Andres Bernal
Perhaps one of the most insightful intellectual developments on understanding society, culture, and politics in the 20th century comes from the Philosopher Michel Foucault's work on power. Foucault challenged the notion that power is wielded by some beings or groups through "episodic or sovereign": acts over others. He suggested rather that power was a pervasive and dispersed relational force in constant flux and negotiation. Power realizes itself in the form of accepted truths, or produced knowledges, that shaped and reshaped subjectivities, narratives, procedures, social disciplinary norms, and thereby institutions, structures, and systems (power cube).
In this sense, it is not only a negative coercive force to exert control or maintain structure, but it is also a generative "truth" making positive force. "We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it ‘excludes’, it ‘represses’, it ‘censors’, it ‘abstracts’, it ‘masks’, it ‘conceals’. In fact power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production" (Foucault 1991: 194).
This understanding of power expands the possibilities through which to think about policy making and the policy process within a governing political body, or modern day nation state. Moreover, it allows us to integrate discourse and interpretative narratives with political processes and structural dynamics and in turn opening up fields of opportunity for change elements of society via policy and politics.
In Policy Paradoxes (1997), Deborah Stone, defines The Rationality Project as having the mission across disciplines such as law, economics, political science, and public administration of "recusing public policy from the irrationalities and indignities of politics," adding "the aspire to make policy instead with rational, analytical, and scientific methods." (pg. 9) In its attempt to make policy making rational, efficient, and effective, this particular influential movement sought to therefore professionalize and put governing and administrative capacities into the hands of objective experts and away from factions and political strife. Stone grounds the rational project on a model of reasoning, a model of society, and a model of policy making.
This approach to policy making and society may be traced back to Madisonian liberalism and pluralist theories of governance. The pluralists viewed power as a causal ability to compel someone to do something. They believed that through by fragmenting interests, power could be contained from concentrating in any one particular area. Their conception of democratic power lies on the sanctity of individual liberty over all. A representative pluralist government therefore, creates a process that is self correcting and incremental changes that responds to public interest group preferences as opposed to a generalized public spirit (Larason, Ingram, 1997).
In the spirit of Foucault, Stone deconstructs this approach to policy making and the accompanying scientific policy research as embedded within a market model of human nature and society driven by rules of preference equilibrium's, competition, exchange, and self interested rationality. Stone problematizes this approach and instead offers the idea of policy and governance existing within a polity influence by an expansive set of rules besides self interest, exchange, and individualism. The polis for Stone resides within community, or a series of social relations operating off of images, forms of knowledge, norms, will to action, and driven by self interest as well as altruism, cooperation and competition, conformity and coercion.
Through an inherently normative, political, and interpretive lens, policy making and the possibility of structural change places front and center the Foucaultian notion of constructing subjective agents, normalizing truth, disciplining social bodies, and bringing about structure through the construction of knowledge and being itself. In today's volatile political world epitomized in this current Presidential election, policy does not need to remain and in fact should be liberated from rationalist model and reintroduced into politics and into the realm of the social imagination. Echoing, Karl Polanyi's Great Transformation, the current neoliberal vision for social development has aggressively reasserted the market model of thinking and being into our social reality and technologies of power generating. Prospects for change require more than a critique of the existing relationships of domination but also a proactively constructed and reconstructed narrative of the polity, wealth, economy, community, and power that has the potential to translate into new institution building within the core of the system.
Foucault, M. (1991). Discipline and Punish: the birth of a prison. London, Penguin.
Schneider, Anne Larason and Helen Ingram, Chapter 2: “A Pluralist View of Public Policy” in 7 Policy Design for Democracy, University Press of Kansas, 1997.
Stone,Deborah. Policy Paradox; The Art of Political Decision Making. 1997.
http://www.powercube.net/other-forms-of-power/foucault-power-is-everywhere/
Perhaps one of the most insightful intellectual developments on understanding society, culture, and politics in the 20th century comes from the Philosopher Michel Foucault's work on power. Foucault challenged the notion that power is wielded by some beings or groups through "episodic or sovereign": acts over others. He suggested rather that power was a pervasive and dispersed relational force in constant flux and negotiation. Power realizes itself in the form of accepted truths, or produced knowledges, that shaped and reshaped subjectivities, narratives, procedures, social disciplinary norms, and thereby institutions, structures, and systems (power cube).
In this sense, it is not only a negative coercive force to exert control or maintain structure, but it is also a generative "truth" making positive force. "We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it ‘excludes’, it ‘represses’, it ‘censors’, it ‘abstracts’, it ‘masks’, it ‘conceals’. In fact power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production" (Foucault 1991: 194).
This understanding of power expands the possibilities through which to think about policy making and the policy process within a governing political body, or modern day nation state. Moreover, it allows us to integrate discourse and interpretative narratives with political processes and structural dynamics and in turn opening up fields of opportunity for change elements of society via policy and politics.
In Policy Paradoxes (1997), Deborah Stone, defines The Rationality Project as having the mission across disciplines such as law, economics, political science, and public administration of "recusing public policy from the irrationalities and indignities of politics," adding "the aspire to make policy instead with rational, analytical, and scientific methods." (pg. 9) In its attempt to make policy making rational, efficient, and effective, this particular influential movement sought to therefore professionalize and put governing and administrative capacities into the hands of objective experts and away from factions and political strife. Stone grounds the rational project on a model of reasoning, a model of society, and a model of policy making.
This approach to policy making and society may be traced back to Madisonian liberalism and pluralist theories of governance. The pluralists viewed power as a causal ability to compel someone to do something. They believed that through by fragmenting interests, power could be contained from concentrating in any one particular area. Their conception of democratic power lies on the sanctity of individual liberty over all. A representative pluralist government therefore, creates a process that is self correcting and incremental changes that responds to public interest group preferences as opposed to a generalized public spirit (Larason, Ingram, 1997).
In the spirit of Foucault, Stone deconstructs this approach to policy making and the accompanying scientific policy research as embedded within a market model of human nature and society driven by rules of preference equilibrium's, competition, exchange, and self interested rationality. Stone problematizes this approach and instead offers the idea of policy and governance existing within a polity influence by an expansive set of rules besides self interest, exchange, and individualism. The polis for Stone resides within community, or a series of social relations operating off of images, forms of knowledge, norms, will to action, and driven by self interest as well as altruism, cooperation and competition, conformity and coercion.
Through an inherently normative, political, and interpretive lens, policy making and the possibility of structural change places front and center the Foucaultian notion of constructing subjective agents, normalizing truth, disciplining social bodies, and bringing about structure through the construction of knowledge and being itself. In today's volatile political world epitomized in this current Presidential election, policy does not need to remain and in fact should be liberated from rationalist model and reintroduced into politics and into the realm of the social imagination. Echoing, Karl Polanyi's Great Transformation, the current neoliberal vision for social development has aggressively reasserted the market model of thinking and being into our social reality and technologies of power generating. Prospects for change require more than a critique of the existing relationships of domination but also a proactively constructed and reconstructed narrative of the polity, wealth, economy, community, and power that has the potential to translate into new institution building within the core of the system.
Foucault, M. (1991). Discipline and Punish: the birth of a prison. London, Penguin.
Schneider, Anne Larason and Helen Ingram, Chapter 2: “A Pluralist View of Public Policy” in 7 Policy Design for Democracy, University Press of Kansas, 1997.
Stone,Deborah. Policy Paradox; The Art of Political Decision Making. 1997.
http://www.powercube.net/other-forms-of-power/foucault-power-is-everywhere/