Evidence+from+Part+I

Michel **__FOUCAULT__** **__’81__** in //Politics, Philosophy, Culture// ed. Kritzman 1988 p. 154-156 FOUCAULT __We must escape from the dilemma of being either for or against__. After all, it is possible to face up to a government and remain standing. To work with a government implies neither subjection nor total acceptance. One may work with it and yet he restive. I even believe that the two things go together. D.E. After Michel Foucault the critic, are we now going to see Michel Foucault the reformist? After all, __the reproach was often made that the criticism made by intellectuals leads to nothing.__ FOUCAULT First __I'll answer the point about "that leads to nothing." There are hundreds and thousands of people who have worked for the emergence of a number of problems that are now on the agenda. To say that this work produced nothing is quite wrong__. Do you think that twenty years ago people were considering the problems of the relationship between mental illness and psychological normality, the problem of prison, the problem of medical power, the problem of the relationship between the sexes, and so on, as they are doing today? - Furthermore, there are no reforms as such. Reforms are not produced in the air, independently of those who carry them out. One cannot not take account of those who wi1l have the job of carrying out this transformation. And, then, above all, I believe that __an opposition can be made between critique and transformation__, "ideal" critique and "real" transformation. __A critique is not a matter of saying that things are not right as they are. It is a matter of pointing out on what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought the practices that we accept rest__. __We must free ourselves from the__ sacrilization of the __social as the only reality and stop regarding as superfluous something so essential in human life and in human relations as thought__. __Thought__ exists independently of systems and structures of discourse. It is something that is often hidden, but which __always animates everyday behavior.__ There is always a little thought even in the most stupid institutions; there is always thought even in silent habits. __Criticism is a matter of flushing out that thought and trying to change it: to show that things are not as self-evident as one believed, to see that what is accepted as self-evident will no longer be accepted as such. Practicing criticism is a matter of making facile gestures difficult__. In these circumstances, __criticism (and radical criticism) is absolutely indispensable for any transformation. A transformation that remains within the same mode of thought, a transformation that is only a way of adjusting the same thought more closely to the reality of things can merely he a superficial transformation__. On the other hand, __as soon as one can no longer think things as one formerly thought them, transformation becomes__ both very urgent, very difficult, and quite __possible.__ It is not therefore a question of there being a time for criticism and a time for transformation, nor people who do the criticism and others who do the transforming, those who are enclosed in an inaccessible radicalism and those who are forced to make the necessary concessions to reality. In fact I think the work of deep transformation can only he carried out in a free atmosphere, one constantly agitated by a permanent criticism. DE But do you think the intellectual must have a programmatic role in this transformation? FOUCAULT A reform is never only the result of a process in which there is conflict, confrontation, struggle, resistance __To say to oneself at the outset: what reform will I be able to carry out? That is not, I believe, an aim for the intellectual to pursue__. His role, __since he works specifically in the realm of thought__, is to see how far the liberation of thought can make those transformations urgent enough for people to want to carry them out and difficult enough to carry out for them to be profoundly rooted in reality. __It is a question of making conflicts more visible, of making them more essential than mere confrontations of interests or mere institutional immobility__. Out of these conflicts, these confrontations, a new power relation must emerge, whose first, temporary expression will he a reform. If at the base there has not been the work of thought upon itself and if, in fact, modes of thought, that is to say modes of action, have not been altered, whatever the project for reform, we know that it will be swamped, digested by modes of behavior and institutions that will always be the same. A Claire **__CUTLER__** Poli Sci @ Victoria **__‘2K__** in //Strange Power// Eds. Thomas Lawton, James Rosenau and Amy Verdun p 161-162 We might begin with the now familiar distinction Robert Cox makes between critical theory and problem-solving theory.' __Problem solving theory 'takes the world as it finds it, with the prevailing social and power relationships and the institutions into which they are organized, as the given **framework for action'**__ (Cox 1981: 88). __It is instrumental in its goal of improving the workings of institutions, but does not call into question the patterns or purposes of these institutions and relations__. In contrast, __critical theory 'stands apart from the prevailing order of the world__ and __asks how that order came about'__ (ibid.). Unlike problem-solving theory, __critical theory 'does not take institutions and social power relations for granted but calls them into question__ by concerning itself with their origins and how and whether they might be in the process of changing. __It is directed toward an appraisal of the very **framework for action**__, or problematic, __which problem-solving theory accepts as its parameters'__ (ibid.). There are several dimensions of critical theory that differentiate it from problem-solving theory. The first is its inherent normativity in the sense of its concern with ethics and morality in international relations. While normative international relation theory encompasses 'that body of work which addresses the moral dimensions of interna- tional relations and the wider questions of meaning and interpretation generated by the discipline' (Brown 1992: 3), it also encompasses theories designed to promote social, political and economic change. As Cox notes, __'Theory is always for someone and for some purpose__. All theories have a perspective. Perspectives derive from a position in time and space' (Cox 1981: 87). __All theories either explicitly or implicitly embrace values and promote purposes and interests and the goal of critical theory is to lay these bare in order to 'allow for a normative choice in favor of a social and political order different from the prevailing order'__ (ibid.: 90; see also Hazel Smith 1996). Thus, related to the normativity of critical theory is its transformative and emancipatory potential. __Critical theory assists in identifying alternatives to the existing world order that promote the values and goals of human emancipation__. Mark Neufeld associates emancipa- tory theory with the assistance of 'those poorly served by present social and political arrangements, through which the disadvantaged can empower themselves to effect radical social change' (Neufeld 1995: 20).2 Andrew Linklater frames critical theory in terms of 'theory committed to the reduction or eradication of constraints on human autonomy' (Linklater 1986: 308),

Michael **__SHAPIRO__** Poli Sci @ Hawaii **__’92__** //Reading the Postmodern Polity// p. 88-89 __The__ kind of __discursive practice__ implicit __in spatial arrangements is rarely available__ as part of political understandings __because in most contemporary policy talk, the shape of the arena within which policy is conceived is taken for granted. These__ arenas, the resultants of spatial practices, __are not an audible part of policy talk. They exist at a silent level__, or, to turn to a lexic metaphor, __they are a series of power inscriptions that do their effective work without being read. They belong__, in effect __to a political rhetoric that is implicit in society's__ spatial __practices, as part of its "ground plan__," __which situates the sets of eligible speaker/actors who can produce meaningful and effective policy utterances and actions__. 5 And, in general, __they__ contextualize and __render coherent the discourses that bestow meaning and value on things, actions, and relationships__. The shape of a society's spaces-leisure space, work space, public space, military space, and so forth -tends to remain largely implicit for a variety of reasons. One is of course that the shaping of such spaces takes place so slowly that few can perceive a process of actual boundary establishment or movement. However, part of the inattention to spatial predicates of policy discourse is positively administered. Dominant forms of social theory, for example both liberal and Marxist, fail, with some exceptions, to encode the spatial dimensions of human association.6 For the dominant tendencies in both these theoretical traditions, space is either natural or neutral; it is either the empty arena within which political association and contention develop or it is the sanctified, historically destined places whose boundaries should remain inviolable. Yet __there are good reasons to resist this naturalizing of space__. At a minimum__, careful attention to the irredeemably contextual contribution of a speaker's__ or writer's __situation to the meaning of utterances should provide a clue. The meaning and value that statements confer are inseparable from the mapping of persons within which the statements are deposited. Intelligibility is intimately connected to standing__, to the sites and locations from which meanings are shaped. And the spaces from which discourse is produced are just as much constituted as sets of practices as the discourses themselves. Social relations thus form a complex in which spatial and discursive practices are inseparable. 7 __Those who use a discourse -an institutionalized practice through which meaning and value is imposed, reaffirmed, and exchanged-generally fail to discern the historically developed, presupposed practices__, spatial among others, __that ventriloquate themselves through the discourse__. This is the case, in part, because, as Jacques Derrida has pointed out, our utterances seem to be wholly present to us: "The subject can hear or speak to himself and be affected by the signifier he produces without passing through an external detour, the world, the sphere of what is not 'his own'." Nevertheless, the rhetorical contributions of space can be registered. At least their in- direct culects are available to the gaze. __What is often required is that one manage to suspend the usual aggressive practices through which everyday life is constructed.__