Week 8—Knowing is governing

Week 8—Knowing is governing

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

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

We revisit of some of the ideas presented in the recommended reading for last week. These build on the work of Michel Foucault and his theory of power as a constitutive force in society.

The conventional way to think about power is that it is what makes it possible for someone to control you. A classical definition of power is:

A has power over B when A gets B to do what B would not otherwise do (Dahl 1957, 202–3).

Foucault says this is wrong. Power is everywhere and it flows through A to B to C to D and back again. No one is in charge. We are all subject to power, and everything we do is a site where power operates on us.

Studying societies, counting people in a census, enrolling children in school. They all sound like they could be neutral. No power-mad tyrants are in schools, and the census bureau, or in a laboratory. These are literally the least powerful people in the world, at least according to the classical definition. But these situations are where power applies. Knowledge and communication are media for power.

The classical definition of power is based on a specific premise about the human subject and this premise is that subjects are agents. They do want they wanna do, unless something outside them stops them. It’s a very liberal theory of power: Power is the force that stops you from exercising your natural human rights (Mill [1859] 1901, 17–18). This assumes that people are internally complete, self-contained, and self-sufficient in their agency. They act when they are free to act, because they have the ability to think about and decide on an action; they don’t act when they choose not to act or something stops them. Foucault’s theory of power is based on a different premise. People are made by power, especially the flow of power that connects people to each other and to social systems.

It is, in a way, a return of homo duplex, and Foucault descends from the French sociological tradition that starts with Durkheim and Saussure.

References

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

Foucault, Michel. 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.

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.

Mill, John Stuart. (1859) 1901. On Liberty. London: Walter Scott Publishing Co., Ltd. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/34901/34901-h/34901-h.htm.