Eric and Blaine
While not yet up to scratch on my Foucault, there are aspects of your debate
which interest me. Perhaps I should outline my research interests in more
detail than I have done. Firstly, I apologise, Eric, if you took my
reference to synergistic models of partnership to be my overiding concern. I
do, in fact, have many problems with much of the partnership debate. But I'm
getting ahead of myself.
In 1991 in Britain, an urban programme called City Challenge was introduced,
part of its brief being to 'bring the community back into' urban
regeneration. Now, while ostensibly I am evaluating the success of this, my
concern is with the way in which official or hidden discourses and knowledge
place constraints on the whole question of empowerment and participation.
One of my major objections is to the way in which much of the work done in
this area relies on a certain definition of power as a finite 'energy', for
want of a better word. I see power in this case as merely being a function
of the struggles over knowledge (after all, it seems to me that power and
empowerment is nothing without the resources and knowledge to use it), which
is how I have, perhaps mistakenly, come to be reading Foucault. In turn,
this has led me to wider concerns with citizenship (and there's another
meaningless term), or, particularly, the discourses which can help create a
climate of disillusionment and apathy, and therefore exclusion from, in my
case, regeneration schemes.
While I'm not particularly familiar with the object/subject debate (I've
been concentrating, probably to my own detriment, on power), your
correspondance triggered off some bells. Citizenship is a product both of a
particular history which has led to its conception within any country, and
of the relations in the practical sense which combine to form our material,
every experiences of it. I realise a debate over a term as catch-all as
citizenship is not particularly useful in and of itself. However, am I
correct in seeing Foucault as providing some useful analytical tools for
examining the processes which influence the strands of the debate I have
outlined?
Sorry that this doesn't particularly deal with Foucault per se. As I say,
I'm still only dipping my toes into the water (cliches ahoy!). However, I
would appreciate some healthy criticism of any assumptions you feel I may
have made or overlooked here.
Anyway, I'm off to have a drink and do some reading. I won't have access to
email for the next week and a half, so don't think I'm ignoring any replies.
Happy holidays.
Phil Sawyer
Centre for Regional, Economic and Social Research
Sheffield Hallam University