The alternative is to vote negative in favor of critique before action—we accept power as inevitable and potentially productive but ONLY analysis of domination can challenge current discourses and act as a pre-requisite to action

Aalborg University, Department of Development and Planning AND Department of Town and Regional Planning Bent Flyvbjerg and Tim Richardson, “Planning and Foucault In Search of the Dark Side of Planning Theory”

3. Towards Foucault

Instead of side-stepping or seeking to remove the traces of power from planning, an alternative approach accepts power as unavoidable, recognising its all pervasive nature, and emphasising its productive as well as destructive potential. Here, theory engages squarely with policy made on a field of power struggles between different interests, where knowledge and truth are contested, and the rationality of planning is exposed as a focus of conflict. This is what Flyvbjerg has called realrationalität, or ‘real-life’ rationality (Flyvbjerg 1996), where the focus shifts from what should be done to what is actually done. This analysis embraces the idea that ‘rationality is penetrated by power’, and the dynamic between the two is critical in understanding what policy is about. It therefore becomes meaningless, or misleading - for politicians, administrators and researchers alike - to operate with a concept of rationality in which power is absent (Flyvbjerg 1998, 164-65).

Both Foucault and Habermas are political thinkers. Habermas’s thinking is well developed as concerns political ideals, but weak in its understanding of actual political processes. Foucault’s thinking, conversely, is weak with reference to generalised ideals--Foucault is a declared opponent of ideals, understood as definitive answers to Kant’s question, ‘What ought I to do?’ or Lenin’s ‘What is to be done?’--but his work reflects a sophisticated understanding of Realpolitik. Both Foucault and Habermas agree that in politics one must ‘side with reason.’ Referring to Habermas and similar thinkers, however, Foucault (1980b) warns that ‘to respect rationalism as an ideal should never constitute a blackmail to prevent the analysis of the rationalities really at work’ (Rajchman 1988, 170).

Habermas’s main complaint about Foucault is what Habermas sees as Foucault’s relativism. Thus Habermas (1987, 276) harshly dismisses Foucault’s genealogical historiographies as ‘relativistic, cryptonormative illusory science’. Such critique for relativism is correct, if by relativistic we mean unfounded in norms that can be rationally and universally grounded. Foucault’s norms are not foundationalist like Habermas’s: they are expressed in a desire to challenge ‘every abuse of power, whoever the author, whoever the victims’ (Miller 1993, 316) and in this way ‘to give new impetus, as far and wide as possible, to the undefined work of freedom’ (Foucault 1984a, 46). Foucault here is the Nietzschean democrat, for whom any form of government - liberal or totalitarian - must be subjected to analysis and critique based on a will not to be dominated, voicing concerns in public and withholding consent about anything that appears to be unacceptable. Such norms cannot be given a universal grounding independent of those people and that context, according to Foucault. Nor would such grounding be desirable, since it would entail an ethical uniformity with the kind of utopian-totalitarian implications that Foucault would warn against in any context, be it that of Marx, Rousseau or Habermas: ‘The search for a form of morality acceptable by everyone in the sense that everyone would have to submit to it, seems catastrophic to me’ (Foucault 1984c, 37 quoted in Dreyfus and Rabinow 1986, 119). In a Foucauldian interpretation, such a morality would endanger freedom, not empower it. Instead, Foucault focuses on the analysis of evils and shows restraint in matters of commitment to ideas and systems of thought about what is good for man, given the historical experience that few things have produced more suffering among humans than strong commitments to implementing utopian visions of the good.

For Foucault the socially and historically conditioned context, and not fictive universals, constitutes the most effective bulwark against relativism and nihilism, and the best basis for action. Our sociality and history, according to Foucault, is the only foundation we have, the only solid ground under our feet. And this socio-historical foundation is fully adequate.

Foucault, perhaps more than any recent philosopher, reminded us of the crucial importance of power in the shaping and control of discourses, the production of knowledge, and the social construction of spaces. His analysis of modern power has often been read by planning theorists as negative institutionalised oppression, expressed most chillingly in his analysis of the disciplinary regime of the prison in Discipline and Punish (Foucault 1979). However, it is Foucault’s explanation of power as productive and local, rather than oppressive and hierarchical, that suggests real opportunities for agency and change (McNay 1994). Whilst Foucault saw discourse as a medium which transmits and produces power, he points out that it is also ‘a hindrance, a stumbling-block, a point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategy’. So, at the same time as discourse reinforces power, it also ‘undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes it possible to thwart it’ (Foucault 1990, 101).

Foucault rarely separated knowledge from power, and the idea of ‘power/knowledge’ was of crucial importance: ‘ we should abandon a whole tradition that allows us to imagine that knowledge can exist only where the power relations are suspended and that knowledge can develop only outside its injunctions, its demands and its interests ... we should abandon the belief that power makes mad and that, by the same token, the renunciation of power is one of the conditions of knowledge. We should admit rather that power produced knowledge .. that power and knowledge directly imply one another; that there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge ...’ (Foucault 1979, 27). For Foucault, then, rationality was contingent, shaped by power relations, rather than context-free and objective.

According to Foucault, Habermas’s (undated, 8) ‘authorisation of power by law’ is inadequate (emphasis deleted). ‘[The juridical system] is utterly incongruous with the new methods of power,’ says Foucault (1980a, 89), ‘methods that are employed on all levels and in forms that go beyond the state and its apparatus... Our historical gradient carries us further and further away from a reign of law.’ The law, institutions - or policies and plans - provide no guarantee of freedom, equality or democracy. Not even entire institutional systems, according to Foucault, can ensure freedom, even though they are established with that purpose. Nor is freedom likely to be achieved by imposing abstract theoretical systems or ‘correct’ thinking. On the contrary, history has demonstrated--says Foucault--horrifying examples that it is precisely those social systems which have turned freedom into theoretical formulas and treated practice as social engineering, i.e., as an epistemically derived techne, that become most repressive. ‘[People] reproach me for not presenting an overall theory,’ says Foucault (1984b, 375-6), ‘I am attempting, to the contrary apart from any totalisation - which would be at once abstract and limiting - to open up problems that are as concrete and general as possible’.

What Foucault calls his ‘political task’ is ‘to criticise the working of institutions which appear to be both neutral and independent; to criticise them in such a manner that the political violence which has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight them’ (Chomsky and Foucault 1974, 171). This is what, in a Foucauldian interpretation, would be seen as an effective approach to institutional change, including change in the institutions of civil society. With direct reference to Habermas, Foucault (1988, 18) adds:

‘The problem is not of trying to dissolve [relations of power] in the utopia of a perfectly transparent communication, but to give...the rules of law, the techniques of management, and also the ethics...which would allow these games of power to be played with a minimum of domination.’

Here Foucault overestimates his differences with Habermas, for Habermas also believes that the ideal speech situation cannot be established as a conventional reality in actual communication. Both thinkers see the regulation of actual relations of dominance as crucial, but whereas Habermas approaches regulation from a universalistic theory of discourse, Foucault seeks out a genealogical understanding of actual power relations in specific contexts. Foucault is thus oriented towards phronesis, whereas Habermas’s orientation is towards episteme. For Foucault praxis and freedom are derived not from universals or theories. Freedom is a practice, and its ideal is not a utopian absence of power. Resistance and struggle, in contrast to consensus, is for Foucault the most solid basis for the practice of freedom.

Whereas Habermas emphasises procedural macro politics, Foucault stresses substantive micro politics, though with the important shared feature that neither Foucault nor Habermas venture to define the actual content of political action. This is defined by the participants. Thus, both Habermas and Foucault are ‘bottom-up’ thinkers as concerns the content of politics, but where Habermas thinks in a ‘top-down’ moralist fashion as regards procedural rationality – having sketched out the procedures to be followed - Foucault is a ‘bottom-up’ thinker as regards both process and content. In this interpretation, Habermas would want to tell individuals and groups how to go about their affairs as regards procedure for discourse. He would not want, however, to say anything about the outcome of this procedure. Foucault would prescribe neither process nor outcome; he would only recommend a focus on conflict and power relations as the most effective point of departure for the fight against domination.

It is because of his double ‘bottom-up’ thinking that Foucault has been described as non-action oriented. Foucault (1981) says about such criticism, in a manner that would be pertinent to those who work in the institutional setting of planning:

It’s true that certain people, such as those who work in the institutional setting of the prison...are not likely to find advice or instructions in my books to tell them ‘what is to be done.’ But my project is precisely to bring it about that they ‘no longer know what to do,’ so that the acts, gestures, discourses that up until then had seemed to go without saying become problematic, difficult, dangerous (Miller 1993, 235).

The depiction of Foucault as non-action oriented is correct to the extent that Foucault hesitates to give directives for action, and he directly distances himself from the kinds of universal ‘What is to be done?’ formulas which characterise procedure in Habermas’s communicative rationality. Foucault believes that ‘solutions’ of this type are themselves part of the problem.

Seeing Foucault as non-action oriented would be misleading, however, insofar as Foucault’s genealogical studies are carried out only in order to show how things can be done differently to ‘separate out, from the contingency that has made us what we are, the possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think’ (Foucault 1984a, 45-7). Thus Foucault was openly pleased when during a revolt in some of the French prisons the prisoners in their cells read his Discipline and Punish. ‘They shouted the text to other prisoners’, Foucault told an interviewer. ‘I know it’s pretentious to say’, Foucault said, ‘but that’s a proof of a truth—a political and actual truth--which started after the book was written’ (Dillon 1980, 5). This is the type of situated action Foucault would endorse, and as a genealogist, Foucault saw himself as highly action oriented, as ‘a dealer in instruments, a recipe maker, an indicator of objectives, a cartographer, a sketcher of plans, a gunsmith’ (Ezine 1985, 14).

The establishment of a concrete genealogy opens possibilities for action by describing the genesis of a given situation and showing that this particular genesis is not connected to absolute historical necessity. Foucault’s genealogical studies of prisons, hospitals and sexuality demonstrate that social practices may always take an alternative form, even where there is no basis for voluntarism or idealism. Combined with Foucault’s focus on domination, it is easy to understand why this insight has been embraced by feminists and minority groups. Elaborating genealogies of, for instance, gender and race leads to an understanding of how relations of domination between women and men, and between different peoples, can be changed (McNay 1992, Bordo and Jaggar 1990, Fraser 1989, Benhabib and Cornell 1987).

The value of Foucault’s approach is his emphasis on the dynamics of power. Understanding how power works is the first prerequisite for action, because action is the exercise of power. And such an understanding can best be achieved by focusing on the concrete. Foucault can help us with a materialist understanding of Realpolitik and Realrationalität, and how these might be changed in a specific context. The problem with Foucault is that because understanding and action have their points of departure in the particular and the local, we may come to overlook more generalised conditions concerning, for example, institutions, constitutions and structural issues.

In sum, Foucault and Habermas agree that rationalisation and the misuse of power are among the most important problems of our time. They disagree as to how one can best understand and act in relation to these problems. From the perspective of the history of philosophy and political theory, the difference between Foucault and Habermas lies in the fact that Foucault works within a particularistic and contextualist tradition, with roots in Thucydides via Machiavelli to Nietzsche. Foucault is one of the more important twentieth century exponents of this tradition. Habermas is the most prominent living exponent of a universalistic and theorising tradition derived from Socrates and Plato, proceeding over Kant. In power terms, we are speaking of ‘strategic’ versus ‘constitution’ thinking, about struggle versus control, conflict versus consensus.