Bruno Latour (1984), described how so often a focus upon human action as the root of theory building has led to social scientists repeatedly mistaking “what is glued for the glue” (ibid.276). Translating this into the realms of governance and institutionality, Phillips et al. (2004) similarly criticise what they see as theories built on examinations of effects as opposed to underlying processes. To seek to explain the underlying causality of the existence of the master plans in Lusaka and Sacramento (or indeed anywhere else) with a why question is to become embroiled in the endless possibilities associated with structural causality assumptions that offers little insight into concerns over the specific, situated consequences of the plans’ production described in the previous chapter. What is required, is a means of situating the actions to produce the visions in different places within a critical framework that accounts for the role of discourse in shaping both their emergence and their subsequent production. Discourse, when applied to specific issues in situated places, is incorporated into Foucault’s more comprehensive concept of the dispositif, as a “heterogeneous set of
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discourses, institutions, forms, regulations, laws, statements or moral propositions” (Foucault and Gordon 1980). Foucault’s widely recognised concept of ‘Power/Knowledge’ serves to represent the impossibility of separating the two concepts if we are to talk of them in general terms - that is, as disembodied concepts. The following quote is from Discipline and Punish, when Foucault first lays the foundations for the power-knowledge relationship (1977:27):
“We should admit rather that power produces knowledge (and not simply by encouraging it because it serves power or by applying it because it is useful); that power and knowledge directly imply one another; there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations”
The dispositif apparatus allows us to go beyond this altogether and approach society through its organisation rather than its individual parts as it mobilises towards a particular agenda upon which collective and individual conscious feeds (Jager and Maier 2010; Wodak and Meyer 2001). Foucault used the context of the prison to flesh out his ideas around the disciplining apparatus of power and uses the concept of the ‘panopticon’ to illustrate this. His work on the prison and other spaces of control and governmentality was itself a manifestation of Foucault’s interest in the seeming “naturalness of power” that would warrant the exploration of a “historical process that had yielded the necessary truths for justifying and institutionalizing procedures of confinement” (Racevskis 2005: 88). Understanding historical emergence is vital to ensuring that one avoids an interpretation of discourse as monolithic and hegemonic, ‘deployed’ from the top down and thereby restricting situated agency (Gaventa 2003; Lie 2004). Foucault’s work pre-supposes a theoretical free subject, which is then enmeshed into the web of discourses and power relations, through which the possibility for resistance is central to promoting productive change (Nielsen 2013). In an article on this very issue in relation to the application of the panopticon as a tool for thinking about the city, (Pløger 2008) is critical of a number of what he calls ‘functionalist’ interpretations of Foucault, opposed to the generative or framing perspective which therefore misses the processes of “politicization and subjectification” (ibid. 54). Discourses, as Foucault described it, “are practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak” (Foucault 2002). This is
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precisely how I want to think about the crystallisation of the urban master plan as a vehicle for establishing sustainable cityness in particular locations.
Siegfried Jager and Florentine Maier’s (2010) ‘Critical dispositive analysis’ is a prominent example of Foucault’s dispositif being transformed from a ‘powerful tool to understand social phenomena’ (Saldanha 2014), into an actionable, comprehensive, methodology. They construct this framework in two ways. Firstly, by firmly situating the concept of ‘actions’ as couched between the notions of ‘discourse’ on the one hand, and ‘materialisation’ on the other in order to emphasise the impossibility of isolating individual intentionality (Jørgensen and Phillips 2002), and secondly by posing four key questions about any particular apparatus (ibid.34):
What is valid knowledge at a certain place and time? How does this knowledge arise and how is it passed on? What functions does it have for constituting subjects?
What consequences does it have for the overall shaping and development of society? One of the most important elements of Jager and Maier’s framework is the fact that it actively emphasizes - through the questions posed - the fact that discourse is not something ideological and transcendental. Heeding the warning of Saldanha (2014), not to invoke a “material transcendence” in how universalising ‘post-political’ discourse is applied across ‘global’ scales, its specific manifestations should always be treated as a materialising dispositif when applied in particular locales. This approach allows us not to take sustainability as a concept floating around waiting to be enacted in some way by powerful agents, but to try and understand how sustainable cityness as a powerful discourse actually materialises in particular places at particular times. Applying it to the case studies of Lusaka and Sacramento, what the sustainable city ‘is’ becomes irrelevant and our interest is firmly on the role of power in defining these two fully materialised and adopted interpretations as ‘valid’ at a certain place and time. In order to understand the emergence of the ‘already material’, then, I want to invert the four questions described above by Jager and Maier, as well as their ‘Discourse- Action-Materialisation’ trajectory that describes the functionality of the dispositive apparatus. Starting with what we already have - the troubling consequences of the plans ‘post-adoption’ described in chapter two - and focusing on the question of validity, we can
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place the actions taken by various actors within a wider process that can be to be described, deconstructed and ‘de-scribed’ (Oppermann 2011).