhaps the very notion of the intellectual implies ambiguity and contradiction- of never entirely being one thing or another. If the intellectual remains in the library, the ivory tower, retreating from the market place, then he or she can make little impact on the rest of society with their ideas. But if the intellectual gives him or herself entirely over to the market place without the long hours in the library then he or she simply becomes an advertiser of others' ideas, just another prepackaged media celebrity. The same ambiguity exists in the relation between intellectuals and politics. If all an intellectual does is support a string of political causes he or she loses that distinctive quality that gives them a separate social identity as an intellectual: namely the privilege and luxury of maintaining a critical and analytical distance in relation to all party lines. It is precisely the capacity to take this critical distance which constitutes the unique power and identity of the intellectual. 10 But if intellectuals hide in a library or laboratory washing their hands of the wider social and political implications of their researches, they again lose that distinctive quality and become in another way, mere pawns at the beck and call of those in political power who can then, unhindered, determine research agenda and how the outcomes of these agenda are used. In the past, many intellectuals have seen this necessity to perform a constant balancing act as a sign of their inherent superiority, proclaiming that they are prophets crying in the wilderness with privileged access to the Truth, by sheer virtue of their ability to reason. It is only in recent decades that some intellectuals have begun to recognise that the intellectual, rational interpretation of the world is only one of many. The current crisis of the intellectual is in fact largely bound up with the recognition of their powerlessness and the fact that their interpretations of the world are no longer taken as seriously as they once were by the rest of the community. To return to the market place however: I have remarked on the tension between the necessity for an intellectual to market his or her ideas in order to be heard and the desire to remain a solitary contemplative. This is not the only difficulty. No matter how well intellectuals market their products, is this any guarantee that they will in fact be heard? Indeed, one can be too successful as Foucault himself suggests in his anonymous interview. He has chosen anonymity, he says, 'out of nostalgia for the times when being quite unknown, what I had to say had some chance of being heard. With any
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readers I did have, the surface of contact was without a wrinkle'. In other words, once Foucault's name became known, people read his work through the screen of everything else that has been said about him. They began to read the packaging rather than the actual contents. Foucault continues 'If I have chosen anonymity... It is a way of addressing the reader more directly, the only person here who is of interest to me. "Because you don't know who I am, you will not be tempted to look for the reasons why I am saying what you are reading, allow yourself to say quite simply- it's true, it's false, I like this, I don't like that. Full stop"'.U As he points out in another interview, it took 15 years for the media to turn his book The History of Madness into a slogan, with The History of Sexuality Vall it took only 6 months. Any 'new' ideas are immediately seized on and sloganised. As Fran~ois de Negroni remarks, in the nineteenth century the intellectual was excluded by making him or her a figure that could not be invited into the polite salons of the bourgeoisie- someone with no social skills. On the one hand, the dry dusty, unfashionably dressed and awkward figure of the academic, on the other, the excessive, bohemian and dangerous figure of the artist. Since the 1970s however the intellectual has become an elegant fashionable photogenic character, well packaged for presentation and general consumption. 12 But perhaps this does no more than mark a new way of neutralising the intellectual. In the market place- production and image is all. Ideas become fads, commodities- with so many around, what does it matter which ones one selects? It becomes just a matter of personal style- all ideas are banal fodder for a kind of indifferent tolerance. This is Baudrillard's world of endless circulation and pure boredom. At the same time, as Foucault remarks, there are too few outlets for the number of intellectuals wishing to speak. They have to line up in a queue to take their turn and to prevent anyone from holding the floor too long, mechanisms such as fashion and 'personal taste' operate. 13 What is the solution to all this? Perhaps intellectuals might begin by recognising that the old model of the intellectual as saviour and spokesperson-for-all is no longer (if it ever was!) valid. Intellectuals are only one group amongst many in developing and offering interpretations of existence. These interpretations can never be fixed or definitive, especially in a period so overwhelmingly characterised by unmanageable information overload. As Foucault suggests in his final work, 14 those working in the intellectual domain must have the courage to begin every day from scratch, constantly rethinking their positions and offering new ideas, remaining endlessly curious about the world and the way it works in the hope of contributing to a collective effort to continually 'think otherwise'. 1
Herve Guibert, A I'ami qui ne m'a pas sauve la vie, Paris: Gallimard, 1990, p.28.
2
Macey reports that according to Daniel Defert, Foucault's detailed and not entirely tolerant reply to Derrida's critique of The History of Madness was motivated by 'his feeling or perception that a Foucault-Derrida rivalry was being actively promoted in American universities and that interest in his own work was being eclipsed by the rise of deconstruction'. David Macey, The Lives ofMichel Foucault, London: Hutchison, 1993, p. 238. The result of this was a rupture
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3
For a full account of this episode see ibid, p.378.
4
'La crise dans la tete', L'Arc, no.70, 1977.
5
Foucault, 'Le philosophe masque', (entretien avec C. Delacampagne), Le Monde: Le Monde-Dimanche, 6 April1980, pp. I, XVII.
6
Foucault, 'What is an author?' in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991, p.llO.
7 James Miller, The Passion ofMichel Foucault, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993. If my thesis needs further confirmation, one only has to consider the religious overtones to the title of this book. See also the title of David Halperin's book Saint Foucault: towards a gay hagiography, New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. 8
For some interesting comments on the generic nature of these kind of accusations in relation to HIV infected persons see Michael Bartos' article included in this volume, 'Foucault had to die shamefully'.
9
Cf. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, London: Tavistock, 1972, p.17.
10 I have discussed these ideas at more length in the following: 'Famous for their savoir ... fair enough?', National Library Australian Voices Series, Australian Book Review, no. 155 October 1993, pp. 29-33; 'Restoring the scholarly balance', Comment, Campus Review, Jan 18-24, 1996, p.8; 'Media Republics: Now the Intellectuals Strike Back', Inter Alia, Campus Review, Aug 7-131996, pp.7-8. 11 Foucault, 'Le philosophe masque', p.l. 12 Fran<;ois de Negroni, Le Savoir vivre intellectuel, Paris: Olivier Orban,1985. 13 Foucault, 'Le philosophe masque', p.XVII. 14 Foucault,Histoirede la sexualite t.2: L'usagedesplaisirs, Paris: Gallimard,1984, p.13.
Condensing Foucault .9llec !Jvfc:J{ou{ What appears below is not in any sense a 'paper'. Rather it is an attempt to reconstruct my address to the conference. Nothing, it seems to me, is worse than trying to read a written paper aloud over the allotted twenty minutes or so. Indeed, it becomes especially redundant and futile when the delegates have the paper before them as it is read. My practice has almost always been, instead, to construct the address from notes and, thereby, with luck, to speak to an audience (adjusting where necessary to meet the new relevances and themes that inevitably spring from previous sessions and discussions over drinks). This, rather than guiding listeners through quite complex issues that are better left to readers in the quiet recesses of the library. The down side of this practice is that when, as now, the paper comes to be written (down or up, it doesn't matter), it looks thin and chatty: perhaps even unserious. These are the risks of mixing genres; as Derrida once said, we 'must not'.
Introduction I want to open up a discussion about the marketing and pedagogic uses of Foucault's work. How are the markets operating in terms of both original works by Foucault and secondary texts? What are some of the pedagogic implications of the texts being aimed at undergraduates? And can Foucault's own ideas about pedagogy and training be used to understand and, perhaps, criticise those formations? This leads to a discussion of whether Foucault's work can be considered 'critical' or 'interventional' at all; or whether, on the contrary, it has quite descriptive and prosaic uses for making the world run along as it always did and must. The paper comes out of a difficult time I spent trying to write a Foucault primer. I realised that it was all but impossible to condense Foucault and that, in doing so, something inevitably got lost along the way. To aim for a student market is to be forced into thinking Foucault's work as an 'oeuvre', and therefore overlooking some of the discontinuities between his books. It is also to be forced into some idea of 'periodisation'. Stories have to be told and various fictional Foucaults described. Most paradoxically: it becomes almost impossible to introduce Foucault's work in its historical contexts using a Foucauldian (counter-) history of ideas. Instead, if one is to begin this way - and assuming the reader knows little of Foucault - it is almost inevitable that one has to use a rather standard history of ideas approach. What does this tell us about the practical useability of Foucault's counter-history of ideas today?
The Conditions of Marketing The Anglophone world which dominates the Foucault industry (the French, for the most part relying on translations from the English for secondary studies) is based on a set of translations of Foucault's texts into English. No
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wonder, then, that many French scholars are perplexed by what they find in those, largely American, studies. And no wonder that Anglophone Foucauldian are startled into non-recognition when they read such things as Deleuze's little book on Foucault where he appears as the 'philosopher of the visible' rather than, say, the philosopher of discourse, of discipline, or of subjectivity. The situation is more than paradoxical and it has its root in the translations of the primary texts which are, at best, misleading and, at worst, plain wrong. The misleading simply leads to wrong pictures. Thus, while Foucault begins Les mots et les choses with: 'Le peintre est legerement en retrait du tableau', the professional hack who writes The Order of Things starts like this: 'The painter is standing a little back from his canvas'. 1 'Le peintre' is no doubt the painter; but whether 'h~gerement' is a little, whether'en retrait du' is back from, and (more emphatically) whether 'tableau' is a canvas (when almost any French writer would have use 'la toile' for that): these are moot points- not to mention the possessive that has crept in somehow. The plain wrong arises when, as it does in The Archaeology, a single word (which happens to be 'not') gets inserted where it should not be. 2 And this situation is going to continue and reproduce- perhaps indefinitely- while Tavistock and Penguin own the rights, preventing improved translations, and while the Foucault executors and executrixes remain, as they have for so long, immobile in their duties to propagate the legacy (apparently because, they say, Foucault told them so). Added to this are the numerous books and journals devoted to reproducing Foucault's interviews and lectures, semi-primary texts. Here a quite different range of Foucaults appears: one who speaks out on political issues of the moment and who drags in his personal experiences, beliefs and understandings; one who is more overtly gay, Leftist (at times), critical, interventional; one who gives potted summaries of his work for the novitiate (with a different summary of his oeuvre on almost every occasion, as the occasion demands). These texts (the best of which can be found in Power/ Knowledge, Politics Philosophy Culture and, possibly, in Foucault Live) 3 standin stark contrast to the Foucault who wrote the hard, impersonal books from Madness and Civilisation through to The Care of the Self- books which hardly show a biographical personage at work, which rarely seek to judge (look closely at Discipline and Punish -it contains no criticism at all and criticism can only be found there by paranoid lapsed Marxists, I suspect), and which hardly ever touch on social and political conditions after 1899.4 There is, it is obvious to anyone who reads, another plethora of Foucaults here: leading to a strange tendency in the secondary literature .... These secondary texts consist of books and articles. The books are almost wholly owned by the Routledge company- especially since their purchase of Methuen some years ago- so much so that a deft researcher could (and this would be a great PhD topic) find out the principles of writing on Foucault by inspecting the vicissitudes of Routledge's publication policy during the 1980s and 1990s. Some person or persons in those offices in New York and London are effectively deciding the course of scholarship: who publishes what; who gets jobs; what constitutes the 'professional' orthodoxy on Foucault. That orthodoxy, especially on the Western side of the Atlantic,
Condensing j'oucau{t
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might well run like this: inspect the interviews and lectures, find from these what Foucault really meant, then go to discover that meaning in the impersonal primary texts. Thus we find Simon During in his Foucault and Literature (Routledge- of course) explaining the complexity of Foucault's interests and approaches to them by invoking an intention: The reason for this richness of subject-matter is not simply that Foucault, working [naturally] to offer the unrepresented a voice, is no respecter of disciplinary specialization. Rather, he no longer operates in an intellectual context for which it goes without saying that this approach is proper to that topic, or that this topic connects with that one- just because that is the way it has traditionally been in academic research. 5
Foucault, the spokesperson for the silenced; Foucault, the methodologist who simply inverts the Sussan adverts ('this goes with that'). No wonder, then, that when a much more careful reader, John Frow, goes to inspect the secondary literature- as he did a few years ago over a couple of volumes of Meanjin -he finds unrelenting awfulness, in both the books and the generically similar articles. 6 Nothing I have seen since then has changed my opinion. Professional Foucauldians, then, need to be more than simply dismissive when conservative anti-theorists suspect that uses of his work and references to him are little more than means for pretentiously stuffing the curriculum vitae. A great deal of this work plays directly into their hands. Outside this, there remain the biographies- three in English to date, and all three displaying yet another range of Foucaults. The first was Eribon'sin a strange translation from the French - but reliable and prosaic, seeking very little in the way of judgment and written with a true fan's and friend's enthusiasm. 7 Next came Miller's essay in self-flagellating psycho-nonsense. Here we have bio-criticism at its lowest ebb: Foucault, from his first breath, is dominated by a passion for the limit-experience of death. 8 It is, we read, death that will open up the secret truths of existence, the final revelation which arrives when what it reveals is over. This is all very silly- especially when it moves from death-fascination to sado-masochism, a predilection which, Miller argues, explains the momentum behind Discipline and Punish. What Miller fails to mention is that his grand narrative would, logically, have Foucault on the side of pre-modern forms of corporeal punishment (hanging, dismemberment, decapitation, and so on) since they (rather than the effective but non-corporeal gaze) mesh better with the truth of death's limits and the sado-masochistic impulse. Foucault as the philosopher of the nostalgic return to the sadistic King and his masochistic subjects? I don't think so. Lastly, there is now the Macey biography. 9 This is, at least an intellectual biography. It contains many a nice precis of Foucault's major works. It revels in the multiplicity of Foucaults, without seeking to close the book on the matter or draw a final verdict. Of all the biographies, this is the most useful as an assembled reminder of Foucault's work. It acts as a kind of diary or regimen for the reader who wants to jog their sluggish memory of the books - as does all good journalism. In all of this, however, there is what brain-dead Foucauldians call a 'dominant discourse': a tendency, by and large, despite the complexities, to
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dwell on Foucault as one who was invested in a critique of contemporary society.Again,itistheFoucaultoftheinterviewsreadbackintotheFoucault of the main texts, especially Discipline and Punish and the first volume of The History of Sexuality. 10 In this version, Foucault appears to be against modern forms of punishment (pace Miller) with its insidious gaze and its terrible (because non-deadly) Panopticon. He appears to offer a critique of power which, we are told, reaches into every facet of our lives so that we must be on the lookout for it in every friendly gesture, every collegial word, every act of love, everything that appears on the surface to be well-meaning- for each conceals this hidden phantom of power which has no source and no end, but constitutes a 'network' of which we are merely the nodes. He appears to deal with the subject (as individual) only in the later works, having killed it off (' comme ala limite du mer un visage de sable'11 ) earlier on in the piece, and felt guilty so that he had to return to a fuller humanity. He appears as one who - despite his attempts at critique -had a dubious theory of gender and/ or gender politics such that, according to Teresa de Lauretis, his apparent 'support' for perverts and sex offenders was nothing more than a pro-rape posture, typical in its masculinism, deserving unmasking by a feminism that only knows one thing: that all men are wrongP These are all interesting stories, but they forget a few things. They forget that the details of Discipline and Punish, the textual specifics, the things one can actually read in that text if one bothers, contain almost no words of judgment about forms of punishment (retributive or panoptic, ancient or modern, sovereign or popular) and that the overt methodology of that text, spelled out in very direct terms in I Pierre Riviere, is a methodology specifically of non-intervention, non-critique, non-judgment (either of 'criminals' or of their 'accusers'), insofar as this is possibleP They forget that Foucault's analysis of power is almost completely descriptive and works in direct opposition to the naive versions of it that one finds in those politically invested crypto-disciplines which presume to know what politics and power are, were and have been, eternally and all along, and which never (as did Foucault, who was a philosopher) ask the question of the question of the political and of power. They forget that almost all of Foucault's major texts ask questions about the subject and its historical processes of formation via an amassing of empirical detail, such that one can find (especially in The Order of Things) an investigation of the subject as it is produced via forms of knowledge and discourse, an investigation (in Discipline and Punish) which is overtly organised as a 'genealogy of the modern soul' (I quote from the preface), and an investigation (in the last volumes) of the self in its relation to itself (as one of its many possible relations)- so that the question of the subject and what it is shifts during the course of Foucault's writing, to be sure, but it can never be said to be absent earlier on, killed off in the middle (that was 'Man' remember? -not the subject, and the death was in the conditional-'s'effacerait'), then reinstalled at the end. They forget that the last two volumes of The History of Sexuality give a detailed empirical account of changes in the position of women across the two periods investigated in each volume, such that the wife in Ancient Greece is nothing, property, chattels, while the wife in the Early Christian period is expected to be exactly
Condensing j'oucau{t
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like a man, an equal, an equivalent, using the same means of self-production and self-care - so there are different patriarchies operating, producing different subject positions for women and suggesting to the alert reader that a genealogy of patriarchies might be in order, rather than that simple experiential knowing of what that essential substance is- a knowing which can so easily and unthinkingly accuse Foucault of not knowing it, ignoring it. What this state of affairs (technically, a state of ignorance or unprofessionality, hidden by a genuine concern for political critique) leads to, is a highly sloganised version of Foucault geared mostly towards the American market. Sometimes, as Foucault himself often noted, the slogan is 'knowledge is power'; at other times, it is 'there is no sexual repression'; at still others it is a story about an abrupt shift from our being punished to our being 'surveilled' (and a nastier Anglicism there has never been). And we have to wonder whether this Americanisation of Foucault is anything more than a continuation of a long American tradition of liberalist scholarship which has searched for that Marxist which is not one: a theorist who can provide critique but without allying the devotee to the Left in any direct way. Gramsci, Bakhtin, Althusser have all been pressed into this service. Is Foucault merely the next subject of that American critical blandness which refuses to read carefully? Foucault was very aware of this process by which intellectual production of the most careful and empirically detailed kind can become a mere slogan: he was aware that our very modes of textual dissemination and pedagogy almost inevitably lead to it. His view was that it is not so much bad as inevitable. 14 And this is precisely why it is impossible for me (or anyone) to argue that, as it were, 'behind' the sloganised, bowdlerised and travestied Foucault, lies a true original form neglected in the secondary literature. If he is right in thepassagewhichfollows, there can never, practically, be any true or any single Foucault. Any idea of that Foucault has been 'freed' from itself, from its own pretensions of authenticity and singularity: A book is produced, a minute event, a small handy object. From that moment on it is caught up in an endless play of repetitions; its doubles begin to swarm around it and far from it; each reading gives it an impalpable and unique body for an instant; fragments of itself are made to stand for it, are taken to almost entirely contain it, and sometimes serve as refuge for it; it is doubled with commentaries, those other discourses in which it should finally appear as it is, confessing what it had refused to say, freeing itself from what it so loudly pretended to be. 15
The Conditions of Pedagogy A curious fact is apparent when we look at how Foucault is taught today. He appears in general courses, and often as an adjunct to other thinkers. I have given lectures on Foucault in literary theory courses, in courses on social semiotics, discourse analysis, cultural theory and sociology, where he has appeared among an array of other literary theorists, discourse analysts and so on. I have been invited to contribute Foucaultist morsels to workshops on fine art theory and nursing, architecture and museology. But nowhere have
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I seen a course on Foucault; still less an intensive concentration involving anything more than a reading of the 'Docile Bodies' section of Discipline and Punish. There does not seem to be a course where his books (in the plural) are read. Still less does there seem to be a location of Foucault in any approximation to his 'natural' homes: philosophy and/ or the history of ideas. This leaves us with a peculiar: where, pedagogically, is Foucault today? Sadly, the answer is: beside or behind Freud, Marx, Durkheim, Heidegger, Garfinkel, Levi-Strauss, Halliday.... And the only consolation is that this must be having a seriously negative effect on Routledge's sales figures. If only there were Foucault courses, then the secondary texts could be set and sell in profitable numbers. Then there is a second curious fact. Even though Foucault is a marginal pursuit in its /his own right, the range of his work which is read in tertiary courses is incredibly limited. Out of his prodigious output, only Discipline and Punish and the first volume of The History of Sexuality achieve anything like a decent mention. His monumental achievement in The Birth of the Clinic is hardly acknowledged, despite the fact that it is one of his most thorough histories and, possibly, the least criticised by those it could affect today. 16 His only real 'best seller', The Order of Things (first edition 1966) is now (28 years later) consigned to a distant past, rarely turned to, seen as an arcane investigation of unknowns (Bopp, Cuvier, Ricardo). So there is, in a practical sense, in terms of the everyday politics of curriculum decisions, a problem with Foucault's accessibility and with the disciplinary formation in which he might be taught. What is alarming for Foucault scholars in all of this is something which comes close to the heart of his project: the idea of forming an inter-disciplinary or counter-disciplinary space may have failed. There is nothing called 'the counter-history of ideas'. Was it only a whim? If not, where does it exist in any practical, material sense? At present, Foucault is read inside 'schools' which have their own trajectories. This both expands and limits the possibilities of reading Foucault. There is a school which reads Foucault as a tool for academics working with and alongside government(s). In Australia, this is exemplified at Griffith University - the Griffith School. And, in this case, we have to wonder whether there may have been a mistake about a word- 'government'. Is what Foucault means by the 'government of the self' easily assimilable to what Paul Keating means by 'the government'? Does Foucault's work on governmentality (with its meticulous discussions of advices to the Prince) easily translate into a mobilisation of Foucauldian categories for the better running of state museums? Should the prince continue to be given advice from Foucauldian- and does he even want it? On the other hand, there is a much more dominant school which has no particular locus - Griffith, after all, always wanted to be different, less dominant, at whatever cost, including the charge or neo-conservatism. This is, precisely, the mobilisation of Foucault for 'subverting the dominant discourse', for 'voicing the position of the unvoiced', for showing that 'power is everywhere', for 'working against the surveillance' of the dispossessed. In this case, he appears as a liberatory device for doing social critique. As I have already said: this forgets his attempt to produce descriptions in studied historical detail, to assemble
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reminders of what, towards the end, he called an 'ontology of the present'. An ontology, mind you: not a pluralist, relativist miasma. A category of philosophy: not of a knee-jerk experientialism which works on the old adage, 'I am, therefore I know'. Taking up this idea of an ontology of the present, perhaps Foucault's central question was always 'who are we today?' - a question which he answered in his main works in a curious way, by (we would have to conclude from the textual evidence) deliberately abstaining from addressing how things are today and turning instead to the (discursive, political and ethical) conditions which have made them possible. Unlike Kant, his idea of the conditions of possibility was not abstractly a priori. Instead, they were historically aprioristic. They could be documented in terms of the ways in which what we count as essential shifted from essentiality to interpretability (or vice versa) over time. That does not mean that they may easily be otherwise today by a simple expression of faith or experience. On the contrary, it makes them into difficult (if not impossible) limits to surpass. But it does mean that they could have been otherwise. And that a close study of historical events can give us some idea of how our (seemingly rather fixed) legacy might be changed. It allows us to calculate (if Foucault's historical readings are right) ways of changing who we are today. But this broad discussion neglects where we started from: the position of the student in what must be (for the student) an abstruse debate. How could we reasonably involve any student in this debate? It has almost no chance of getting off the ground as something which could be brought to class as a tutorial discussion. Quite interestingly, and even though it shows Foucault on the wilder side of things, he has something to say about this positioning of the student: The student is put outside of society, on a campus. Furthermore, he is excluded while being transmitted a knowledge traditional in nature, obsolete,' academic' and not directly tied to the needs and problems of today. This exclusion is underscored by the organisation, around the student, of social mechanisms which are fictitious, artificial and quasi-theatrical (hierarchical relationships, academic exercises, the 'court' of examination, evaluation). Finally, the student is given a gamelike way of life; he is offered a kind of distraction, amusement, freedom which, again, has nothing to do with real life; it is this kind of artificial, theatrical society, a society of cardboard, that is being built around him; and thanks to this, young people ... are thus, as it were, neutralised by and for society, rendered safe, ineffective, socially and politically castratedY
Writing the Book So under these circumstances, given the multiplicity of Foucaults, how could it be possible to write a primer for undergraduates on Foucault? If I really believed in this terrible dispersion, how could I even begin to write? Put bluntly, Foucault studies seem to rest on a happy irony which was once well expressed by Hobbes: the desire for freedom and dominion over others. For Hobbes, these were not extremities. They fitted together as natural desires. Today things are different and lead to polarisations - indeed polarisations of Foucault as either the advocate of freedom (in some
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unspecifiedly unlimited sense) or as the advocate of control: a Foucault who is either unruly or well-tempered (to use Toby Miller's distinction) but not both. The first Foucault is the avatar of Nietzsche and de Sade, the Foucault who sets us free from the juridico-discursive, who bids us to have more than one true sex, who would delegislate everythingincludingrape, who freebases in the Nevada desert, and who seeks the ultimate limit-case of death. The second Foucault is the avatar of Bentham and Kant, the Foucault who finds the pastoral bureaucracy to be inevitable and other modes of training to be rare, who bids us to work directly with government, who would have us devote ourselves to administering and administering better, controlling more methodically, who leads us to conclude that even taxation is good for our souls. So there can be a mobilisation of Foucault either for or against current versions of political correctness (racism, sexism, and so on). There can be a Foucault who 'transgresses the dominant discourse', as though he were a kind of Halliday with politics. There can be a Foucault who is blind to primordial sexual difference, who supports perverts (who are really rapists), the Ayatollah's Iran, and (amazingly) Israel, the ultimately repressive and continuingly colonising state of our times. And there cannot be a Foucault who theorised this surface difference of 'Foucaults' in terms of the empirico-transcendental doublet. One way of dealing with this nesting of paradoxes has always been to periodise Foucault- the classic example being that of Dreyfus and Rabinow in their book Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. 18 One problem with this division into the early (psychological), the post-early (discursive), the middle (power- dominated) and the late (subjectivist) Foucault is that it does not take into account Foucault's own continual rewriting of the purposes of his work (mentioned above). In fact, at almost any stage of his writing, there is an interviewed or a lecturing Foucault who summarises his work to date in terms of his current preoccupations. 19 For example in the 'Orders of Discourse', he rethinks it in terms of the projects starting just after The Archaeology of Knowledge, the projects which, we hear, are focussed on power and knowledge and which forget the earlier category of discourse (Deleuze's reading notwithstanding). 20 In the interviews in Politics, Philosophy, Culture, and at the end of Dreyfus and Rabinow's book, he rethinks it in terms of the production of subjects vis-a-vis their relations to themselves ('rapports asoi'). And there are several minor rethinkings to boot along the way to these major revisions. If Foucault is a revisionist historian, the object that his revision applies to most is his own work. This problem of selecting a 'period' of Foucault to work with - for students, encountering him for the first time and who require something (at least) of a definite ground to work upon, to revise for themselves- always leaves out of account, must leave out of account, several quite important Foucaults. For example, it must run over the early psychologistic period when Foucault worked on his translation of and introduction to Ludwig Binswanger ('Dream, Imagination and Existence'). 21 There is a real question about the inclusion of Madness and Civilisation- especially since the text is most renowned for Derrida's debate with a passage from it (on Descartes) which is absent from the abridged English translation. The Order of Things is
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a massive part of Foucault's output (even just to count the pages) but, as I have noted already, it is almost completely neglected today for pedagogic purposes. The Archaeology ofKnowledge is still used to some extent- but it can make little sense without the immediately prior volume on which it is, after all, merely a methodological reflection. And this reflection, especially on the concept of discourse, is much better done by Foucault in his 'Reply to a Question', translated into English as 'Politics and the Study of Discourse'. 22 Butwhatwoulditbetodevoteachaptertothisseeminglyminorpaper,even if it does tell us what Foucault was thinking at the time about this crucial concept in his armoury? Instead of this careful understanding, most pedagogy today goes to the 'middle' works: Discipline and Punish and the Introduction to The History of Sexuality. These are, after all, the nearest Foucault comes to dealing with something like fashionable political issues based on experience: troubles with the law of the land, troubles with the law of gender. The real trouble, as I have said, is that, whatever Foucault may have written in those texts, he is always going to be read as having written there a message for contemporary identity politics. Maybe, there are clues in those works for those who would see their professional positions as pure effects of their personal experiences. Maybe not. But if so: Foucault is no philosopher. And that is a very hard thing to believe, especially since he begins his next work, The Use of Pleasure, with an Introduction which registers his work in terms of the (his) use of philosophy today by comparison with its use in Ancient Greece. 23 It is not, as the story has it, that this late work is a sudden return to the subject: the subject has been there all along. It is simply that, in these last works, it is now considered as having had, all along, differing relations to itself as opposed to relations to its outside (whether in the forms of discourse or of power). That, for Foucault, is what philosophy does, in the end, as a discipline in the political world, and despite its own possible self-understanding as a form of transcendental or pure reason: it secures the self's idea of itself. His question then is: what is the history of this relation? He almost took this history up to the Middle Ages which is where, we may remember, Madness and Civilisation begins. And so we are left with the suspicion that Foucault's oeuvre is something of a 'complete' history from the Ancient Greeks to the dawn of our own century. No one, so far, has looked at him this way. No one has thought that the projected third volume, The Confessions of the Flesh might Gust) overlap with Madness and Civilisation, and repeat it. But this would be to speculate on Foucault. It would return us to the biographical. And then, for the writer of any primer: should one use the bio-details? Should the beginning student be given the easy story of the author's life as a key to the more difficult story of his writings? How easy to slip into the mode of the biographers and find the key to the later works in Foucault's homosexuality; or to find his promotion of the Prisoners Information Group as the impetus behind Discipline and Punish; or to try to locate his odd politics vis-a-vis Iran and Israel as a personal populism which infects his political stance. None of this works- it always requires a forced narrative, a determination to make a representation of the man's life and a representation of his incredibly anonymous writings fit together. As Foucault puts it
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(and here I realise that I am committing the sins I have just denounced), it is almost impossible to locate his own political bearing: I think I have in fact been situated in most of the squares on the political checkerboard, one after another and sometimes simultaneously; as anarchist, leftist, ostentatious or disguised Marxist, explicit or secret anti-Marxist, technocrat in the service of Gaullism, new liberal etc ... It's true thatl prefer not to identify myself and that I'm amused by the diversity of the ways I've been judged and classified. 24
This opens up the problem of Foucault's own historical positioning in the discipline of the history of ideas. How can this doubly enfolded problem be introduced to the beginning student? To use a Foucauldian approach to Foucault projects him as a radical discontinuity of a particular kind. To understand this kind of discontinuity assumes that a Foucauldian idea of history is already in place- which it is not for the beginner, by definition. The most practical solution is to give an account of Foucault which is quite traditional, which sees him as emerging from structuralism (Dumezil), Marxism (Althusser), the Bachelard- Canguilhem tradition of history of ideas, Foucault's own fellow anti-existentialists (especially Deleuze), as well as a certain literary tradition which might have informed his style: Roussel, Bataille, Artaud, Beckett and Blanchot. At the same time, it would be impossible to forget Foucault's dependence on Nietzsche and Heideggerin fact very different forms of dependence on these two. And also his opposition to Hegelian, Freudian, and phenomenological versions of the subject, of history, and of the positioning of the subject in history. Then it would be necessary to account for Foucault's opposition to linguistic, textualist, hermeneutic and communicational versions of discourse. In any such version of Foucault, ideas of 'influence' (or dissension from influence) are going to be rife- and this is precisely what his own idea of the history of ideas would deny. To condense Foucault is inevitably to miss him on his own grounds. He cannot, in any clear sense, be the subject of a primer. The task is, in strictly Foucauldian terms, impossible.
Overall The result of what I have written (and I think must write) about Foucault is just another story among the many and various stories about him. It is also one which must, by definition, be uncritical of Foucault's own work. I must, in writing a primer, be uncritical. I am put, like it or not, in a position of advocacy. By explaining, so that the student may understand, I am defined as a defender and supporter. There is no other way. And the student who reads the book, who has, in some way, chosen to want to know Foucault, is put in a position of having to accept this particular story about him in order to begin to understand. Criticism can come later. But, at the same time, criticism may be demanded from the start. This student- whoever reads the primer- is, without exception, and without the possibility of any easy form ofdissent,putintoexactlythesamepedagogicposition,isaneffectofexactly the same pedagogic conditions, that Foucault himself described (above). How would it be to write in such a way (perhaps a Foucauldian way) which would work counter to the conditions of marketing and pedagogy
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outlined so far? What would the world be like if Foucault's ideas could be easily and unproblematically introduced as if they were natural? It would be already Foucauldian; already in no need of a primer. And so the idea of the need for a primer says quite clearly that such a world does not exist. And this paradox, in itself, explains why a Foucault primer is intrinsically paradoxical. Perhaps, after all, history, including Foucault's part in it, is forced to have a meaning - resist as it might. Perhaps, after all, Foucault is right when he says in Power /Knowledge that, after the long night's search, we arrive at the end of the tunnel only to find Hegel standing there laughing at us. 1
Michel Foucault, Les Mots et les chases: Une Acheologie des sciences humaines, Paris: Gullimard 1966, p.19. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, London: Tavistock, 1971.
2
See for other examples of mistranslation, Meaghan Morris, 'Fiche technique' in Meaghan Morris and Paul Patton (eds), Power, Truth and Strategy, Sydney: Feral, 1979, pp.101-5.
3
Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, Colin Gordon (ed. ), New York: Pantheon, 1980; Foucault Live: Interviews 1966-84, Sylvere Lotringer (ed.), New York: Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series, 1989; Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977-1984, Lawrence D. Kritzman (ed.), London: Routledge, 1988.
4
Foucault, Madness and Civilisation: A History ofInsanity in the Age ofReason. Trans. Richard Howard, lntro David Cooper, London: Tavistock, 1970; Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. A. M. Sheridan-Smith, London: Allen Lane, 1977; The Care of the Self Trans. Robert Hurley, New York: Pantheon, 1985.
5
Simon During, Foucault and Literature: Towards a Genealogy of Writing, London: Routledge, 1992, p.3.
6
John Frow, 'Some versions of Foucault', Meanjin 47,1 (1988), pp.144-56; 47, 2 (1988), pp. 353-65. For an extensive examination of the secondary literature, particularly prior to 1984 see also Clare O'Farrell, Foucault: Historian of Philosopher?, London: Macmillan, 1989.
7
Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault, trans. B. Wing, London: Faber & Faber, 1992.
8
James Miller, The Passion ofMichel Foucault, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993
9
David Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault, London: Hutchinson, 1993.
10 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, New York: Pantheon, 1980. 11 Michel Foucault, Les Mots et les chases, p.398. 12 Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn't: Feminism, semiotics,cinema, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984, p.94. 13 Foucault, I, Pierre Rivere, Having Slaughtered my Mother, my Sister and my Brother ... Trans. FrankJellinek, New York: Pantheon, 1975. 14 Foucault, 'Critical Theory /Intellectual History', in Politics, Philosophy, Culture, p.43. 15 Foucault, Histoire de la folie aI'age classique, Paris: Gallimard, 1972. 16 Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology ofMedical perception. Trans. A. M. Sheridan-Smith, London: Tavistock, 1973.
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17 Foucault, 'Rituals of Exclusion', in Foucault Live, S Lotringer (ed.). 18 H. L. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Afterword by Michel Foucault, Brighton: Harvester, 1982. 19 For a detailed description of these shifts in Foucault's work see O'Farrell,
Foucault: Historian of Philosopher. 20 Foucault, "Orders of Discourse', trans. R. Swyers, Social Sciences Information, April, 1971. 21 Foucault, 'Dream, Imagination and Existence', trans. F. Williams, Review of Existential Psychiatry, xix, 1, 1984-85, pp.29-78. 22 Foucault, 'Politics and the Study of Discourse', trans. Colin Gordon, in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller, (eds), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, Brighton: Harvester, 1991, pp.53-72. 23 Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, trans. R. Hurley, New York: Pantheon, 1985. 24 Foucault, 'Polemics, Politics and Problematizations: An Interview', in Paul Rabinow, (ed.), The Foucault Reader, London: Penguin, 1986, pp.383-4.
Contributors Ratnam Alagiah is a lecturer in the Syme Department of accounting at Monash University, Melbourne. He received his Bachelor of Commerce degree from the University of Mysore, India and his Master of Commerce degree in accounting from the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Before launching on a teaching career he was a Group Accountant for a commercial institution in Malaysia. He has lectured in accounting at Rima Institute, Malaysia; the University of Technology, Papua New Guinea; the University of Wollongong and at Charles Sturt University, in Australia. Paul Alberts teaches the history of social and political philosophy, communication theory and contemporary theory at the University of Western Sydney, Nepean. 'Atrocity mechanics' represents a larger work in progress. W. R. Albury is Professor of History and Philosophy of Science, School of Science and Technology Studies, University of New South Wales. His research interests include the history of biology and medicine, the role of scientific knowledge in social-practical systems and constructions of 'disability'. He has published widely on the history of medicine and on geology. Chris Atmore teaches in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at Monash University. Her current research interests are at the intersection of media and cultural studies, feminist, post-structuralist and lesbian/ gay theory. Her recent work is concerned with representations of lesbian feminists and sexual violence in public controversies over rape and child sexual abuse. Philip Barker is currently a visiting scholar in the Department of English at the University of Queensland. His PhD is from Sydney University. He is author of Michel Foucault: Subversions of the Subject (Allen and Unwin 1994). He is currently working on a new book on Foucault in the Modern Cultural Theorist series which is due for publication at the end of 1996. Michael Bartos is a Research Fellow at the National Centre in HIV Social Research, Macquarie University. His doctoral research at LaTrobe University, investigated the connection between the government of public health and of sexuality as it has been reorganised by HIV I AIDS. He has published articles and policy commentary in the areas of AIDS policy and education policy. In 1993 and 1994 he was President of the Victorian AIDS Council/ Gay Men's Health Centre and on the Committee of the Australian Federation of AIDS Organisations. Tony Bennett is Professor of Cultural Studies in the Faculty of Humanities at Griffith University where he is also Founding Director of the Institute for Cultural Policy Studies. His publications include Formalism and Marxism, Bond and Beyond: The Political Career ofa Popular Hero (with J. Woollacott) and Outside Literature, Show and Tell: The Museum, the Fair and the Exhibition.
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David Burchell lectures in the faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Western Sydney, Nepean, Australia. He was for some years editor of Australian Left Review, a monthly magazine. He has recently published on the concepts of society and economy in the debate over economic liberalism, and on Adam Smith's critique of the neoclassical ideal of citizenship. He is researching preclassical political economy as a form of statecraft, and the 'active/passive' distinction in theories of citizenship. Julianne Cheek and Trudy Rudge are both academics at the University of South Australia. Julianne is senior lecturer (research) in the Faculty of Nursing and holds a doctorate in social science/education. Trudy is a lecturer in nursing in the Faculty of Nursing and is currently completing her doctorate at LaTrobe University in Nursing. They share a common interest in post structural perspectives and how they can be applied to the health and nursing areas. They have written numerous articles and book chapters many of which explore applications of Foucauldian perspectives to the health arena. Stewart Clegg is presently Foundation Professor of Management at the University of Western Sydney, Macarthur. Previously Professor of Organization Studies at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, and, before that, Professor of Sociology at the University of New England. Prior to that, a member of the School of Humanities, Griffith University. He is author of a number of books and papers. Claire Colebrook has a PhD from Edinburgh University and is currently teaching in the English and Comparative Literature program at Murdoch University. She is currently preparing a book on New Historicism for Manchester University Press. Sue Crane is currently Senior Lecturer in the School of Nursing at Griffith University. Previously, Sue was a Lecturer in Nursing at Deakin University (Geelong), in Victoria for six and a half years assisting in the development of the undergraduate Bachelor of Nursing, and in particular in the areas of elderly care and the incorporation of alternative therapies into nursing practice. Sue submitted a PhD in 1996 with the Faculty of Education at Deakin University. She has published a number of papers on nursing homes and the care of the elderly. Peter Cryle holds a personal chair in French at the University of Queensland. He has published five books and a number of articles, most of them in literary criticism. His books include The Tower and the Plain: The Thematics of Commitment (Princeton UP 1985) and Geometry in the Boudoir: Configurations of Classical French Erotic Narrative (Cornell UP 1994). Geoff Danaher is a tutor and postgraduate student at the University of Central Queensland, undertaking a thesis applying Foucault's Discipline and Punish to historiographic constructions of the convict colony in Australia.
Contri6utors
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Jorge Davila is Professor of Interpretive Systematology at the Systems School in University of Los Andes at Merida in Venezuela. He received his Systems Engineering degree from the University of Los Andes and his Diploma of postgraduate studies in Social Sciences from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris supervised by E. Morin. His research focuses on public institutions of developing countries, power in organisations, and the historical dimension in interpretive systems theory. He has published papers on Heidegger and Foucault. Mitchell Dean is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Macquarie University. He is the author of The Constitution of Poverty: toward a genealogy of liberal governance (Routledge, 1991) and Critical and Effective Histories: Foucault's methods and historical sociology (Routledge, 1994). He has published in Australian, English, U.S. and Canadian social science and social theory journals. He is currently working on the Australian social state in the 1990s. Christopher Falzon is a lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at the ANU. He has taught at the ANU since 1989, in courses on existentialism, the Frankfurt School and Habermas, Nietzsche, Husserl and Foucault. His PhD was on Foucault and he has published articles on Foucault and Habermas. His book Foucault and Social Dialogue: Beyond Fragmentation will be published by Routledge in 1997. Rob Garrett is a performance and bookwork artist who is currently engaged in investigations of the artist as citizen, and questioning the political usefulness of art. He is at present teaching Art Theory at the School of Art, Otago Polytechnic, Dunedin, New Zealand, and in 1993 received Otago Polytechnic's award for Excellence in Research. He has undertaken many performance projects since the early 80s as well as installation projects at the Wellington City Art Gallery and the Manawatu Art Gallery. In 'The Town Meeting Project' (Dunedin 1993) and 'Answering Back: Are You Being Heard?' (Christchurch 1994) he has explored notions of publicness and democratic participation in various political spheres. Suzanne Goopy is an associate lecturer in the School of Nursing, Faculty of Health and Behavioural Sciences, Griffith University, Nathan, Queensland. Jennifer Gore is Senior Lecturer in Education at The University of Newcastle, where she teaches sociology of education, curriculum theory, gender studies and subjects on power and pedagogy. She is author of The Struggle for Pedagogies and co-editor (with Carmen Luke) of Feminisms and Critical Pedagogy. Her current research is an empirical investigation of the functioning of power relations in a range of pedagogical sites. Barbara Grant teaches in the Student Learning Centre and the Higher Education Research Office at The University of Auckland in New Zealand. As a teacher, she is particularly interested in postgraduate supervision and the practices of thesis management and writing. In her academic work, she
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is interested in the intersection of post-structuralist theories - of discourse, the subject and power- and radical (including feminist) education theories in relation to student experience of higher education. Shayne Grice is currently studying for a doctorate and lecturing in the School of Management Studies at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. His research interests include developments in critical organisation studies, developing a framework for considering consumer culture in late capitalism, applying Foucault's work to management theory and practice. He has presented a number of conference papers on racism, consumer culture and careers. Susan Grieshaber is a lecturer in the School of Early Childhood, Queensland University of Technology. Her research interests include post-structural and feminist orientations involving families and young children, where gender is a significant player. Paul Henman completed his PhD in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at the University of Queensland. This thesis studied computer use in Australia's Department of Social Security and the effects of such use on policy and policy processes in that Department. He is now working for the Department as a policy officer. Christine Higgins is a lecturer in the School of Humanities in the Faculty of Arts at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane. Her major teaching interests are nineteenth and twentieth century English and Australian Literature and Literary Theory. She is interested in interdisciplinary explorations of literary theory, language study and legal texts. Jean Hillier works in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at Curtin University, Perth, W A. Her research interests lie in issues of citizen participation and power, and linking the work of Michel Foucault and Jiirgen Habermas, written up in two forthcoming books, Post-modern Democracy? and The Swan Valley; a Case of Public Participation. David Holmes is lecturer in, and convenor of, Sociology at Griffith University, Gold Coast. A past co-editor of the Melbourne Journal of Politics and Arena he is currently working on a book contextualising French intellectual traditions around the 'end of history' thesis. Michael Jan over teaches social theory and history of political thought in the Department of Politics, Monash University. He is currently working on the nexus of politics and philosophy in ancient Greek thought, and on a history of ideas of 'modernity' and 'subjectivity' as affirmative ideals and critical targets of contemporary thought.
Contri6utors
787
Deborah Jones is a lecturer in Management Communication at the University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand. Her various past and present positioning as a feminist activist, organisational communication consultant, public servant, anti-racist, and academic, contribute to her current research focus on discourses of equality and biculturalism in the New Zealand public service. She teaches communication theory and research; and interpersonal, organisational, gender and intercultural communication. Stephen Katz is Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, Trent University, Peterborough, Canada. He has recently published Disciplining Old Age: The Formation of Gerontological Knowledge. Gavin Kendall is lecturer in sociology at Queensland University of Technology, formerly a lecturer in psychology at Lancaster University, UK. He is interested in the relation between the human sciences and problems of government. He is currently completing a study of the relation between psychology, literate practices, and forms of personhood. Jayne Keogh is currently tutoring in education at Griffith University, where she is also completing her doctoral studies. Moya Lloyd is a lecturer in political theory at the Queen's University, Belfast. She is the author of articles on Foucault and feminism, and on feminism and the politics of the body. She is co-editor (with Andrew Thacker) of The Impact ofMichel Foucault on the Humanities and Social Sciences (Macmillan, 1997). She is currently writing a book entitled A Feminist Politics of Difference to be published by Sage. Elizabeth Logan is a lecturer in Public Relations at Deakin University. Throughout the turbulent eighties, she worked for numerous large Australian organisations in various communication management roles. She has also held a position on the Board of the Society of Business Communicators in Melbourne. Elizabeth Logan Her research interests have focussed on the erosion of traditionally powerful institutions in society, such as the legal profession, and their response to changing ideologies. John Macarthur is a lecturer in Architecture at The University of Queensland. John's master thesis Gointly supervised at Griffith University) compared aspects of the work of Foucault with that of marxist architectural theorist Manfredo Tafuri. His doctorate 'The Ornamental Cottage, Landscape and Disgust' is an analysis of picturesque architecture as techniques in power relations and aesthetics. John teaches and writes on architectural and urban design as well as the history and theory of architecture. Mary Mackay is a lecturer in Australian Colonial Art and Architecture in the Department of Fine Arts at The University of Sydney. She has published articles on Australian Colonialism, nineteenth and twentieth Century Landscape, Attitudes to Death, and twentieth century Modernism. Her interests
788
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include Foucauldian studies, the Sublime and Post-colonial approaches to Colonial research. She is currently writing a book on the Sublime in nineteenth century Australia using a Foucauldian approach. David Marshall is currently lecturing in media and cultural studies in the Department of English, University of Queensland. Previously Dr Marshall was assistant professor in the School of journalism and Communication, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. He is the author of Celebrity and Power (forthcoming in March 1997) and articles on popular culture, conceptions of theaudience,andthemedia.Hiscurrentinterestsincludeanhistoricalstudy of the development of agencies which manage public personalities and research into collective subjectivity and modernity through studying the development of the entertainment crowd. James Marshall is Professor and Head of the Education Department, University of Auckland. In 1996 he published Michel Foucault : Personal Autonomy and Education ( Kluwer Academic Pub) and is editor of a forthcoming book on Poststructuralism and Education. Alec McHoul is Chair of Communication Studies at Murdoch University. His main research areas are: discourse analysis, ethnomethodology and literary theory. His most recent book is A Foucault Primer: Discourse, Power and the Subject (with Wendy Grace), Melbourne University Press 1993. Andrew MeN amara teaches Art Theory and History in the Academy of Arts at QUT. His main areas of research are art-historical methodology and theory, Australian art, modernism in the early twentieth century (particularly in the inter-war period). He has published work on these areas in Art History, Meanjin, Binocular and a variety of Australian art publications. Daphne Meadmore teaches sociology of education in the School of Cultural and Policy Studies at the Queensland University of Technology. Her research interests include the use of genealogy and social theory in cultural studies in education. Denise Meredyth is a lecturer in the School of Cultural and Historical Studies in the Division of Humanities, Griffith University. She has written various articles on education and cultural policy. She also co-edited Child and Citizen: Genealogies of Schooling and Subjectivity (1993) with Deborah Tyler and is one of the authors of Accounting for the Humanities (1991). Her recently completed doctoral thesis is entitled 'Education and its Critics: principles and programs in Australian education policy'. Dirk Meure is a Senior Lecturer in Law in the Law School of the University of New South Wales. His most recent book is Reconstructing Criminal Law (with Lacey and Wells) is published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson in their Law in Context series. His current research interests include truth practices in law, legal rationalities, and problems in legal discourse.
Contri6utors
789
Jeffrey Minson teaches in the School of Cultural and Historical Studies at Griffith University where he has helped develop an interdisciplinary curriculum in Applied Ethics. His publications include Genealogies of Morals, a study and exemplification of Foucault's historical arguments on ethical and social policy related issues and Questions of Conduct which develops an historical-sociological and rhetorical approach to ethical affairs in areas ranging from sexual harassment policy to the practice of active participation. Judy Motion is a doctoral student enrolled in the Department of ManagementCommunicationattheUniversityofWaikato,NewZealand.Hertopic is 'Strategies of power and communication'. In this thesis she is examining the role of discursive practices in the construction of identity from a public relations perspective. Patricia Moynihan is in the Department of Social Science and Communication at RMIT in Melbourne. Her interests lie in the critique of modernity, in resistance and in the moves toward the postmodern. She is writing a text on modernity and transgression. Clare O'Farrell is the editor of the current volume and the convenor of the conference which brought these papers together. She lectures in the School of Cultural and Policy Studies at Queensland University of Technology and is the author of Foucault: Historian or philosopher? (London: Macmillan 1989). She has published articles on various French intellectuals as well as on the idea of the intellectual in general. Richard O'Farrell is a photographer living in Sydney. His work was exhibited under the title The Shaken Foil in 1992 at the Chapter Hall Museum in Sydney. His photographs also appear in Vanished Kingdoms (1990) by Patrick O'Farrell. He works as a product manager in the computer industry. Mika Oj akangas is a Research Fellow in Political Science and Philosophy at the University of Helsinki in Finland. He has published widely, mainly in Finnish journals. Titles include 'On Genealogy', 'Gilles Deleuze's Manifest for Philosophy', 'Early Twentieth Century Finnish Primary School Pedagogy and Political Technologies of the Body', 'Beyond Good and Evil in Youth Psychiatry', 'Masturbation in the Discourses of Medicine and Pedagogy at the Beginning of the 20th Century', 'Young Delinquents and the History of the Medicalization of Morals', 'The Post-modern Killer, Killer without a Cause'. Ade Peace is a lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Adelaide. D.Phil. (Social Anthropology), University of Sussex. Past research: Nigeria, 1970-71, migrant workers and political conflict. Current research: Ireland, 1983, 1988, 1993, rural community organisation, environmental movements, political conflict.
790
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George Petelin is Senior Lecturer at the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University and is currently completing a PhD thesis titled 'Discourses in Sydney Biennale Catalogues'. He is also Queensland Art Critic for The Australian. Alan Petersen is a lecturer in sociology in the School of Social Sciences at Murdoch University. He has researched and published extensively in the area of the sociology of health and medicine. Included among his publications are two recently published books in the sociology of health, In a Critical Condition: Health and Power Relations in Australia (Allen and Unwin, 1994) and Just Health: Inequality in Illness, Care and Prevention, co-edited with Charles Waddell (Churchill Livingstone, 1994). John Pratt is a Senior Lecturer in criminology at the Institute of Criminology, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. His interests are in the history and sociology of punishment, on which topics he has published extensively. Gail Reekie is an ARC Research Fellow attached to the Research School of Social Sciences at the ANU. The latest title for her project is 'History and the discursive construction of illegitimate parenting', and she is currently preoccupied with the implications of post-structuralism for History in general and feminist history in particular. Her pre-Foucault publications included articles in journals ranging from feminist studies to criminology, Temptations: Sex, Selling and the Department Store (Allen and Unwin 1993), and an edited collection of essays On the Edge: Women's Experiences of Queensland (University of Queensland Press 1994). Paul Rutherford is Associate Lecturer in the Department of Government at the University of Sydney and a doctoral candidate in the Graduate Program in Political Science at the Australian National University. His current research interests focus on the problem of nature in recent critical social theory, particularly applying Foucault's notions of biopolitics/ governmentality to environmental politics and regulation. He has taught public policy and political theory at the ANU and has worked extensively in areas of environmental and resource policy both for government and environmental non-governmental organisations. Edward Scheer has recently completed a PhD on Antonin Artaud and poststructuralism at Macquarie University in Sydney. He is currently lecturing at the University of Newcastle. He has published several articles on cultural studies and a chapter in a recent anthology of essays on the work of Heinrich Muller. Tony Schirato is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Communication and Media Studies at the University of Central Queensland. He teaches and researches in the areas of cultural theory and practice, cultural literacy, gender studies and post-colonialism. Currently he is writing a book, with Dr Susan Yell, on Communication and Cultural Literacy for Allen and Unwin.
Contri6utors
791
Janet Schmitzer is Associate Dean of the School of Nursing at the Northern Territory University. She is currently studying for her PhD. Her research activities have included successfully attracting funding to support ongoing education programs for registered nurses in specialty areas and re-entry programs to the workforce. Her research has focussed on qualitative areas and in particular historical studies. Gary Sigley is a doctoral candidate in the Humanities Faculty of Griffith University. His thesis will examine the reconfiguration of the body as a site of reproductive intervention in terms of a shift from a cosmological conception of the body as an arts of living in Daoist discourse and traditional Chinese medicine to a biological subject integrated in a unified conception of the 'population'. Parlo Singh lectures in the Faculty of Education, Griffith University. Her current research interests include an analysis of the representation of gendered racial identities in popular and educational texts. Russell Staiff is a lecturer in the Fine Arts Department (Art History and Cinema Studies) of the University of Melbourne. He has recently completed a PhD on the colonial scopic regime of mid-nineteenth century South Australia. Patricia Stamp is Associate Professor, Division of Social Science, York University, Toronto, Canada, and author of Technology, Gender, and Power in Africa (1990, Ottawa, International Development Research Centre). Currently she is researching and writing on local government in Africa and Asia, and women, democracy and development in Africa and South Asia. Kylie Stephen is currently a PhD student at the University of Queensland. Her thesis is titled 'Integrity of the Body Rape, Women and Citizenship'. The project of this thesis is to examine the concept of 'bodily integrity' as a fundamental condition of liberal democratic citizenship. She argues that the concept of 'bodily integrity' reflects a phallocentric view of individuals and hence disadvantages women in their claims to equal citizenship. Elaine Stratford is a Lecturer in the Department of Geography and Oceanography at the Australian Defence Force Academy in Canberra. She completed her PhD at the Mawson Graduate Centre for Environmental Studies at the University of Adelaide. Her dissertation examined constructions of the environment and women through public health debates in Australia in the 1890s and the 1980s. Elaine has publications in Australian Geographical Studies, Australian Feminist Studies, and Social Alternatives, and is currently co-editing a book on environmental sub-cultures with a colleague at the Centre.
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Andrew Thacker is a lecturer in English at the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland. He has published on Foucault and aesthetics and is currently co-editing a book on Foucault's impact on the social sciences. His other research interests include gender and modernism and literary theory. Tony Thwaites teaches cultural and literary studies in the Department of English at the University of Queensland. With Lloyd Davis and Warwick Mules, he is the author of Tools for Cultural Studies an introduction. He is currently working on a book about James Joyce. Anthony Uhlmann is currently lecturing at the Department of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Western Sydney, Nepean. He completed a PhD in 1995 on Samuel Beckett's novelsMolloy,Malone Dies, and The Unnamable at the Department of English at the University of Sydney. Slobodanka Vladiv-Gloveris Senior Lecturer in the Department of German Studies and Slavic Studies at Monash University. She is the author of Narrative Principles in Dostoevsky's Devils A Structural Analysis (Bern Lang, 1979) and articles in comparative (Slavic and European) modernism. She is also competing a monograph project on Dostoevsky's Discourse ofDesire and Transgression and is co-authoring a book on post-Soviet excremental culture and Bataille. Thomas Wallgren is a Junior Research Fellow at the Academy of Finland. He has published on moral philosophy, theories of modernity and critical theory. Kathleen Warren is a Senior Lecturer at the Institute of Early Childhood, Macquarie University. Her major interest is in drama in early childhood and in the ways in which teachers can use process drama to empower children. She has lectured, given workshops and demonstrated her ideas with children in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, United States, England, Sweden and Holland. She has published widely in the field and her book Hooked on Drama; the theory and practice in early childhood has been well received both in Australia and overseas. Bert Wigman is currently a lecturer in sociology at the University of Central Queensland. His research interests revolve around the interconnections between education, childhood and the family in Australian society from a sociological/historical perspective, particularly in terms of changing definitions of public and private. Shane Wilcox is a postgraduate student in the Department of English at the University of Queensland. His current research is on Georges Bataille and prison writing, including that of Sade, Genet, Solzhenitsyn, Ngugi, Soyinka and Breytenbach.
