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Qualitative
Research Practice

Edited by

Clive Seale
Giampietro Gobo
Jaber F. Gubrium
David Silverman

SAGE Publications
London

Thousand Oaks

New Delhi

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8
The Foucaultian framework
Gavin Kendall and Gary Wickham

Michel Foucault (19261984) produced a body

of work that is hard to fit within a singular discipline. His own sense of what he was a
philosopher who used fragments of history to
examine and disturb the self-evidence of the
human sciences is a clue to the diagnosis of his
work as multidisciplinary. A brief examination
of his major works shows that a number of disciplines were objects of his inquiries: psychiatry,
psychology, criminology, penology, linguistics,
economics, biology, medicine and sexology all
received major treatments. In addition, a number
of themes philosophical, historical, ethical and
sociological fascinated Foucault at different
points in his life: for example, the nature of the
relationship between power and knowledge,
the status of the self, truth and truth-telling, and
the logic surrounding self-mastery and the government of others. Foucault also found time to make
forays into art, music and literature. It is difficult
to distil from all this activity a singular
Foucaultian framework. To most historians and
philosophers, for example, Foucault appears an
outsider, and his methods and questions alien.
The disciplines that Foucault examined do not
seem, in the main, to have reciprocated his interest in them. Foucault has more frequently found
a home in the meta-disciplines the study of
studies and perhaps especially in that branch of
sociology that is philosophically nervous about
the status of knowledge.
That Foucaults work is diverse, then, we can
take as read. What framework can we identify in
this diversity, and extract to use as a model for
future research? Our approach in this chapter is
to do three things. Our first section glosses one
of Foucaults areas of interest the government
of self and of others to examine the strengths
and weaknesses of the Foucaultian framework.
Our second section tries to reconstruct what

Foucault was trying to do one of his major studies, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An
Introduction (Foucault, 1978a). The aim of this
section is to uncover the sorts of research questions for which the Foucaultian framework might
best be used. In our third section we discuss how,
as a writing duo, we became part of an intellectual community that deals in Michel Foucault.
The emphasis here is very much on the personal:
we offer an account of how this process appeared
(and appears) to us. Our aim here is to discover
to what sorts of intellectual communities
Foucaults work belongs.

GOVERNMENTALITY: A
FOUCAULTIAN FRAMEWORK
In the late 1970s, Foucault turned his attention to
what he eventually named by a neologism:
governmentality. This term covered the idea of
mentalities of government, as well as rationalities of government. Although Foucault did not
develop a full treatment of this area (we have to
make do with some rather sketchy remarks in
essays and interviews see especially Foucault,
1978b, 1981, 1989a, 1994), many other scholars
have taken up this preliminary work to develop a
fully fledged governmentality literature. In a
recent, comprehensive book-length survey of the
notion of governmentality, Mitchell Dean
acknowledges that the study of governmentality
is continuous with some aspects of theories of
the state (particularly in that it too regards the
exercise of power and authority as anything but
self-evident), notes that it does, however, break
with many of the characteristic assumptions of
theories of the state (Dean, 1999: 9), and outlines Foucaults understanding of the basic

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notion of government as the conduct of

conduct, especially as it involves thinking about
the very act of governing (Dean, 1999: 1016).
He moves on to a definition of the term itself:
It is possible to distinguish two broad meanings of this
term in the literature. The second is a historically specific version of the first. In this first sense, the term
governmentality suggests what we have just noted. It
deals with how we think about governing, with the
different mentalities of government. The notions of
collective mentalities and the idea of a history of
mentalities have long been used by sociologists (such as
Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss) and by the Annales
school of history in France. For such thinkers, a
mentality is a collective, relatively bounded unity, and
is not readily examined by those who inhabit it. The
idea of mentalities of government, then, emphasizes the
way in which the thought involved in practices of
government is collective and relatively taken for
granted. [This] is to say that the way we think about
exercising authority draws upon the theories, ideas,
philosophies and forms of knowledge that are part of
our social and cultural products. (Dean, 1999: 16)

Dean elaborates the second meaning (the one

that is a historically specific version of the first)
as follows:
Here, governmentality marks the emergence of a distinctly new form of thinking about and exercising of
power in certain societies. This form of power is
bound up with the discovery of a new reality, the economy, and concerned with a new object, the population.
Governmentality emerges in Western European societies in the early modern period when the art of government of the state becomes a distinct activity, and
when the forms and knowledge and techniques of the
human and social sciences become integral to it. (Dean,
1999: 19)

For his part, the noted Foucaultian socio-legal

scholar Pat OMalley does an extremely good
job of introducing the governmentality framework to an audience he assumes to be unfamiliar
with it:
There is a considerable literature exploring and developing this approach. Such work has been influenced
strongly by the thinking of Michel Foucault but has
been advanced primarily in recent years by British and
Australian scholars. The journal Economy and Society
has been a principal site for the development of
this approach, which is frequently referred to as the
governmentality literature. While governmentality
refers to a particular technology of government that
emerges in the eighteenth century, the term is more generally used to refer to the approach adopted in its study.
The approach is characterized by two primary characteristics. The first is a stress on the dispersal of government, that is, on the idea that government is not a

preserve of the state but is carried out at all levels and

sites in societies including the self government of individuals. The second is the deployment of an analytic
stance that favors how questions over why questions. In other words it favors accounts in terms of how
government of a certain kind becomes possible: in what
manner it is thought up by planners, using what concepts; how it is intended to be translated into practice,
using what combination of means? Only secondarily is
it concerned with accounts that seek to explain government in the sense of understanding the nature of
government as the effect of other events. (OMalley,
1998/9: 676, 679n.7)

In speaking of governmentality, we address a

body of work which is both Foucaults and his
followers. It is the culmination of a particular
reading of Foucaults oeuvre coupled with a
rejection of standard sociological and politicalscientific accounts of power. To a certain extent,
governmentality was Foucaults rejoinder to
those who found his theory of power useful, but
criticized him for his lack of a theory of state
power. The governmentality work was
Foucaults way of describing how the state could
be seen as the result of practices of government,
rather than the latters cause. Some commentators have suggested that Foucaults work on
power is an emphasis on micro-processes; it is
tempting, then, to imagine that the governmentality work allowed Foucault to weld a theory of
macro-processes on to his micro-power theory.
However, we suggest that this schema is too
easy: first of all, Foucaults work on power is not
about micro-social processes it is about a variety
of processes that are local and mobile, but that
can operate at any point on the macro/micro continuum. Second, the governmentality approach
tends to deal in the same way with mentalities of
government whichever end of the macro/micro
continuum it considers: the conduct of conduct
can be at the individual level (self-government),
at the family level (the government of a small
group), and at the national level (the kings
government of his people and territory).
Nonetheless, Foucaults formulation of a governmentality problem space allowed him to look at
a novel series of problems or at least, to examine some familiar problems from a new vantage
point.
To reiterate the point we made earlier, governmentality is a kind of meta-analysis. It is not so
much a way of doing political science, as a kind
of philosophical intervention into the objects of
political science. For example, much of the
governmentality literature has concerned itself
with liberalism: not the liberalism of the political
scientists, but the everyday practices of government that liberalism as a mentality/rationality

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permits and suggests. There have been quite a

few attempts, by those who have followed
Foucault, to explicate and defend this approach
(e.g., as well as Dean, 1999, see Miller and Rose,
1990; Burchell et al., 1991; Rose and Miller,
1992; Barry et al., 1996; Dean and Hindess,
1998; Rose, 1999), though it is enough that we
simply note their existence; we do not need to
explore them further. The more pressing question is How can governmentality help the qualitative researcher?
Governmentality does not supply tools for
qualitative research: rather, it produces a certain
attitude or sensitivity towards questions in political science. For example, Kendall (1997) provides a governmentality-inspired analysis of
some elements of the government of the
Australian colonies in the nineteenth century.
While methodologically this piece adopts some
standard historical approaches (the collection
and analysis of historical archive material in
defined territories over a defined historical
period; an attempt to be reasonably comprehensive in material surveyed; attention to questions
of reliability and validity, and so forth), its use of
the governmentality framework forced it to take
seriously the mentalities and rationalities of
colonial government. In this case, Kendall
argued that the usual histories of colonial government, predisposed as they are to demonstrate the
self-serving nature of such government, can
easily miss the ways in which rationalities of
government (in this case, liberalism) informed
strategies and programmes that are not necessarily
in the best interests of those who govern. In addition, the governmentality focus pushed Kendall
to look at government as a problem at the individual, community, national and international
levels: governing thus comes to be seen not so
much as the imposition of ones will over
another, as the insertion of a certain way of
thinking and doing within the fabric of everyday
life. Governing is revealed to be a fundamentally
ethical endeavour.
This mention of ethics will no doubt remind
many readers of Max Webers work, and indeed
there are many similarities between Weber and
Foucault. The similarities might give us a sense
of what the Foucaultian framework is: an
approach rather than a methodology, a predisposition to look at certain questions rather than
others. Just as the Marxist tends to find most
answers in the economy, and the functionalist in
the functional or dysfunctional relationship of
one part of the social system to another, so the
Foucaultian framework emphasizes certain sorts
of phenomena. Here we can also see the weakness of this approach: it is sometimes rather

131

one-eyed, and for this reason we suggest that

some of the governmentality work has really just
reinvented the wheel. More seriously, while
Foucaults own work on governmentality
amounted to a number of schematic periodizations and distinctions in the history of government, in Foucaults followers this has on occasion
turned into using governmentality as a general
schema for understanding the history of government. This is a rather perilous approach, since as
Hunter (1998) notes, in a powerful set of critical
remarks directed at the governmentality approach,
Foucaults own remarks tend to downplay the role
of theological politics as well as overestimate the
extent to which sovereignty disappears from
liberal politics. The translation of governmentality
into a general schema or a theory of politics is
correspondingly fraught with danger.
Our first engagement with Foucault, then,
makes it clear that precise methodological tools
are not on offer: rather we are given an approach
and a series of phenomena to look out for.
Hughes and Griffiths (1999) provide an example
of how this approach might be translated into an
empirical study. Their piece is a straightforward
qualitative analysis of changes in patient administration practices in a health service setting.
However, because it is informed by the notion of
governmentality, it sets its sights on the ways
in which liberal government is embedded in
everyday medical administration, especially
through accounting and auditing procedures.
But is there more to the Foucaultian framework than this spirit of inquiry?

FOUCAULT IN ACTION
Kendall and Wickham (1999a: 22ff.) outlined
some of the principles that inform archaeology,
Foucaults term for his methodology. Archaeology is a historical investigation, but one always
tempered by scepticism. Just as real archaeologists need time passed for their endeavours to
bear any fruit, so the Foucaultian archaeologist
needs time passed, not least because Foucaultian
archaeology is an approach designed to understand knowledges, practices, relations, etc., that
have stabilized, rather than those that are in flux.
Foucault himself never did any archaeologies
that made their way as far as the twentieth century,
even though he usually chose twentieth-century
problems to archaeologize. This should be
remembered whenever the Foucaultian approach
is taken up. So, for example, while the prison is
the pressing twentieth-century problem of
Foucaults (1977) Discipline and Punish, the

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practices and knowledges Foucault analyses

were put together, in the main, in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries.
A second point is that Foucaultian research in
action is problem-based, rather than periodbased: in other words, follow your problem back
as far as necessary, rather than investigate every
element of a specified time period. In all of
Foucaults major works, this approach has led to
some unexpected rewards (the history of sexuality
led Foucault to antique medical texts and dream
interpreters; the history of madness led him to
leper-houses). It is an approach that has aroused
antipathy, not least towards Madness and
Civilization (Foucault, 1965), yet such criticisms
usually stem from the mistaken belief that
Foucault was trying to do a total or social
history, rather than the analysis of the conditions
of possibility for the emergence of knowledges,
practices, objects, programmes, etc.
For our most detailed example of the
Foucaultian framework in action, we choose one
of Foucaults own texts, The History of Sexuality
Volume 1 (Foucault, 1978a). While Foucaults
basic research question in this work seems to be
something along the lines of How did sexuality
come to be the crucial practice for defining the
truth of the modern self?, there is some evidence
that from as early as the late 1950s, while working on Madness and Civilization, Foucault was
interested in an archaeology of psychoanalysis,
and that to a certain extent The History of
Sexuality was concerned not just with sexuality
but with the modern practice that most closely
wedded sexuality and the truth of the self,
psychoanalysis. So, while this book touches on
some expected resources, especially work by
sexologists such as Ellis and Krafft-Ebing, a
novel feature of the book is its emphasis on the
relation between sexuality and talk (psychoanalysis is, of course, the talking cure).
Foucault is always predisposed to seek out discontinuities, and the major one he spots is in the
mid- to late nineteenth century. In a reversal of
traditional historical analyses, he produces evidence that the Victorian era, far from being the
high point of sexual repression, is an era for the
dissemination of knowledge about sexuality, for
its tireless examination, for its relentless empirical investigation. The rest of the book does two
things: it explores in more detail some of the
major areas of sexuality that became the focus of
scientific research and popular concern (marriage,
masturbation, perversion and hysteria); it also
traces this obsession with sex, and with talking
and writing about sex, back to a sixteenth-century
watershed. For Foucault, the Council of Trent
(154664) is especially important, since it signals

a change in confessional practice (confession

becomes more frequent, more extensive, but also
less explicit), a change accompanied by a new conception of the inescapability, the all-pervasiveness,
of desire.
No doubt our summary here is familiar; but
what can we learn about method from Foucaults
approach? First, Foucault pointedly asks how
questions, rather than why questions (Kendall
and Wickham, 1999a: 2156). His question, then,
is How did such-and-such come to exist?, or
How did such-and such come to have such an
important place in our society? Buried within
such an approach is a commitment to constructionism (see Hacking, 1999) and a mistrust of
anthropological universals. Second, while
Foucault does not say a great deal about the
selection of his archive, it is clear that his preference is for what we might call programmatic
texts, writings that try to impose a vision or spell
out most clearly a new way of conceptualizing a
problem. The nineteenth-century sexologists
were an obvious resource in this regard, and
Foucault makes the judgement that their twentiethcentury successors (Masters and Johnson, Hite
et al.) are not doing anything especially new. At
this point we might note another principle that
guides Foucaultian research: look for the novel
programmatic statement. With this in mind, we
need to keep looking until we find the relative
beginnings (Foucault, 1989b: 46) of such statements. Similarly, although he regards psychoanalysis as especially significant, he reduces it to
a form of confession, and thus decides to keep
digging until he finds a paradigm shift in the
world of confessing (hence the importance he
accords to the Council of Trent).
So far, then, we have seen that Foucaultian
research requires: (a) a how question, (b) a
decision about an appropriate archive for investigation, (c) a preference for programmatic texts,
and (d) the commitment to keep digging until
one finds the relative beginnings of a practice.
We might add at this point that what guides
Foucault is an emphasis on what we might term
discursive history. By this we mean that
Foucault is less concerned with institutions or
individuals than he is with knowledge: knowledge (such as sexology or psychoanalysis or psychiatry) is given a primacy by Foucault, such that
non-discursive elements (people, materials,
objects) are governed by knowledge. Foucaults
approach can be contrasted with some forms of
history those organized around great men or
the spirit of the age. Rather, Foucault seeks to
make knowledge the stars around which the
planets (in this case, humans, institutions, materials, etc.) circle.

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To some extent, the Foucaultian framework

requires the researcher to write a detective story.
We start with a known outcome, but what we
need to do is find the precursors that lead to this
outcome. The work is about putting together the
various pieces of the puzzle so we can see sufficient conditions for the emergence of the
problem or issue under investigation. While it
can be a dizzying experience to read Foucault
one marvels at the parallels and links that are
made across the centuries, and the contrasts that
are drawn the less gifted researcher should not
shy away from some of the more conventional
procedures of qualitative research to see if a
hypothesis will stand up. It is worth trying to
generate categories from fragments of data, for
example, in a Sacksian or Garfinkelian manner.
It is worth counting instances of a phenomenon
to see whether a claim to generalizability is supported. It is worth specifying a limited archive
for investigation so that a reasonable claim for an
exhaustive investigation can be made. To this
extent, while it has been fashionable to regard
Foucault as representative of a postmodern or a
post-positivist movement, it seems to us on the
contrary that Foucault is perfectly recuperable
within rather traditional and long-established
social science approaches. We do not see
Foucault as the enfant terrible of the social
sciences, but as a good modernist (see Osborne,
1998), a rather traditional positivist and neoKantian. He is a modernist because his work is
an analysis of the underbelly of modernity to
this extent he does not look very different from
Marx or Weber. He is a positivist because of his
insistence on the analysis of texts and his refusal
to go beyond texts into the realm of interpretation, and he is neo-Kantian in his insistence on
analysing the conditions of possibility of
knowledge.
While we are on this topic, it is important to
mention that while Foucault looks for discontinuities, it is interesting to note that he does not
find too many of them, and is often forced back
through thousands of years to find two or three
paradigm shifts. There is a certain conservatism
in the Foucaultian framework or, better, there
is a certain scepticism about change. Unfortunately, every generation, it seems, is doomed to
believe that they live in a time of major social
upheaval, yet Foucaults patient and dogged
accounts suggest quite the opposite that change
is a rarity, and that our age is really not so different from one or even two hundred years ago. While
much social science research is hell-bent on
announcing that the next big thing has arrived,
by contrast, the Foucaultian framework is cautious: it does not shy away from demonstrating

133

historical discontinuity, but it is aware that such

moments are rare indeed.

BECOMING PART OF THE

FOUCAULTIAN INTELLECTUAL
COMMUNITY: A KENDALL AND
WICKHAM PERSPECTIVE
We decided on writing something Foucaultian
together, or at least we decided on the possibility
of doing so, very soon after our first meeting,
which occurred at the British Sociological
Association Conference in Edinburgh in 1988. In
those days, such a conference did not feature
many papers on Foucault or Foucaultian themes;
indeed, they were quite rare (hard to believe
now, when they are standard fare at such gatherings). This initial rarity, we must admit, was an
important force in forming and binding a community of scholars around the name Michel
Foucault. Perhaps this was because, at the time,
Foucaultianism and it was surely then, as now,
no more than a loose approach was felt to
represent something of a challenge to the then
dominant orthodoxy in sociology. This orthodoxy can fairly be described as Marxist-inspired
ameliorativism the desire for social change,
sometimes revolutionary, usually not, but always
expressed as critique, the call of those whose
slogan was something like we know something
is wrong with the system even if most of the
people do not. At this stage, one of us had
completed a PhD thesis on a Foucaultian theme,
while the other was in the process of doing so
(Wickham, 1985; Kendall, 1993), and each of us
had either published or near-published pieces on
Foucaultian topics (Wickham, 1983; 1987a,
1987b; Bevis et al., 1989). So, not only were we
aware of the secret pleasures of swimming
against the tide of intellectual orthodoxy, we also
knew what was involved in taking this as far as
the published word. Despite this, and despite the
fact that we communicated regularly and met
reasonably often, either during Wickhams visits
to Britain or Kendalls visits to Australia we
met as often as two academics in different countries who were yet to secure tenured university
positions could hope to meet the best laid plans
of mice and Foucaultian scholars : we didnt
get around to submitting anything for publication
until 1991.
We built our co-authorship arrangements, and
our understanding of what the Foucaultian
framework could do, in a series of pieces for the
journal Australian Left Review (Kendall and

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Wickham, 1991a, 1991b, 1992a, 1992b). This

journal was at that time experimenting with a
young editor with Foucaultian sympathies, David
Burchell, in a bid to boost flagging circulation.
This was achieved, much to Burchells credit, but
the experiment was not allowed to run its course;
the old-left element on the journals management team, it seemed to us, could not bear the
experiment for long and chose eventually to risk
letting the journal go under (it did), rather than
continue the flirtation with Foucaultianism. This
experience not only continued our swim against
the tide it was not much more than a weak current by then (on which, more below) it also
allowed us to assess the extent to which a
Foucaultian approach to power and politics could
be translated into commentaries on current issues.
Our assessment was that such commentaries did
not fit well within our Foucaultian framework.
We were coming around to the view that if the
objects being studied were not given a strong historical dimension, the Foucaultian framework
was of no especial value, being little more than an
extension of a Marxist or Marxist-inspired
approach under a new, French, name.
This methodological emphasis was far from
strong in our thinking at this time, but as we also
then published a piece with more historical depth
(Kendall and Wickham, 1992c), it can at least be
called a growing influence. The next few years
saw us strengthen this direction in our published
work, as we, together (Kendall and Wickham,
1996), and separately (Kendall, 1991, 1997;
Wickham, 1992; Hunt and Wickham, 1994;
Malpas and Wickham, 1995, 1997; Lewi and
Wickham, 1996; Kendall and Michael, 1997,
1998; Collins et al., 1998), further explored the
strengths, weaknesses and possibilities of the
Foucaultian framework.
Already by the early 1990s it was clear to us,
and to others, we presume, that not only was the
tide against Foucaultian work no longer strong, it
was either on the turn or had turned. The
Foucaultian framework no longer felt like a shelter
for those who were seeking something other than
the Marxist-inspired orthodoxy, a shelter with the
warm and fuzzy side of community formation to
the fore. Rather, it was beginning to feel more like
a large institution, with at least traces of the sort of
internal differences that mark the other side of the
formation of communities. This feeling certainly
did not reach (and has not reached) the fully
violent and passionate extreme of this side of the
formation of communities, but it was strong
enough to produce notice, on our part at least, that
the framework was now being taken up by an
array of different positions. Feminist, gay, leftpolitical, administrative-governmental, cultural

and style-insistent positions, to name just some,

were now more evident. Of course, these positions
could reasonably be said to have existed all along,
very much part of Foucaults multi-faceted self,
we might say, guided by his biographers (Eribon,
1991; Macey, 1993; Miller, 1993). However, they
were certainly more noticeable, as the Foucaultian community within the Foucaultian framework grew so large as to render problematic
the singular form of each of community and
framework.
In line with our emergent methodological
direction, we began to align ourselves, as participants, more closely to one particular community within the Foucaultian community, and to
work within one particular framework within
the Foucaultian framework governmentality.
We have already introduced the governmentality
framework; and in doing so, we introduced the
governmentality community. This is to say that
our sketch, with its lists of authors, its passing
mention of countries (Australia and Britain), its
passing mention of the journal Economy and
Society, provides another pointer to the way in
which an intellectual framework is grounded in a
set of quite mundane practices and events. We
have so far discussed the way in which we, as
an authorial team working to advance the
Foucaultian framework, far from sitting in some
ivory tower and ethereally producing great intellectual insights, slogged away like everybody
else attending conferences, trying to find
secure jobs, trying to find time to write pieces,
trying to get them published. Through our sketch
of governmentality we are adding to this quotidian picture some hints about the quotidian operation of some of the institutions involved. Just as
our own intellectual production is much more
about slogging away in the daily grind than it is
about some secret inspiration, so the conferences, seminars, inter-nation communication,
books, journals and suchlike are about the minutiae of daily life. In saying we became members
of the governmentality subset of the Foucaultian
intellectual community, we are certainly not suggesting we had to undergo some secret initiation
ceremony, or pass some secret test. Rather, we
are saying we participated, as often as we could,
in governmentality conferences around the
world, and in the London History of the Present
seminars that ran so successfully for a number of
years, we read and contributed to Economy and
Society when we could, and we read and contributed to books that sought to promote the
governmentality approach (sometimes we even
bought them). In all this, we experienced the
vicissitudes of such institutions the occasional
bickering and self-serving common to them all,

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as well as the camaraderie and good humour they

also provide, but no more than this.
Before returning to our autobiographical
narrative, we need to say a little more about two
of the institutions only pointed to so far. The first
is teaching. We mentioned that at the time of our
first meeting in 1988 neither of us had secured a
permanent academic position. While this situation eventually improved for each of us
(Wickham gaining a tenured post at Murdoch
University in 1990, Kendall doing so at Lancaster
University in 1992 and then, after making the big
move to Australia, at Queensland University of
Technology in 1995), teaching was a central part
of our Foucaultian development on both sides of
our tenure-hunt (Wickham held various nontenured posts at Murdoch from 1985, after a year
at Philip Institute of Technology in Melbourne in
1984, Kendall held a temporary post at Lancaster
University from 1989 to 1992). The teaching
experience helped us to formulate our views, in
the way that most scholars report, but it also
helped us to present them in what we hoped
would be the most telling ways.
For instance, teaching undergraduate and
postgraduate students allowed us to monitor
closely the intellectual tide we spoke of earlier.
When we started teaching, of course, we found
ourselves, as it were, seemingly drawn into the
role of missionaries among the savages of
orthodoxy, trying to attract the students away
from the orthodoxy of their texts and, it must be
added, most of our colleagues. Neither of us felt
comfortable in this role. We were quick to see that
a missionary zeal would feed into many of the
assumptions of the very orthodoxy to which we
were opposed. More than this, we were quick to
see that the missionary zeal was misplaced: the
assumption that the students were somehow automatically of the orthodox faith, in need of conversion, was wrong. The students were not wedded
to anything at all and were just as happy to learn a
Foucaultian approach as they were any other. It
was we who had to learn the lesson, not they.
The other institution we wish to further discuss is communication, by which we mean the
way in which the participants in any intellectual
community around a particular framework communicate with one another. We said earlier that
in the formative years of our writing partnership
we communicated regularly with each other and
kept up with the Foucaultian intellectual community as best we could. We urge our readers to
remember that we are talking about the late
1980s and early 1990s. What we are getting at
here is that this was B.E. before e-mail. This
communication device has made such a difference to the way we communicate, both with each

135

other and with the Foucaultian community more

widely, that the period B.E. seems like the era of
hope our pigeons can make the journey by
comparison.
This dramatic change in the means of communication has had a variety of effects. On the one
hand, we can now communicate with each other
over any distance as quickly as it takes it to reach
our computers, speeding up the production of
jointly authored work immeasurably. We can
also now seek and receive feedback from others
just as quickly, and we can participate in e-mail
and Internet intellectual exchange sessions (our
regular Foucaultian forum is the excellent HoP
list run out of Toronto by Engin Isin). On the
other hand, there is a set of perhaps less noticeable, but nonetheless crucial, effects that some
may see as negative. We will mention just two
here. First, there is the problem of feedback overload. As it has become easier to seek instant
feedback, so the number of requests, both given
and received, has grown exponentially. The swift
get it out of the way style of feedback has
become more the rule than the exception, something we are each as guilty of as anyone else.
Secondly, the rapid increase in the speed and
ease of communication has led to a rapid broadening of intellectual communities. While many
e-mail lists and websites are moderated, no
amount of moderation could possibly have
stopped this phenomenon. The number of highquality contributions seems to us to have
remained constant, but this means that as a percentage of total contributions they represent a
much smaller fraction than they used to. We also
suggest that the fracturing or factionalizing of
intellectual communities we discussed earlier
has been intensified by this development, though
we remain silent as to whether this has been a
positive or a negative aspect of it.
The autobiography of our writing partnership
had, it will be remembered, reached the mid1990s, with us heading in a more methodological
direction, not to mention a more governmentalist
direction. Our thinking, in line with our stronger
alliance with the governmentality community,
and as developed in the publications we produced in the mid-1990s, cited above, was much
more a reaction to a growing trend in Foucaultinspired studies than it was some natural aspect
of our intellectual development. In other
words, we could see the need for a fight and were
only too keen to mix it. The Foucault who was
starting to dominate cultural studies, and to have
quite a role in sociology and other social
sciences, was that Foucault who tells people
what power is really about, who tells them that
power can (and should) be found in the meaning

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of every situation they come across in their

everyday lives, the source of a slap it on, any
fool can do it approach to the study of social and
cultural objects. This is a Foucault that we
cannot abide, a figure so far from the serious
and learned scholar we understand to have operated under the name Michel Foucault as to be
unrecognizable.
Our determination to promote the scholarly,
careful Foucault, at the expense of the one
described above, pushed us, with the encouragement of David Silverman, to produce a book on
our Foucault, the book released under the title
Using Foucaults Methods (Kendall and
Wickham, 1999a). We cannot speak too highly
of Silvermans role in our project. From the tiniest
scraps of proposal-like correspondence, he
seemed to be able to see what we wanted to do
more clearly than we did, and as the editor of the
Sage series Introducing Qualitative Methods, he
was able, and willing (we owe him an overwhelming debt), to do something about it. He
encouraged us to submit a formal book proposal
and guided it through the various stages to help
us secure a contract for the book. We decided, in
consultation with him, to write the book in as
accessible a style as possible.
This is to say that only one of our goals in
Using Foucaults Methods was to attack the
power and meaning, slap it on interpretation
of Foucault perpetrated by other writers in the
broader Foucaultian community (by this time, we
have to admit, this broader community had so
fractured into many smaller communities, in the
manner described earlier, as to be almost nonexistent). More important to us was to reach a
student audience, a goal made very important to
us by our aforementioned realization that
students are not, in the main, the slavish followers of the most simplistic interpretations available, but are quite prepared to engage with the
complexities of debates. We tried to address this
audience as if only a very small percentage of
them needed to be de-programmed before they
could understand our position. The main device
we employed to achieve this goal was the use of
characters, fictitious students who were engaging
with Foucaults work at a variety of levels. We
allowed just a few of them to be slavish followers of the most simplistic interpretations available, but we made sure, unsurprisingly, that the
students most sympathetic to our position always
won the day. We have been pleased by the
largely positive reaction to our strategy, as
expressed both in reviews and in strong sales in
a very competitive market.
In the few years since the appearance of Using
Foucaults Methods, we have together produced

a Foucault-related chapter in a book of

conference proceedings (Kendall and Wickham,
1999b) and, more importantly, one more
Foucault-related book together (Kendall and
Wickham, 2001), as well as other Foucaultrelated work separately (Wickham, 2000;
Kendall, 2001a, 2001b; Wickham and Pavlich,
2001). Our 2001 book is called Understanding
Culture: Cultural Studies, Order, Ordering. It
pushes our governmentalist Foucaultian line
against the power-and-meaning line of Cultural
Studies, and as such can be said to continue at
least one of the themes of Using Foucaults
Methods. It is too early yet to judge whether we
have had any success with this, though we are all
too aware that most things in intellectual life are
ever so resistant to change.
Our biographical account here is, perhaps,
rather behaviourist. Our point is that intellectual
communities are formed around the mundane.
They require a number of ballasts if they are to
survive: material, technological, intellectual, and
so forth. Of course, a similar account could no
doubt be produced to describe the emergence
of other communities in this respect the
Foucaultian communities and frameworks are
nothing special. One interesting point about such
biographies does remain to be made. Biographical accounts such as the one above can be understood within the Foucaultian framework. In his
work on techniques of the self, Foucault (1986)
has outlined some of the ways in which human
beings work on themselves. He uses a pair of
words to describe this process: technique and
technology. However, the term used more often
by Foucault is technique. This seems to be in
marked contrast to the post-Foucaultian literature, which almost exclusively uses the term
technology, and rarely, if ever, discusses
techniques. It seems to us that this is not just a
linguistic quibble. Foucault does discriminate
between the terms, using the French technique
to refer to a practical instance, while the term
technologie refers to a practical system. In a
nutshell, techniques are singular and elemental,
while technologies are agglomerations of techniques formed into a logical and systematic whole.
When we think of this vocabulary as applied to
the object the self, a technique of the self is
merely a skill or procedure, possibly isolated but
possibly integrated with other techniques; a
technology of the self, by contrast, is something
much more like a Wittgensteinian form of life
or a Weberian department of existence. This
distinction, then, is important: it seems that
Foucaults endeavour was not so much to
describe forms of subjectivity as systematized,
but as made up of a variety of independent and

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non-systematic procedures (or techniques). In

this usage, then, Foucault is closer to Marcel
Mauss (e.g. 1973) than to Weber or Wittgenstein.
Mauss described some of the various techniques
of the body that are used in different societies at
different historical conjunctures, stressing, most
importantly, their contingent form; for Mauss,
there is no truly or simply human way of walking,
eating or swimming, for example. Foucaults
account here is also reminiscent of Elias (1978),
who dealt with the formation of the person of the
Renaissance courtier: the courtier does not build
up a coherent form of selfhood based on some
telos, but merely takes elements from here and
there, as they are pleasing. The self is a temporary agglomeration of these pleasing ways, but
not especially systematic or coherent: it is,
rather, emergent and contingent.
In a similar way, our biographical sketch is an
attempt to adumbrate some of the sorts of technical procedures by which members of an intellectual community (ourselves as Foucaultians) are
put together (both intra- and inter-subjectively).

CONCLUSION
Our sketch of our Foucaultian framework might
look rather different from what many readers
were expecting. We barely mentioned the ubiquity of power relations, techniques of domination, surveillance, the gaze, discipline. While
these concepts do appear in Foucault, they are
used as specific descriptors of specific historical
conjunctions. They are useless as methodological guides, and if we pay too much attention to
them, we risk reducing Foucault to a cartoonish
mixture of vulgar Marxism and the Orwell of
1984, made into a sociologist. But this is not our
Foucault, and these are not the ingredients for
our Foucaultian framework. The framework is a
mundane thing and is not brand-spankingly new,
but has a sceptical lineage. Membership of intellectual communities that engage in academic
work is also built on the quotidian, the mundane,
the technical. We have also suggested that the
war between Foucault and modernist social
science is a phoney war; indeed, the possibilities
for synthesis need to be stressed if students are to
be taught how to do Foucaultian work; anything
else runs the risk of reducing Foucaultian work
to individual genius. It is also the case, although
we have not explored this issue to a great extent,
that the Foucaultian framework and the discipline of history are not ranged in battle against
each other. One thing we should like to achieve
in this chapter is to build some bridges between

137

methods; an important task is to contextualize

Foucault, and make people see that a Foucaultian
approach is not so daunting after all.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We should like to thank the following for their
comments on an earlier draft of this chapter:
Amanda Davies, Barbara Czarniawska, Lindsay
Prior, David Silverman.

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