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AT Permutation—Depoliticization/Containment
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AT Permutation—Depoliticization/Containment____ The permutation is a strategy of technical containment—it reduces political contestation to a conflict of implementations and a question of expertise—vote negative to keep the front of struggle openLi , 2007, professor of anthropology and senior cananda research chair in political economy and culture in Asia-Pacific at the University of Toronto [ Tania Murray, The Will to Improve, pp. 10-12] Although rendering contentious issues technical is a routine practice for experts, I insist that this operation should be seen as a project, not a secure accomplishment. Questions that experts exclude, misrecognize, or attempt to contain do not go away. On this point I diverge from scholars who emphasize the capacity of expert schemes to absorb critique, their effective achievement of depoliticization. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, among others, argue that expert knowledge takes "what is essentially a political problem, removing it from the realm of political discourse, and recasting it in the neutral language of science." They find expertise closed, self-referencing and secure once a "technical matrix" has been established. Resistance, or failure to achieve a program's stated aims, comes to be "construed as further proof of the need to reinforce and extend the power of the experts." Thus "what we get is not a true conflict of interpretations about the ultimate worth or meaning of efficiency, productivity, or normalization, but rather what might be called a conflict of implementations."24 Similarly, Timothy Mitchell describes discursive practices that translate issues of poverty, landlessness, and hunger into problems of public health to be solved by technical interventions in social relations and hygiene. In his account, experts rule: much of the time, they succeed in disguising their failures and continue to devise new programs with their authority unchallenged.25 Ferguson offers the qualified observation that development "may also very effectively squash political challenges to the system" by its insistent reposing of political questions in technical term.26 Nikolas Rose stresses the "switch points" where critical scrutiny of governmental programs is absorbed back into the realm of expertise, and "an opening turns into a closure."27 Closure, as these scholars have shown, is indeed a feature of expert discourses. Such discourses are devoid of reference to questions they cannot address, or that might cast doubt upon the completeness of their diagnoses or the feasibility of their solutions. In particular, as Ferguson and Mitchell stress, they exclude what I call political-economic questions—questions about control over the means of production, and the structures of law and force that support systemic inequalities. I am fascinated by the question of how these questions are screened out in the constitution of improvement as a technical domain, and I examine this operation in detail in several chapters of this book. Yet I am equally interested in the "switch" in the opposite direction: in the conditions under which expert discourse is punctured by a challenge it cannot contain; moments when the targets of expert schemes reveal, in word or deed, their own critical analysis of the problems that confront them. I make a conjuncture of this kind the focus of my analysis in chapters 4 and 5. From the perspective proposed by Foucault, openings and closures are intimately linked. He describes the interface between the will to govern and what he calls a strategy of struggle as one of "permanent provocation."28 He writes: For a relationship of confrontation, from the moment it is not a struggle to the death, the fixing of a power relationship becomes a target—at one time its fulfillment and its suspension. And in return the strategy of struggle also constitutes a frontier for the relationship of power, the line at which, instead of manipulating and inducing actions in a calculated manner, one must be content with reacting to them after the event. In effect, between a relationship of power and a strategy of struggle there is a reciprocal appeal, a perpetual linking and a perpetual reversa1.29 As I see it, the unsettled meaning of the terms politics and the political hinge on this element of linking and reversa1.30 Is politics the name for a relation of power, or a practice of contestation? At what point does one slide into the other? In order to pin down the relation of "perpetual reversal" that Foucault describes in rather abstract terms and to make it the subject of empirical investigation, I have settled on a terminology that distinguishes between what I call the practice of government, in which a concept of improvement becomes technical as it is attached to calculated programs for its realization," and what I call the practice of politics—the expression, in word or deed, of a critical challenge. Challenge often starts out as refusal of the way things are. It opens up a front of struggle. This front may or may not be closed as newly identified problems are rendered technical and calculations applied. Government, from this perspective, is a response to the practice of politics that shapes, challenges, and provokes it. The practice of politics stands at the limit of the calculated attempt to direct conduct. It is not the only limit, however. In the next section, I examine the limit presented by force. AT Our Demand Framework Solves—Not Implemented____ Governmental policies are formed on pragmatics, not on the ethical appeal against the problem—their good intentions get drowned outDuyvendak & Uitermark, 2005 [Jan Willem, Justus, Professor of Sociology at University of Amsterdam, Ph.D. degree at the Amsterdam School of Social Sciences, Policy, People, and the New Professional, May 2005, p.64-66] Histroical resreach (Duyvendak & Rijkschroeff 2004; Fermin 1997; Prins 2000 [2004]; Rijkschroeff, Duyvendak & Pels 2004) has demonstrated that over the last decades, much of the policy making has been driven by pragmatic conditions rather than principles. Moreover, one and the same policy instrument seems to have been applied over time for different reasons, either pragmatic or principle related. (Luceo & Kobben '992)' To put it another way, policy does not have a one-to-one relationship with ideals; it is based on a variety of mo-tives and justifications as well as principles, and cannot be reduced sim¬ply to the implementation of an ideal. An idea that commonly crops up in the public and political debates is that the ideal of a multicultural so¬ciety permeates all phases of policymaking, including the results, but the literature reveals serious doubts about whether there is a direct relationship between ideas and the actual results of policies (Lipsky 1980; Wil¬son 1989; Pressman & Wildavsky 1984). In many studies on multiculturalism, the 'black box' of public admin-istration and how policies are executed remains closed. People assume that there is a close link between the policy pursued and what professionals do in practice. In the Netherlands, policies were multicultural in the sense that they recognised the right of ethnic self-organisation, and due to the religiously 'pillarised' past there was a legal framework that provided rights to minorities (and to other citizens) to follow their own cultural and religious identities. Whether this indeed led to a lot of multicultural practices is an entirely different question - one we want to answer in this chapter on professional practices. Due to space considerations, however, we cannot investigate the complex relationship between ideals, policies, and practices in detail. What we can do is shed some light on how recent shifts in public debates and the political climate have affected professional practices by briefly discussing two cases. I The first concerns the Neighbourhood Alliance, an organisation that shares many of the criticisms that are now often made against multiculturalism. We show that this organisation attempts to translate an ideological critique of multiculturalism into a concrete program. At the same time, we see that there are powerful forces at play on a local level that make it difficult to effectively implement this program. The second case concerns recent reforms of Rotterdam's local right-wing government in which the party of the late Pim Fortuyn is quite hegemonic. This government's mission was to create and implement policies that departed radically from those of the left-wing governments that had ruled Rotterdam for decades. In this case too, we find that the translation of an anti-multicultural ideal into policy practice is not straightforward. Both cases highlight that there are many obstacles that frustrate the translation of ideals into policy and the implementation of policies into practice. These obstacles play their part even when the ideals themselves are hegemonic in the public debate. The notion that ideals and policies on the one hand and professional practices on the other are closely linked is also a fundamental assumption in the debate on (de) professionalization: new neo-liberal policies are blamed for limiting the maneuvering space of professionals. ____ Debates don’t translate into government implementation—The government has its own agenda and does not ct in the people’s interests which leads to discontempt in the public sphereDuyvendak & Uitermark, 2005 [Jan Willem, Justus, Professor of Sociology at University of Amsterdam, Ph.D. degree at the Amsterdam School of Social Sciences, Policy, People, and the New Professional, May 2005, p.73] The most important observation is simply that there is a world of difference between the national debate and the reality of policymaking ill neighbourhoods. The concerns of local actors are not necessarily the same as those expressed in the public sphere. While commentators who participate in the national debate may be concerned about Dutch norms and values or the (lack of) compatibility between Islamic and Western civilisations, most organisations ill disadvantaged neighbourhoods sim¬ply want to reach their target groups in order to develop and maintain policy interventions. As a consequence, they sometimes end up acting against the very beliefs that are promoted in the public sphere. This is most apparent with the issue of political and admirlistrative organisation along ethnic lines. In the Dutch case, such a constellation is normally not defended on ideological grounds ('each ethnic group should have a seat at the table!') but on pragmatic grounds ('we can only reach immi¬grants through immigrant organisations'). In a sense, then, examining the exceptional position of the Neighbourhood Alliance helps us under¬stand that most of the time ideology does not fmd its way into profes¬sional practice. When an organisation like the Neighbourhood Alliance explicitly scrutinises professional practices from an ideological viewpoint, it becomes apparent that almost all professional practices fall short of addressing public concerns (as manifested by the public Sphere). Interestingly, this is also the case for the Neighbourhood Alli-ance itself on the basis of the research we have carried out so far, we conclude that only under very specific conditions (high involvement of hea~quarters with the panel, high level of professional support, co-operative attitude of other local stakeholders) does its program actually translate somewhat into practice. Directory: files files -> Answer True False 2 points Question 2 files -> Integer programming and game theory files -> 4 Integer Programming files -> Bpa vehicle Window Repair Scenario #1 task: Procure vehicle window relacement. 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