Foucault+Steals+Political+Science

“Foucault Steals Political Science” Paul R. Brass Annual Review Political Science, 2000 Summary by Sonja Thesis: Foucault has turned traditional political science on its head by reframing the debate on power and government, and at the same time the discipline has refused to seriously engage with these topics. However, Foucault’s works can be seen as a starting point for re-engaging power and governance within the discipline, and providing new energy for scholars. Foucault on Power and Knowledge · Rather than “speak truth to power,” Foucault insists that knowledge is power. · The reverse is also true: power cannot function without knowledge. · Knowledge is power’s weapon to control things. · The definitions of “man” are normative claims, and normative claims are power. Since we started defining man in terms of knowledge, we have been unable to separate power from knowledge and vice versa. · The medical examination is an example of this: the doctor gives a diagnosis and a treatment, the junior physician has to follow that diagnosis and treatment, the patient does not know otherwise. The examination becomes a way of “sorting” individuals. · Within modernity, the individual becomes not a citizen, but a CASE. · Brass highlights Foucault’s disdain for census-taking, state-surveillance, and “correctional” facilities—they all impose a normative prescription. · “There is no possible separation between power and knowledge, studies that seek to step outside contemporary forms of discourse cannot be separated from resistance to contemporary patterns of domination and unequal relations of power. Study and practice, political study and political practice, are inseparable” (Brass 312). · Objects of study in political science: o “power relations, bodies, forces, and ourselves as ‘objects of discourse’” (312). o There is no framework—frameworks are limiting and self-constructs. o Method: archaelogy. Read everything, and practice discourses among the different levels of thought, even across elite and popular knowledge. o The objects of study are plural because they are not necessarily objective—they are constructed versions of themselves. o “Go to the very heart of politics, to the ways in which political divisions are created and perpetuated in societies and to the power relations that sustain such divisions over time” (315). Foucault on Government and Governance · Expanded the study by adding governmentatlization and governmentality. · Government expansion in the 16th century grew from just collecting taxes to technical oversight and pastoral oversight regulating individuals’ daily behavior. · “Foucault’s position is that this discourse of the state and rights has ignored the most pervasive and insidious exercises of power not only by the state, but within society and virtually all public institutions” (317). Foucault re-frames the question to pertain to the practice of government rather than to the individuals who actually do govern. · All modern state shave become police states. · “The production of knowledge systems. . . establish what is defined as true and false” (318). · Foucault postulates that power must be a part of the discourse on government and governance, because power pervades all aspects of society. We cannot define power, because in doing so we ignore other places that power touches. Foucauldian Forays · Political Theory o Connolly demonstrates that it impossible to define power, authority, and legitimacy and then build political theory on top of these. Anyone who attempts to define power is him/herself involved implicitly in politics. o Connolly doesn’t define power but creates a power paradigm, where people have or do not have access to resources (criticism: isn’t this almost a definition of power?) o Connolly’s conception of power is different than Foucault’s. He says that power will not be the principal basis of a ‘well-ordered polity’ (322), wheras Foucault would say that “well-ordered polity” is an oxymoron. · Comparative Politics o Mitchell uses Foucault’s concept of the adoption of modernity as a lens through which to view colonialism. o So do Finkle and Kornmesser, two of Brass’ students o Brass changed his focus to an objective study to questioning the subjective nature of his survey respondents’ answers. · Public Administration o Polsky shows how philanthropic efforts often impose a sense of what is “normal” and “permissible.” o He doesn’t criticize the welfare state, but rather the culture of examination and prescription that underlies it.