Readings #2: Crampton & Elden - Space, Knowledge, Power

To post a message, just click the "Post Reply" tab above to post your comments. For username, just type in your name. There's no need to create a formal login and password, since guests are allowed to respond to posted messages. Reuben Rose-Redwood

In the 1976 lecture, "The Meshes of Power," Foucault provides one of the most concise summaries of his conception of power, which involves a critique of the juridical and repressive views of power and an elaboration of what he refers to as "technologies of power." From this perspective, power is seen in the plural--as a set of techniques, procedures, mechanisms, and practices--that may be hierarchically arranged yet nevertheless remain dispersed. In this respect, he is not attempting to provide a general theory of power but rather contends that we should direct our attention to the ways in which power is exercised via the myriad mechanisms of so-called "political technologies." I have found this framework of power-as-technique quite helpful in my own work, as it enables one to consider not only the way in which power is exercised as a technology but also the manner in which the "technical" itself has a politics.

In other words, it points towards a critical analysis of what Stuart Elden has called "the politics of calculation." What are the politics of categorization, mapping, spatial identification? These are some of the basic questions of contemporary critical geography, which can in many respects be traced back to Foucault as well as other theorists such as Pierre Bourdieu (see especially his book, Language and Symbolic Power). What is fascinating in this lecture is the way in which Foucault draws inspiration directly from Marx's Capital (Vol. 2) as well as Clastres' work, Society Against the State. He frames his analysis of disciplinary power in relation to the industrial factory as well as the army, and he argues that "we must undertake not only a history of industrial techniques, but also of political techniques" (p. 159). Here, as elsewhere, Foucault distinguishes the "anatomo-politics" of discipline from the "biopolitics" of the population (p. 161), as we saw in Security, Territory, Population. Discipline "individualizes" a multiplicity whereas biopolitics takes as its object the "population" as a whole to be governed. Spatial partitioning is absolutely key here. One example that Foucault uses to explain the "individualizing" techniques of discipline is that of the gridded space of the lecture hall. The grid of seats in an auditorium has the effect of naturalizing Cartesian conceptions of space, thereby enabling the professor to "individualize" the multiplicity of students while also arranging them in a coordinated configuration as a whole (i.e. as a population). Speaking to the audience of his lecture, Foucault comments: "See for example how you sit in a row before me. It is a position that perhaps appears natural to you, but it is worth recalling however that it is relatively recent in the history of civilization. . . . Nowadays, you are placed like this in a row, the gaze of the professor can individualize each one. . . it is these little techniques that these new mechanisms of power could invest in and were able to make work" (p. 160). Similar techniques of individualization were employed in modern urban design and other fields of practice. The reason that he highlights sexuality as a linchpin to such mechanisms of power is that it is the nexus between the disciplining of the individual and regulating the demographics of the population (e.g., birth rates, etc.). It is this dual focus on political techniques of individualization and totalization that allows Foucault to link an analysis of micropolitics and macropolitics--responding to criticisms that his earlier work only focused on the micropolitics of discipline. The importance of this lecture, as I see it, is that it helps us understand Foucault's intellectual debt to Marx while at the same time providing a compelling critique of Marxian theories of power vis-a-vis the state apparatus. A few questions to consider:

1. Is this dual conception of political technologies still applicable today?

2. Some have argued that instead of the one-seeing-the-many of Foucault's panoptic power, a more relevant analogy would be the many-seeing-the-many (omni-optic power) of legible spaces (Patrick Joyce and Matt Hannah both make this type of argument). If this is true, how might this reformulation affect our understanding of discipline and biopolitics?

3. Foucault argues that we should take geographical specificity into account when theorizing political technologies......yet he does not delve into this in as much detail as he could have.....How might a more explicit consideration of geographical specificity influence how Foucault's work is approached by critical geography?

If any of you have different reactions to this piece (or any other chapter), feel free to post them below so we can start a dialogue.....Wendy, Tina, and Jonathan will be posting separate commentaries on other chapters from the book as well.....

Why are intellectuals fascinated by the concept of power? They are very clearly mesmerized by it, and intone its name with the reverence of priests in the temple of an awesome god. It is not because power is a powerful concept, as I will argue below. Rather, it is because intellectuals crave power and yet can’t get their hands on much of it. So they study power, theorize power, anatomize power, all in the vain and alchemistic hope of some day possessing it. I’m using the title intellectual here in the special but not unusual sense of practical philosophers, men and women who lead the life of the mind and wish to put their ideas into effect. Foucault and his followers clearly fall under this heading, as can be seen on the very first page, where we are told that knowledge is “strategic” and thinking a species of war.

We all know the philistine taunt, “if you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich.” And I trust we all know how to answer it: “whatever smartness I have I’ve spent learning about things other than money.” Brilliant impoverished linguist is not, for instance, an oxymoron. But this taunt does begin to bite the closer one moves to economics, especially those branches of economics most directly concerned with capital investment. The same would seem to be true if we amend the philistine taunt, and ask “if you’re so smart, why aren’t you powerful.” It doesn’t have much bite so long as the challenged scholar’s smarts have been expended on medieval tapestries or the migratory habits of the gruffvoiced titmouse. But the question calls for an answer when it is directed at anatomists of power like Foucault and his followers.

The answer one can expect is that intellectual research into the nature of power shows that power is not, for insuperable “structural” reasons, easily annexed by intellectuals in any large quantity. I doubt that this is true. Rather, where intellectuals have failed to grasp the power they covet, I believe it is due to defective ideas about power. And intellectuals do not always failed to grasp power.

When intellectuals fail in their bid for power it is because they idealize it and treat the abstraction as a thing that can be known, possessed, mastered, and put to work. In other words they reify power and turn an abstraction into an explanation. Outside of idealism this is considered illegitimate because an abstraction is a generalization about how something behaves, and does not necessarily imply that it behaves in this way for the same reason in every case covered by the abstraction. Consider, for example, the abstraction “early riser,” meaning a person who starts his/her day earlier than most. This describes a behavior, but a behavior that is explained by heterogeneous factors: insomnia, a heavy work load, a love of solitary mornings, proneness to back pain after six hours recumbence, etc. The fact that someone is an early riser explains nothing, although careless thinkers may imagine they are saying something trenchant when they observe, “he gets up early because he is an early riser.”

Likewise, to attribute some change to “power” is simply to say that change occurred, for what is power but capacity to do work or effect change (when “power” is said to “prevent” change, it has in fact changed the outcome of some course of events that would have unfolded in the absence of this power). Indeed, since power means a capacity to do work, much of what is said in this book comes down to analytic, circular reasoning. The subject of the proposition, power, is the same as the predicate, work being done, so that what we are told, in effect, is that work is done when there is a capacity to do work. This is not to say that power is a useless word or a worthless concept. Capacity for work differs from person to person and group to group, and it is often convenient to describe this difference as differing quanta of power. But to explain this difference as differences in power is simply to translate one description (capacity for work) into another locution (power), and then imagine, or pretend, that one has made a synthetic statement.

Intellectuals do not invariably fail in their quest for power, though, however crippled they may be by their idealism and circular reasoning. They have a very hard time putting their hands on money, and the twentieth century taught us that they should be allowed nowhere near political power, but as a literate clerisy they do know something about the sources of rhetorical and discursive power. (The very high transaction costs of converting this rhetorical and discursive power into other forms might be taken as an indication that there is no common currency of “power.”) And because they know something about rhetorical and discursive power, they are good at constructing ideology. Three attributes of ideology are well illustrated in the chapter I agreed to discuss, Raffestin’s “Could Foucault have Revolutionized Geography (chap. 14). These are (1) speak as a maverick and an outsider, even when you are an insider voicing conventional wisdom, (2) employ critical language that is itself shielded from criticism, and (3) disguise policy proposals as philosophical inferences.

Foucaudian geographers represent themselves as mavericks and outsiders when they are, in fact, epigone of the new conventional wisdom. This is evident in the question that serves as the title to chapter 14, “Could Foucault have Revolutionized Geography?” I trust most people would agree that the question was answered long ago, when Foucault did revolutionize (or at least contributed to revolutionizing) geography in precisely the manner Raffestin recommends. Raffestin claims that geographers neglected to follow Foucalt’s lead and study the “gaze” of geographers, which is to say the part geographer’s practices, language, and intentions play in constituting or constructing the “object” of geographic study (i.e. landscape). He insists that they have instead continued to see the landscape as composed of “external material objects” (although he elsewhere says, incongruously, that “geographers have not understood that the landscape emerges as much from physics as metaphysics”). This is, of course, grossly inaccurate, since external material objects disappeared from Anglo-American human geography thirty years ago, and some version of the “philosophy of the relation” is now very nearly universal dogma. But because ideology always represents itself as a solution to a problem, it can never admit that it is the reigning orthodoxy.

The language of critical geography appears to be critical, but does not itself stand up to criticism. Consider this gnomic proposition by Foucault: “the rationality of life is identical to the rationality of that which threatens it.” Is this true? Does the biological life of a human, or of the pathogens that threaten it, have to it anything we can call rationality? No, they do not consider reasons, draw inferences, or render judgments. They have, to be sure, certain patterns of behavior; but what is gained by calling this pattern by the name of the wholly different pattern we know as rationality? What is gained is rhetorical effect, for here we see an appearance of critical bite created by the poetic use of philosophical terms. A poet using poetic diction would likely write about something like of the flower of life, or the song of life, and these we would recognize as metaphors. But “the rationality of life” is a metaphor that does not look like a metaphor because rationality is a term from philosophic diction. This is easy to do once you see how it works: “the inferences of love,” “the syllogism of violence,” “the past participle of excrement.” As the last example shows, it is always striking to couple a technical word with one tied to sex or bodily function, since this implies some cybernetic insight. Raffestin does this when he describes the geographical gaze as “the gaze of the voyeur mobilized by curiosity.” This sounds deep until one considers that voyeurs are not mobilized by curiosity, but by a desire to find living replicas of erotic fantasies they already have. Returning to the Foucault quote, let’s accept the metaphor of “rationality” and ask about the truth of the full proposition, that the rationality of the life of a human threatened by disease is identical to that of the disease by which he is threatened. If this means that both desire to live, it is true, but in a very sloppy sense, for the desire of a pathogen to live is only roughly analogous to the desire of a human to live--the pathogen is not afraid of dying, for instance. But “rationality” encompasses means as well as ends, and the fact that the pathogen means to live by killing me, and I mean to live by killing it, makes our rationalities very far from identical. Two countries at war do not have identical rationalities because both wish to win. Ideology does not make arguments; it sings lullabies.

To disguise a policy proposal as a philosophical inference is, perhaps, the defining characteristic of ideology. Raffestin does this in a manner so maladroit that it is impossible not to see. He describes the gruesome symptoms of an epidemic that ravaged the city of Rouen in 1769, and then infers from these that “the first task of the doctor is political and ‘must begin with a war against bad government.” Now this may, indeed, be the inference Raffestin draws, and it may make sense as an example of his “philosophy of relation,” but the logic is for most readers far from compelling. This is because nothing in the description of the epidemic indicates that the government of Rouen in 1769 was bad, or that any government of that era, no matter how good, could have averted or alleviated the epidemic. In order to make sense, in other words, Raffestin forces us into the habit of assuming that all governments are bad and every evil has a political solution. It is because we do grow into such habits that ideological writing seems to grow more persuasive the more one reads of it

I find it very hard to understand power as a technique. Techniques are more or less powerful, to be sure. But a technique devoid of power would seem to be a technique that does not work. And a technique that does not work is not a technique. What this suggests to me is that power is being used here in a moral sense. Power is not effectiveness or ability to do work, but some sort of illegitimate or unjust ability to do work.

Foucault's remarks on the arrangement of the lecture hall are wrong, or at least misleading. The details of a modern lecture hall are new, but audiences have arranged themselves in this fashion ever since our first loquacious ancestor rose to address a group of people. They arrange themselves in this fashion because they wish to see the speaker's face and hear his words. They can then be disarranged only by (a) external power (e.g. police dispersing the audience); or (b) reduction in the power of the speaker's message (i.e. he grows boring or incoherent). This is not to deny that some audiences listen to lectures under compulsion, but the relation of that institutional compulsion to the layout of lecture halls is purely accidental.

A few comments in reply to Jonathan's postings:

1. When reading Raffestin's chapter, "Could Foucault have Revolutionized Geography?," it is important to keep in mind that Raffestin is a Swiss geographer writing primarily within the Francophone tradition of human geography, not the Anglo-American tradition, so when he says that geographers have not engaged with Foucault, he is talking about French-speaking geographers. In Chapter 13, Juliet Fall provides a fascinating discussion of the differences between Anglo and Francophone geography vis-a-vis Foucault, with the latter barely considering the relevance of his work to geography. So, in that sense, Raffestin is indeed a "maverick" and "outsider" within his own tradition of Francophone geography, although Jonathan is right to note the considerable influence of Foucault within Anglo-American critical geography.

2. Theorizing "power" is admittedly tricky business. Foucault is trying to get us to question the notion that power is simply something that can be possessed or accumulated in specified "quanta." He sees power not so much as a possession, a commodity, or a capacity to do work (a definition taken from physics). Rather than viewing power as a measurable quantity or an abstraction, he suggests that a more useful approach is to examine precisely how power is exercised, by what mechanisms and practices is it operationalized? In a sense, this is a very empirical way of approaching the genealogy of power. And this is why the relation between knowledge production, spatial organization, and power is so central to Foucault's genealogical method. It should be pointed out here that Foucault's conception of genealogy, knowledge, and power owes much to Nietzsche, who argued that knowledge was a "tool" of power, and that knowledge "increases with every increase of power." While Nietzsche spoke in somewhat abstract terms, Foucault investigates this claim historically. For instance, in Chapter 15, Foucault discusses the birth of the hospital/clinic, and how it was bound up in a practice of record keeping, observation, identification, and registration, which produced medical knowledge at the same time as it allowed medical examiners to govern the hospital as a "legible" space. It is not so much to argue that this is "good" or "bad" (although one could certainly consider these questions as well) but to examine the details of how exactly knowledge is related to power. Instead of speaking in generalities, he focuses on specific practices, such as the technique of attaching a "small label . . . to the wrist of each patient that will allow them to be distinguished if they live, but also if they die......the registry of each room prepared by the head nurse. . . . [etc.] Thus a collection of documents is formed in the heart of the hospital" (p. 150-51). The label with the patient's name on it--and the various records associated with that label--are all techniques of individualizing the patient which are key elements of disciplinary power (the same could be said about the students in the gridded classroom). Now, the point here is not that the doctor/professor dominates the patient/student via these techniques; in fact, most patients/students actively participate in their own identification and registration. I'm reminded here of recent news stories about how in some cases hospitals are now using RFID chips embedded in the patient's skin to access databases of their medical history. Some patients see these chips as a blessing, since it may improve their chance of living by enhancing the efficiency of retrieving medical information in an emergency. A key question, in Foucault's discussion of power, is how individuals come to internalize these disciplinary techniques. Power, from this perspective, is not forcing someone else to do something, but providing the conditions in which individuals will voluntarily self-regulate themselves. Foucault sees this as a central aspect of liberal governance. Going back to the point about the spatial layout of the classroom: sure, the relation between the orator and the audience existed long before the 18th century, but the entire apparatus of record keeping associated with such a spatial layout is a relatively recent phenomenon in the history of schooling.

3. The question of the "rationality" of life can be traced back to Nietzsche's notion of the will to power. It seems to me that the term rationality is being used very differently than it typically is in analytical philosophy, where it is equated with logic. In this context, rationality does not refer to theoretical deductions. Nietzsche frames it in somewhat Darwinian terms:

"In order for a particular species to maintain itself and increase its power, its conception of reality must comprehend enough of the calculable and constant for it to base a scheme of behavior on it. The utility of preservation--not some abstract-theoretical need not to be deceived--stands as the motive behind the development of the organs of knowledge--they develop in such a way that their observations suffice for our preservation. In other words: the measure of the desire for knowledge depends upon the measure to which the will to power grows in a species: a species grasps a certain amount of reality in order to become master of it, in order to press it into service."

I'm not saying that we should embrace Nietzsche's conception of power in its entirety. However, I would argue that rationalities do not arise out of some innocent "search for Truth" but are a means of rendering the world "calculable" in order to "base a scheme of behavior on it." In this sense, a species--say, which causes a virus--need not consciously use deductive logic for us to say that there is a certain rationality involved in its behavior. I could go on....but that's enough rambling for one night. Tina, Wendy, any thoughts on Legg's "Foucault and Postcolonialism"? Other group members, feel free to put your two cents into the discussion as well!

This chapter covers considerable intellectual territory (from Said through to Subaltern Studies, Gramsci, and Governmentality); I would be remiss to present some pithy analysis of every point for each topic that made me cringe or shake my head in confirmation. So, I will attempt to develop one argument: Chapter 24 is an apology for the absence of colonialism in Foucault's writings.

Legg writes, there is a "haunting presence of colonialism" in Foucault's geographical imaginary - the "absent presence" of Europe's periphery. Colonialism is absent in Foucault's writing, as an explicit topic of analysis. As Peter Jackson notes, Foucault is interested in difference within societies, focusing on the local and national scale. Indeed, he rarely acknowledges extra-European of colonial realities of state power and techniques of management and exploitation. There is a "massive forgetting" of the colonial project beyond Europe. There is what seems to be an absence of seeing the colonial world within Europe, through the imperial spaces of European capitals, urban spaces, and even rural idylls. The empire strikes back, so to speak, as cultural, political and social forms, geographies, as ideas made "their way back to the metropole and relayed a symbolic and material reworking of the European Self" (Legg, 267).

Colonialism (or post-colonial theory) is present, at least in the minds of those who read and contemplate Foucault's analysis of institutions and power and, yes, governmentality. Legg writes that the imperial reworking of Europe is implicit but invisible to Foucault's analysis of peripheral space and population in the core. The chapter deftly identified those that have spoken (or apologized for) his massive forgetting. To summarize: (1) Legg writes "Spivak justly claims that Foucault's analysis actually produced a miniature version of colonialism, one that is replayed the management of space and periphery populations through the screen of allegories of doctors, prisons, and the insane."(p 267); (2)Ann Stolers work on sexuality showed that "though Eurocentric, Foucault was not blind to race and its potential imperial connections" (268); (3) Homi Bhabha writes that within the massive forgetting, lies a "metaleptic presence of colonialism"; (4) Mitchell excused this absence by arguing that Foucault's writings pursued and dismantled the discourses and discipline of Europe and colonial states, thus preserving "the potential to mobilize counter-discourses of modernity" (268). The colonial present, then, is what Legg calls "the epistemologically constitutive outside" - where it is accepted that while Foucault articulated the means and perspective (through the archeological model of discourse analysis) to dismantle colonial cultural, economic and political discourses and power. This impressive list of post-colonial intellectuals props up the apology, that well, sounds like a means to get around a presentist reading of his work, an intellectual double-speak (seriously, an "absent presence"?).

Rather than challenge this contradiction, Legg supports it, and that is what I object to the most in this chapter. Legg slips into an analysis of Said's criticism leveled against Foucault (re: agency and power). The focus of the review of colonialism becomes centered on Said, his interpretation (good or bad) of Foucault. Legg missed the opportunity to delve deeper into Foucault's own Orientalism through this acceptance of the "absent presence," according to the post-colonial theorists cited above. For example, I am troubled by the failure to explore the debate over Foucault's own complict or sympathetic view of the Iranian revolution as a journalist there during the Revolution - which one could read as "orientalist." What about his work in Tunisia? It is unsatisfying to simply gloss over the connection or lack of connection between his travels outside Europe and not question why this has not appeared in his analysis. I would argue that there is a failure to examine Foucault's writing on security, population etc. using Orientalism as a guide and question more intently on the question of "massive forgetting" rather than rely on the apologetics.

So, while brief, the chapter succeeds in making clear that there is a gap in his writings re: European colonialism, but fails in explaining this absence, and moreover, avoid any analysis of his own possible complicity in reinforcing Orientalist project.