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Knowing is governing

Knowing is governing

Ryan Schram
ANTH 2700: Key debates in anthropology
ryan.schram@sydney.edu.au
Social Sciences Building 410 (A02)
Week of April 14, 2025 (Week 8)

Slides available at https://anthro.rschram.org/2700/2025/8

Main reading: Gupta (2012a); Gupta (2012b)

Other reading: Foucault (1991); Foucault (1982); Li (1999); Li (2007)

Asking for trouble

Again the anger of the Lord burned against Israel, and he incited David against them, saying, “Go and take a census of Israel and Judah.” (2 Sam. 24:1, New International Version, cf. 1 Chron. 21:1)

Why is God angry about censuses?

A prison without walls

Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon

The Panopticon is an ideal prison. No violence or coercion is needed to administer it. Criminals are not there to be punished, but to be reformed. And best of all, it’s cheaper.

• All the cells face inward toward a single, central watchtower.
• A person standing in the watchtower can see every cell all at once.
• Each person in every cell can see the watchtower at all times.

No one really needs to be in the watchtower; the prisoners assume someone is there, and so they monitor themselves.

Contrast this with the essence of power for Max Weber

Max Weber writes, “[A] state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory” (Weber [1921] 1946, 78).

• Political authority is, ultimately, backed up by the right to use force. Since only one person has this right, then state power is centralized power.
• Stated succinctly, Weber’s view of power is: A gets B to do what B would not otherwise do (Dahl 1957, 202–3).
• Power is the ability to control another person, to make them do what you want, or to stop them from doing what you don’t.

Michel Foucault gives us another view of power

While they overlap in some ways, I want to emphasize the difference between Weber and Foucault.

• Foucault reinterprets Jeremy Bentham’s idea for a perfect prison, a Panopticon (Foucault 1979, 200–202).

Political arithmetic

For Foucault, the nature of state authority has changed. It’s not about controlling people, it’s about shaping the conditions of a whole population.

Government is an art of making a whole population safe, healthy, prosperous, and happy. It does not operate on individuals, and it does not directly control or coerce people as individuals.

A government deals in statistics, that is, estimates of a population and its parameters: safety, health, GDP, etc. Statistics are the science of the state.

Knowledge is power

Power is that which shapes people into members of a mass population that can be measured. Power acts on action, not on people (Li 2007).

There are two crucial differences to this sense of power:

• When you play your part in social life, power is operating on you. Even (and especially) in settings where you have a reason to play a role, you make it possible to create official knowledge of populations.
• The watchtower is everywhere, and no one is in it. Many different, independent social institutions require people who participate in them to modify themselves to fit into their roles. All of these roles teach you to see yourself the ways others see you.

This leads to an important implication for the meaning of power:

• Power does not stop you, deny you, force you, or make you do anything. It is you. Without your agency as an individual, there is no fuel to maintain social order. Power is the mechanisms by which your own agency is co-opted.

Some thought experiments

What would a prison without walls and without guards look like?

The Moriah and Lakeview Shock Incarceration Correctional Facilities in New York state are two examples (Ramey 2016; “Lakeview Shock Incarceration Correctional Facility” n.d.).

• The “shock” is the busy schedule that the prisoners maintain.
• Nobody needs to be coerced or punished; there’s too much else going on: Boot camp, drills, classes, therapy sessions, etc.
• This is a prison that frees people, literally, by giving them new abilities and skills, many quite practical.
• The prison in its time reported a great success, less recidivism (The Associated Press 2015; see also The Sydney Morning Herald 2004). What does that mean? It was good at funnelling its inmates into the working class.

Are schools prisons for children?

Everyone in a typical school is there because they want to contribute to education of children.

• Schools pervasively rank children as individuals and groups.
  • This is not a plot against children, or a conspiracy to control them.
  • Grades are a well-intentioned tool to help teachers teach and to help students learn.
  • Students always have clear incentives to learn, and to graduate from school. There is a real payoff for them.
• Students are learning, but as they learn, they also discipline themselves to be a specific kind of person.
  • A school system that uses a national language as a medium will churn out a bunch of speakers of the standard language, no matter what their grades are.
  • Students don’t have to memorize official doctrines to internalize social norms; They are good citizens because they are good school students.

What if “Where are you from?” was the only question to answer?

No one forces you to answer census questions, and most people want to answer them. The questions themselves force you to think in certain ways.

• Census information is useful and practical for many people.
• Answering the questions is like getting graded at school. You are learning to see yourself the way others see you.
• The statistical knowledge of a census leads us to be something we would not otherwise be.

Counting who eats where

The wording of questions of household surveys, no matter how carefully chosen, can contain implicit cultural biases and assumptions about how people are related. Even family, household, and home are based on one culture’s ideas about kinship.

• How many children do you have? What does your husband do for work, ma’am? 😡
• Who are the people who live here? 😕
• Who eats here? 👍

“They did surgery on a grape”

Focusing on the bias in any one survey or survey question is not the only way to understand them.

Even a well-designed survey will have another kind of effect: Quantification changes how we think about time and space. (“They did surgery on a grape!”)

• When known through statistics, poverty becomes a math problem, a matter of trendlines.
  • We need technical, scientific solutions created by experts who know how to read the evidence. (So we don’t need to have a debate about what kind of society or economy we want for ourselves.) Poverty is no longer a political question (Ferguson 1994; Escobar [1995] 2012).
• The abstract, technical representation of poverty also transforms how we experience time. Poverty becomes a development problem in two senses:
  • We can track our progress toward a goal: “zero hunger,” “end[ing] TB” (Ansell 2014; “The End TB Strategy” 2025).
  • People’s actual suffering now is de-emphasized in favor of improving, uplifting, raising society as a whole; Social ane economic progress in the future is the objective, rather than doing justice to people today.

In-class activity: Resistance to pastoral power today

In a 1982 article in Critical Inquiry, “The Subject and Power,” Foucault argues that we can tell that the nature of power has changed, because the kinds of radical politics people pursue has also changed.

These are “transversal struggles”: they are global in scope, and disregard differences of policy and political system:

• Struggles against male domination of women
• Struggles for autonomy of children from parents
• Struggles for the rights of psychiatric patients (schizophrenics, people with mental and development disabilities, people living with mental illness) to autonomy in medical decision making
• Other struggles against “administration” of daily life. (Foucault 1982, 780)

These are struggles that contest “pastoral power” (Foucault 1982, 782).

Turn to pages 780 and 781 of this paper (available through the Leganto Reading List on Canvas and from JSTOR [via USYD Library catalogue]).

• What's another struggle today that belongs on this list? Why?
• Does this also apply to questions of development, either as Gupta (2012a,b) describes for India or in another context? How?
• Earlier in this paper, Foucault states that power in liberal societies operates the same way as fascism and Stalinism, even though people in liberal societies cite these as chief examples of the abuse of state power (Foucault 1982, 779). Do you agree?

References and further reading

Ansell, Aaron. 2014. Zero Hunger: Political Culture and Antipoverty Policy in Northeast Brazil. Durham, N.C.: University of North Caorlina Press.

Dahl, Robert A. 1957. “The Concept of Power.” Behavioral Science 2 (3): 201–15. https://doi.org/10.1002/bs.3830020303.

Escobar, Arturo. (1995) 2012. Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb31025.0001.001.

Ferguson, James. 1994. The anti-politics machine: “development,” depoliticization, and bureaucratic power in Lesotho. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Foucault, Michel. 1979. Discipline and punish: the birth of the prison. New York: Vintage Books. http://archive.org/details/disciplinepunish0000fouc.

———. 1982. “The Subject and Power.” Critical Inquiry 8 (4): 777–95. https://doi.org/10.1086/448181.

———. 1991. “Governmentality.” In The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, edited by Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, 87–104. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Gupta, Akhil. 2012a. “Introduction: Poverty as biopolitics.” In Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India. A John Hope Franklin Center book. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822394709.

———. 2012b. “The state and the politics of poverty.” In Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India, by Akhil Gupta. A John Hope Franklin Center book. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822394709.

“Lakeview Shock Incarceration Correctional Facility.” n.d. Department of Corrections and Community Supervision. Accessed March 19, 2025. https://doccs.ny.gov/location/lakeview-shock-incarceration-correctional-facility.

Li, Tania Murray. 1999. “Compromising Power: Development, Culture, and Rule in Indonesia.” Cultural Anthropology 14 (3): 295–322. https://www.jstor.org/stable/656653.

———. 2007. “Governmentality.” Anthropologica 49 (2): 275–81. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25605363.

Ramey, Corinne, dir. 2016. Boot-Camp Prisons Aim to Prepare Inmates for a Brighter Future. The Wall Street Journal. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBHcut1Ux-4.

The Associated Press. 2015. “NY Reports 52,000 Graduates from Corrections’ Shock Program.” North Country Public Radio. December 7, 2015. https://www.northcountrypublicradio.org/news/story/30317/20151207/ny-reports-52-000-graduates-from-corrections-shock-program.

“The End TB Strategy.” 2025. World Health Organization: Global Programme on Tuberculosis & Lung Health. 2025. https://www.who.int/teams/global-programme-on-tuberculosis-and-lung-health/the-end-tb-strategy.

The Sydney Morning Herald. 2004. “Freedom in a Prison with Boundaries, but No Walls,” August 17, 2004, sec. National. https://www.smh.com.au/national/freedom-in-a-prison-with-boundaries-but-no-walls-20040817-gdjkcy.html.

Weber, Max. (1921) 1946. “Politics as a Vocation.” In From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, edited by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, 77–128. New York: Oxford University Press.