Power/Knowledge: Methods of Analysis

Thus to recap, we have seen how governmentality studies look both at the rationalities and technologies of governing. We have also seen how modernity has given rise to a mode of governing that relies on knowledge about naturalised laws, laws that appear to us as untouchable common sense and that function based on circular and even tautological truth games. We have discussed how this mode of governing is extended from a distance to the individual conduct of people through technologies of governing, which are not simply means of implementation, but inherently relate to the arrangement of both material practices of governing and knowledge about governing. Before we move onto discussing the actual technologies of governing immigration and the rationalities that inform these technologies, we will discuss methodology and the actual analytical tools of decentring the power/knowledge constellation around immigration in Finland.

Throughout this chapter we have discussed various tools of decentring. So far we have highlighted how Foucault's epistemological critique can be analytically employed to decentre actual, practical power/knowledge constellations through the empirico-transcendental riddle, which pins down the tautological nature of the modern mode of knowing and locates its source of knowing in the identity of the cogito. We have explicated how the choice of using historicism or psychologism, as tools of affirming and questioning positivity, function as strategies of power/knowledge. We have implied how rendering governing technical, making it a matter of the will to improve, allows for the silencing of ‘the political’ in the power/knowledge constellation. We focused on scarcity and silence as markers of the functioning of power/knowledge, the analysis of which is as important as the analysis of explicitly voiced propositions.

of power/knowledge. In addition, Foucault's thinking around governmentality has shown us how rationalities and technologies of governing and assessing truth also function as strategies of power/knowledge. We have seen how naturalism defines the rationalities of governing, how truth is produced through market veridiction and how technologies of governing operate at a distance and through freedom. These are central tools of decentring that are elemental for the second phase of analysing the power/knowledge constellation around immigration. There is, however, one more strategy of power/knowledge, namely that of universalism/particularism, that we will discuss, because this will give us another method of decentring the discourses of nationalism, liberalism and multiculturalism.

Tools of Decentring: Universalism/particularism

As we have seen, it is the socio-economic and socio-biological nexus of naturalised laws through which the binary of universalism/particularism enters the heart of liberal governmentality and modernity. In the context of conceptualising government through naturalised laws that are necessarily universal, particularism presents scientific knowledge with a need to signify it in relation to the universal, as part of the whole—this method of power/knowledge often leads into strategies of governing through abnormalization of the particular. In Foucaultian terms universalism lies at the centre of the epistemological configuration of modernity: universalism is epistemic vigilance sound asleep (also Laclau 1996/2007, 23). This universalism/particularism binary can be conceptualised as a continuum of power/knowledge: the terms ‘universalism’ and ‘particularism’ cannot function without reference to each other, which is why the dividing line between them becomes impossible to pin down (Laclau 1996/2007, 20-35). The universalism/particularism binary must be understood as a matter of Will to Power that underlines the way that the modern mode of knowing functions.Because of the centrality of the cogito’s identity to the modern mode of knowing, the possibility of transcendental knowledge cannot be treated as purely a philosophical problem that divorces questions of ontology from effects of power, but it must be treated as a desire for one’s knowledge to be universal and transcendentally true—and thus off limits to criticism. The point of genealogy is to turn questions of Will to Truth into questions of Will to Power (Laclau 1996/2007). Therefore, the analysis needs to look at what place is occupied by the ‘particular’ in the purported universal order of things, at how games of resistance are played, how subjects are constituted, at how we “recognise ourselves as subjects of what we are doing, thinking, saying”, and at how we subjectify the immigrant other (for in these texts, the immigrant is not a speaking subject but an object of governing) (Foucault 2000b, 314-316). The focus of attention is on “relations of power, not relations of meaning” (Foucault 1980, 114).

The universalism/particularism binary is essential to socio-evolutionary governmentality. Social evolutionism is at the heart of the self-universalization of European particularism. Whilst the power/knowledge strategy of universalism/particularism has its religious applications, in terms of

“secular eschatology” (ibid.1996/2007, 25), the universal came to be used in various ways in the modern power/knowledge constellation. The Western mode of knowing gave rise to a power/knowledge constellation, in which European culture was presented as representing “universal human interests” that had a civilizing function. The West defined ‘civilisation’ and made itself the pivot of human social evolution. If we look at the position that is employed by the particular in this West and the Rest power/knowledge constellation, the Rest is marked by an “incapacity to represent the universal” (Laclau 1996/2007, 24). In this context, modernization and development become represented as “as an epochal struggle between universality and particularisms” giving rise to a civilising, progressive mission of freeing the colonial mind/society from its primitive condition (Laclau 1996/2007, 24-25). That is, the particular becomes a phase in human evolution, the epitome of which is Western society and culture.

Again, the question here is not about what is the correct interpretation of social evolution and what not, but the question is how various views of social evolution are used to govern ourselves. That is, the focus is on how socio-evolutionary discourses function as discourses of power (also in the intra-societal level) and what kinds of silences are executed through them. Because of its all-devouring universalism this socio-evolutionary power/knowledge constellation necessarily confuses history with evolution. That is, socio-evolutionary discourses make immediate historical variations into discourses of evolution, which rather should refer either to slow genetic change in living organisms through natural selection over thousands of years or to large scale social evolution, such as the move to agriculture or to industrial production. In this way, for example, a change from religious rule to democratic rule or a conceptual development in academic analysis can be painted in the colours of evolution. It is this mixing of history with evolution and its hyper-signified metaphors that is at the heart of the power games that liberal governmentality plays.

Yet, this pivotal role of Western civilization does not mean that socio-evolutionary theory is employable only in one way. Even the contemporary ways in which socio-evolutionary theories are employed in conjunction with nationalism, liberalism and multiculturalism vary (not to mention the copious possibilities not materialised). Namely, social evolution can either be characterised as a universal uni-linear development or as a particular multi-uni-linear development along spheres of civilizational/cultural entities. In this regard, nationalism, multiculturalism and liberalism suggest different types of universalities and particularities (Vincent 2002). In important ways these discourses are made possible

sphere of development/evolution and rely on the quasi-organic qualities of cultures, nations or civilisations. Nationalism imposes a certain universalizing ‘naturalness’ on organising the world around nations (or nation-states), and multiculturalism around cultures (e.g. Balibar and Wallerstein 1991;

Schnapper 1998; Vincent 2002). The ontological essence of human is defined as cultural making the human quasi-organically tied to the blood/culture/upbringing of his/her childhood, resistance against which is either ‘impossible’ or ‘non-desirable’. Beyond this universalizing aspect, nationalism is a particularist discourse of sovereignty, as it asserts the right of a singular ‘nation’ to order its affairs in the particular, cultural fashion, as does multiculturalism at the level of ‘ethnicity’.

Although liberalism is essentially universalising, liberal theories nevertheless bear the contradiction of universalism/particularism inside the theoretical realm. This contradiction is embedded in the liberal conceptualisations of the moral community versus its conceptualisations of individualism, as Vincent asserts. The coherence of the liberal edifice of knowledge suffers from a problematic relationship with particularism and nationalism that underlie conceptualisations of sovereignty and nation-state (Vincent 2002, 97-103). As well as its embeddedness in Western culture, also the practical connection of liberalism with the particularism of the nation-state paradigm complicates liberalism’s claim to universalism. Although cosmopolitanism is the most purely universalising discourse, fundamentally employing a logic of a single line of social evolution, its universalism is equally symptomatic of the Western belief in its own position as a representative of universal human interests, i.e. the pivot of human progress, and hence also inherently particularist (e.g. Laclau 1995; Parekh 1997; Murray 1997;

Newman 2000; Chatterjee 2005).

This type of contamination of the universal with the particular and vice versa (Newman 2000, 101) is essential for understanding how these discourses become employed in governing immigration (e.g.

Doty 1999, 587; Tebble 2006; Lister and Pia 2008, 157-161). Because liberal governmentality in important ways is a socio-evolutionary governmentality, we need to investigate how these discourses need to function in conjunction with stories that we tell about social evolution. As Ryn puts it: “How we regard the relationship between universality and particularity directly affects how we think about humanism and multiculturalism” (Ryn 2003, 8). Paying attention to how the binary of universalism/particularism is employed in practice, in this case in Finnish immigration politics, is an important additional tool of decentring. The discourses of nationalism, liberalism and multiculturalism typically employ the universalism/particularism binary in contradictory ways. Similarly, as with psychologism or historicism as strategies of power/knowledge, we need to focus on when and how universalism or particularism become modes of affirming positivity. In the context of political truth

games, these strategies divide, exclude, negate and omit at the same time as they unite, include, affirm and enable. It is in the strategic game of truth that governmentality is enabled and created.

Primary Method

How do Foucault's epistemological criticism, power/knowledge and governmentality as well as the discourses of nationalism, multiculturalism and liberalism come together in the method then? As has been said, overall the discourse theoretical method here entailed two phases; the primary phase, which concentrated on the analysis of knowledge produced about immigration in Finland, and the secondary phase, which analyses the power/knowledge constellation taking into account the rationalities and technologies of governing immigration. Together the first and the second level convey a picture of how immigration and immigrant are problematized. The third analytical level, that of the comparison of the problematization of immigration in contemporary Finland and the nineteenth-twentieth century America, is carried out in Chapter 4.

As said, the first level analytical approach of discourse theory is different from the normal discourse analytical approach that typically focuses on the level of individual documents or particular discussions, for example in the handling of a particular bill in the parliament. Here we focus on discourses as systems of dispersion and treat statements as a part of the wider discursive field of making sense of immigration, be this then in documents about internal security, immigrant integration, refugee reception or rules of granting permits. In The Archaeology of Knowledge Foucault asserts that a discursive formation cannot be defined by the unity of the object, by the unity of a common style of production of statements, by the constancy of the concept, or by reference to a common theme (Foucault 1969/2002, ch. 2). Defining the discursive formations through these four aspects “presupposes a play of prescriptions that govern exclusions and selections” and, thus, prevents critical consideration of the silences and gaps in the discursive formation of immigration (in "The Will to Knowledge" Foucault 2000a).

In practice, the theoretical background means that the discursive formation is not unified by the object, such as ‘citizenship policy’ or ‘EU visa regime’, but also other policies and statements in other discussions including references to immigration or immigrants need to be considered in their totality as belonging to the dispersion of the discursive formation. Secondly, the style of discourse, such as legislative text versus parliamentary discussion, cannot be deemed as a delimitation of a valid sphere of discourse, but different types of statements can be analysed and included on a par with each other. This

legislative implementation instructions. This is necessary in order to take account of the whole apparatus and to place discourse in context. Thirdly, discursive formations clearly expand the limits of concepts, such as for example ‘national interest’, ‘unemployment policy’ or ‘border control’, and the vastness of the discursive formation of immigration cannot be described by allowing such concepts to a priori limit the field of investigation. Fourthly, if one wants to include and analyse the dispersion of the discursive formation, it cannot be limited by such themes as ‘anti-immigration policies’ or ‘economic role of migrants’, for example. That is, when analysing governmentality the analysis itself cannot start from a problematization.

Therefore, in practice the governmentality of immigration needs to be analysed as an apparatus. I have analysed laws, governmental documents (bills and reports), parliamentary discussions and committee statements as well as implementation guidelines as the bulk of primary sources until a saturation point in the analysis was reached. That is, the aim was not to analyse every statement ever made, but keeping in mind the repetitive function of discourse, the goal was to form a picture of the larger tendencies of conceptualising immigration and immigrant related issues. By a point of saturation I mean a point in analysis, in which no more new and surprising statements were being added and in which the ratio between the utilisations of various discourses was relatively stable. Altogether I have analysed some 110 documents containing some 3300 analysed statements in addition to a number of documents skimmed in order to affirm the saturation of the analysis.

The primary analysis of the statements in the documents followed a methodical structure. The concept of statement was operationalized through Foucault's account of General Grammar and its structure and the way that Foucault paralleled this structure with the theory of anthropological sleep (Foucault 1966/2002, 90-132 and 330-373).³⁴ Therefore a statement was not understood as a sentence, for

34 For those interested in the combination it can be said that this analytical structure is Foucaultian but not Foucault's. What I mean by this is that this approach crucially falls short of the critical ambition of Foucault's archaeology (cf. Hook 2007/2001). Besides the obvious difference that Foucault's archaeological and genealogical methods are historical, in comparison to Foucault's discourse analytical method presented in The Archaeology of Knowledge the concept of statement is also operationalized differently, i.e. through General Grammar. Foucault's concept of statement has always been a source of confusion: Foucault defines ‘statement’ more through what it is not, rather than through what it is. As Dreyfus and Rabinow explained, the statement cannot be characterised as a utterance, it neither is a proposition nor a linguistic entity of a psychological or logical kind, it is neither an ideal form nor an event (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982, especially xxii, 17 and 32). Here, the statement is defined through the concept of a discursive order (derivation) and the elements (propositions, articulation and designation toward a source of positivity) that are required to uphold and affirm the truthfulness of the derived order of things. In this sense, the way that the concept of statement has been operationalized comes closest to a ‘logical entity’, by which I do not refer to structure of logical statements (i.e. A is B, and C is A and therefore C is also B), but to these elements that are required to form a coherent order of things. Whilst this analytical structure of proposition, articulation, designation and derivation is from Foucault's account of the way language functioned in the Classical era, the meaning of these terms was changed by the modern mode of knowing. The way that the modern mode of knowing changed the Classical general grammar was by destabilising the proposition and the articulation through

example, but more like a logical entity that required a proposition (‘something is’), an articulation (‘something is X’), a designation towards sources of positivity (‘something is X because Y’) and a derivation (‘something is X, because Y, which means Z) to affirming an order of things. The next chapter will not focus on this primary analytical structure further, as it operates on the linguistic level and it is only a means, and not the ultimate aim, of the analysis. I will merely indicate this analytical structure, as the below example shows:

Internationally it is a commonly accepted principle based on national sovereignty that a foreigner does not have an absolute right to arrive to a foreign country or to stay and work there.

The immigration policy followed by the state can be determined by its own needs and national interests. (Finnish Government 13.06.2003)

A dotted line is used under the assertion & proposition (i.e. absolute right to arrive is not for foreigners).

Designation towards a discursive source of positivity (i.e. the truthful discourse of national sovereignty) is marked by bold text and the underlying derivation of discursive order (i.e. that because of this immigration policies can be determined by national interest) is marked by a double line.

Because the ultimate focus of this research is on the macro-level functioning of power/knowledge, in the governmentality, the linguistic and the immediate political context needs to be surpassed. The macro-level of making sense of immigration is accessed through the micro-macro-level grid of dispersed and fragmented statements. The methodical aim is to allow the speakers to define the discourses themselves; thus the discourses studied here are not predefined and generic, but specific and particular to the discursive field itself: Nationalism, liberalism and multiculturalism are not treated as academic discourses, but approached through what is made of them in the Finnish context, i.e. as a discourse that can be used for various purposes, not knowledges that would inherently be something innate or limited in terms of academic histories or sociologies of thought. Nationalism, liberalism and multiculturalism are treated as tools of politics. Treating these isms in their commonsensical form allows us to strip the taken-for-granted nature out of these discourses and to highlight how they acquire meaning and lose it in relation to a state racist governmentality.

That is, the primary method allows for an analysis of how discourses are used as tools of politics. This allows for an analysis of the limiting and disciplining elements of discourse (Apperley 1997) and helps to chart the strategic operation of knowledge in this discursive formation (e.g. Haugaard 2002, 3). In practical terms, the primary method categorised statements based on the author, type of document in question, the year, the topics discussed, the objects subjectified, the discourses referred to, the

discourses objected to, and the type of tactical inclusion/exclusions established (universal/particular) and based on what premises. This gives an inventory of statements from which statements under one type of discourse can be pulled out and then compared to each other. They can be assessed, for example, according to what other discourses they have referred to, what discourses they have objected

discourses objected to, and the type of tactical inclusion/exclusions established (universal/particular) and based on what premises. This gives an inventory of statements from which statements under one type of discourse can be pulled out and then compared to each other. They can be assessed, for example, according to what other discourses they have referred to, what discourses they have objected