Bacchi (excerpts)

"In order to identify how different reforms are conceptualised, I determined that it was possible to start with specific policies and examine how they represented a ‘problem’. Continuing with the affirmative action example, the task is to examine the specific forms of change that are advocated in order to identify how the reform is understood and defended. This insight builds on the commonsense understanding that what we propose to do about something reveals what we think needs to change and hence what we think the ‘problem’ is. This idea transforms the way in which we think about government policy. Commonly governments are seen to be reacting to ‘problems’ and trying to solve them. The rethinking proposed here highlights that specific proposals (or ways of talking about a ‘problem’) impose a particular interpretation upon the issue. In this sense governments
create ‘problems’, rather than reacting to them, meaning that they create particular impressions of what the ‘problem’ is. Importantly these impressions translate into real and meaningful effects for those affected. It is important to mention that the kind of representation of issues discussed here does not refer to deliberate misrepresentation, though doubtless at times members of governments portray issues in particular ways for political gain. However, in the form of analysis I am proposing, we are working at a different level of analysis – identifying how ‘problems’ are given a shape through the ways they are spoken about and through the ‘knowledges’ that are assumed in their shaping (see below).

A common reform proposal to improve women’s representation in positions of influence and in better-paying jobs is to offer them training programs. Following the logic of the question ‘what’s the problem represented to be?’, if ‘training programs’ is the proposal (‘the solution’), then clearly it is assumed that women’s lack of training is ‘the problem’. As another example consider the currently, much discussed ‘obesity problem’. If the proposal is for some sort of activity or exercise regime for children, the assumption is that the ‘problem’ is children’s lack of activity. By contrast, if there is a proposal to ban advertising of fast foods during prime-time children’s television, the ‘problem’ is represented to be aggressive, and perhaps unethical, advertising. Different proposals, therefore, create competing representations of the ‘problem’. This proposition does not mean to imply that we are left to flounder in a world of representation. As mentioned above different representations of a ‘problem’ (problem representations) have different effects, which need to be assessed and evaluated. In my analysis, I direct attention to three interconnected forms of effects: discursive effects (what is discussed and not discussed); subjectification effects (how people are thought about and how they think about themselves); and lived effects (the impact on life and death). For example training programs for women put the focus on women as the ones who need to change, limiting consideration of the nature of work environments (discursive effects). In effect they create women as the ‘problem’, affecting how women think about themselves and how others think about them (subjectification effects). As a result some women distance themselves from the reform because it seems to stigmatise them as inadequate or as gaining special privileges, placing significant constraints on the possibility of meaningful social change(lived effects).Since the way in which the ‘problem’ is represented – how the issue is problematized – is so important to the ways we live our lives, I conclude (rather provocatively) that we are governed through problematisations, rather than through policies. Our critical focus should be directed, therefore, to problematisations and the problem representations they contain. My 1999 book introduces a methodology, called ‘what’s the problem represented to be?’, dedicated specifically to this task. To be clear, a ‘what’s the problem represented to be?’ approach to policy analysis does not deny that there are a full range of troubling social conditions that ought to be dealt with. However, it insists that calling these conditions ‘problems’ or ‘social problems’ fixes them in ways that need to be interrogated. Even those who wish to contest a particular understanding (or construction) of a ‘social problem’ – asserting for example that binge-drinking is a result of a Western drinking culture rather than a result of the behaviours of ‘irresponsible’ young people – often still assume that at some level a ‘problem’ (of binge-drinking, obesity, drug addiction, welfare dependence, etc.) exists. By contrast a ‘what’s the problem represented to be?’ approach challenges this presumption and directs attention to the ways in which particular representations of ‘problems’ play a central role in how we are governed, in how we are ruled."

Foucault, governmentality and subjectification

The objective in studying forms of rule is to reflect on how specific regulations and practices affect our lives, and where they come from (how they are justified). Since, as discussed above, we are governed through problematizations(not policies) the best way to understand the terms in which rule takes place is to study (open up for interrogation) problematizations.

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Foucault said late in his life that the notion ‘common to all the work I have done since Histoire de la folie to be ‘that of problematization’. Basically Foucault wanted a way to access the ‘thinking’ that went into governing – how people were thinking about an issue. He decided that the best way to do this was to examine the way/s in which particular issues were conceived as ‘problems’. Specifically, Foucault wanted to uncover the
grounding precepts or assumptions that people took for granted and did not question, the meanings that needed to be in place in order for particular proposals to make sense and to find support. He was typically interested in ‘how’ questions, rather than in ‘why’ questions – how it was possible for certain policies to be put in place:

A critique does not consist in saying that things aren’t good the way they are. It consists in seeing on what type of assumptions, of familiar notions, of established, unexamined ways of thinking, the accepted practices are based(Foucault 1994: 456).

Crucially the meanings that interested Foucault were tied to a range of ‘knowledges’, such as psychology, law and medicine. For example, as noted above, the proposal that women need training in order to ‘succeed’ creates women’s lack of training as the ‘problem’. This way of thinking relies upon a particular understanding of people as able to learn and acquire ‘skills’. Such an understanding constitutes a form of knowledge based on psychological theories of development, theories that we in contemporary western industrialised states currently take for granted. In Foucault’s view, such ‘knowledges’ are contingent and contestable".

Adopting this perspective, when we study policy from a Foucauldianperspective, we are not studying government in the narrow institutional sense.Rather, we are studying the full array of social knowledges that underpin thethinking in government policy. Foucault (1991) coined the term

‘governmentality’ to talk about this broad understanding of how rule takes place.He identified background ‘motifs’ (governmental rationalities or govern-

mentalities

) in the ways in which rule was justified. These styles of rulereflected forms of problematisation. Some of the ‘motifs’ he studied includedsovereignty, discipline, and ‘bio-politics’.Foucault’s major argument about the dominant contemporary

‘motif’ is that,currently, rule takes place

through

subjects or, more specifically, through theproduction of 

governable

subjects. The term ‘subjectification’ captures how thisproduction of subjects takes place, as described briefly below.

 

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"Policies – called ‘practical texts’ in Foucault (1986: 12-13) – create ‘subjectpositions’ that political subjects either take up or refuse to take up. Taking upcertain ‘subject positions’ means adopting particular ways of thinking aboutoneself and becoming that (type of) person. This proposition involves a dramaticrethinking of who we are and how we think about ourselves. It suggests thatpolicies, through the subject positions they create, shape our subjectivities (to anextent):

A governmental analytics invites readers to think about individual subjects asbeing produced in specific social policy practices, for example, as worker-citizens in workfare programs, as parent-citizens, in child and family servicesor consumer-citizens in a managerial and marketized mixed economy of welfare. (Marston and McDonald 2006: 3)

This suggestion is linked to Foucault’s idea of power as productive. Put simply,Foucault argued that it is inadequate to think about rule as repressive (asstopping us from doing a range of things). Rather we need to think about howwe are encouraged to be certain kinds of people and to do certain sorts of things.

Therefore, power relations influence our subjectivity, how we think aboutourselves. This, he argued, is how rule really takes place:

The individual is not to be conceived as a sort of elementary nucleus, aprimitive atom, a multiple and inert material on which power comes to fastenor against which it happens to strike, and in so doing subdues or crushesindividuals. In fact, it is already one of the prime effects of power that certainbodies, certain gestures, certain discourses, come to be identified andconstituted as individuals. (Foucault 1980: 98)

Studying policies and their problem representations takes on a whole newsignificance, therefore. A focus on problematisation allows us to identify the‘motif’ that shapes current forms of rule and how we are produced as particularkinds of subject within that motif. Returning once more to our example of training programs for women, I mentioned above that, when women’s lack of training is identified as the ‘problem’, women become the marked category.Consequently some women may decide to distance themselves from the reformfearing its stigmatising effects, and may indeed internalise the message that it isthey who lack some ability or skill. In this way the subject position of ‘untrainedworker’ in the policy can affect some women’s self-perception, leading them tosee themselves as responsible in some way for their ‘failure’ to ‘succeed’".