Abstract
We owe to Michel Foucault an elaboration of the power/knowledge nexus—the many ways that the microtechniques of power and knowledge are intricated in the processes of producing subjects, managing institutions, and proliferating discourses. In The Birth of the Clinic (1963) and Discipline and Punish (1971), he shows us how the practices of partitioning space, seriating time, ordering perception and cognition, and documenting cases in clinics, schools, factories, and prisons simultaneously produced the Western social order and the human sciences. Foucault insisted that he was investigating practices, not institutions, telling an interviewer in 1978 that:
In this piece of research [for Discipline and Punish], as in my other earlier work, the target of analysis was not “institutions,” “theories,” or “ideology” but practices—with the aim of grasping the conditions that make these acceptable at a given moment; the hypothesis being that these types of practices are not just governed by institutions, prescribed by ideologies, guided by pragmatic circumstances—whatever role these elements may actually play—but, up to a point, possess their own specific regularities, logic, strategy, self-evidence, and “reason.” It is a question of analyzing a “regime of practices”—practices being understood here as places where what is said and what is done, rules imposed and reasons given, the planned and the taken-for-granted meet and interconnect.1
Let us come back to the definition of the exercise of power as a way in which certain actions may structure the field of other possible actions.
—Michel Foucault, Power
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Notes
Michel Foucault, “Questions of Methods,” in James D. Faubion, ed., trans. Robert Hurley and others, Power (New York: New Press, 2000), 225; emphasis in the original.
See Max Heirich, The Spiral of Conflict: Berkeley 1964 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971) (Berkeley Free Speech Movement).
Paul Lauter and Florence Howe, The Conspiracy of the Young (New York: World, 1970), 27–53 (Mississippi freedom schools).
Wini Breines, Community and Organization in the New Left, 1962–1968, new ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989) (ERAP).
Barbara A. Crow, Radical Feminism: A Documentary Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2000) (consciousness raising).
Anita Shreve, Women Together, Women Alone: The Legacy of the Consciousness-Raising Movement (New York: Viking, 1989) (consciousness raising).
As one example, see Anne N. Costain and Andrew S. McFarland, Social Movements and American Political Institutions (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998). A quick glance at the table of contents shows that this volume is divided into sections on theories of American politics and social movements, movement mobilization, and action targeting political parties, government, and the courts. In other words, the individual/institutional/state formula is reflected in not only the book’s format but also in its title.
See Harold Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology, rpt. of 1961 ed. (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 1991) (on ethnomethodology).
Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984) (on structuration).
Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff, “Althusser’s Liberation of Marxian Theory,” in E. Ann Kaplan and Michael Sprinker, eds, The Althusserian Legacy (New York: Verso, 1993), 59–72 (on overdetermination).
Aldon D. Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change (New York: Free Press, 1984).
Walter W. Powell and Paul J. DiMaggio, eds, The New Institutionalism in Organizational Theory and Analysis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
Donatella della Porta and Mario Diani, Social Movements: An Introduction (Oxford, UK, and Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999).
See Timothy Lenoir, “The Discipline of Nature and the Nature of Disciplines,” in Ellen Messer-Davidow, David R. Shumway, and David J. Sylvan, eds, Knowledges: Historical and Critical Studies in Disciplinarity (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 70–75, and the preface, vii-viii.
Tony Becher, Academic Tribes and Territories: Intellectual Enquiry and the Culture of Disciplines (Milton Keynes, UK: Society for Research into Higher Education and Open University Press, 1989).
Barbara Ryan, Feminism and the Women’s Movement: Dynamics of Change in Social Movement Ideology and Activism (New York: Routledge, 1992), 73. Often referred to as the First Wave of American feminism, organizations predating NOW included those associated with women’s suffrage, such as the National American Women’s Suffrage Association (1890), the National Women’s Party (1917), and the League of Women Voters (1920); with labor struggles, such as the Women’s Trade Union League (1903); and with reproductive issues such as Planned Parenthood (1942). Second Wave organizations established around the time of NOW include the Women’s Equity Action League (1968), which focused on education and employment, and the National Abortion Rights Action League (1968). Generally categorized as liberal-feminist organizations because they worked the channels of official politics—lobbying, legislation, and litigation—they advocated for changes considered quite radical at the time.
Left feminists reworked socialist, Marxist, and progressive ideologies and agendas, and radical feminists emphasized woman-centered institutions and cultures. For more information on the liberal, left, and radical strains, see Ruth Rosen, The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America (New York: Penguin, 2000).
Susan M. Hartman, The Other Feminists: Activists in the Liberal Establishment (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).
Alice Echols, Daring To Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967–1975 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).
Barbara A. Crow, Radical Feminism: A Documentary Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2000).
Ellen Messer-Davidow, Disciplining Feminism: From Social Activism to Academic Discourse (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 100–111.
See Patrice McDermott, Politics and Scholarship: Feminist Academic Journals and the Production of Knowledge (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994).
Ibid., 191–201; and Marilyn Jacoby Boxer, When Women Ask the Questions: Creating Women’s Studies in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). Today such nonacademic organizations as the U.S. Bureau of Census, the National Institutes of Health, and the United Nations nuance their research by sex, race, ethnicity, socioeconomic class, level of education age, nationality, and other categories. Ibid., 191–201;
Esther M. Westervelt, Women’s Higher Education: Some Unanswered Questions: Report of the Wingspread Conference (Racine WI: Johnson Foundation, 1972), 7–8.
Ad Hoc Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession, The Status of Women in Sociology 1968–1972 (Washington DC: American Sociological Association, 1973), 24–27.
For more information on the conservative assault, see Ellen Messer-Davidow, “Manufacturing the Attack on Liberalized Higher Education,” Social Text 36 (Fall 1993): 40–80.
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© 2012 Kathrin Fahlenbrach, Martin Klimke, Joachim Scharloth, and Laura Wong
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Messer-Davidow, E. (2012). Studying Power/Knowledge Formations: Disciplining Feminism and Beyond. In: Fahlenbrach, K., Klimke, M., Scharloth, J., Wong, L. (eds) The Establishment Responds. Palgrave Macmillan Transnational History Series. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119833_5
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