In search of truth where it had never been: A critique of public consultation in urban planning

Project Mimique London

In search of truth where it had never been
A critique of public consultation in urban planning

'In the image of God': A statement on Project Mimique's withdrawal from public participation in planning can be accessed here.

Introduction

Critics of public consultation in the UK used to charge that those who do participate in urban planning process do not form a representative cross-section of society. "[T]he poor, the sick, the old, the inadequate (sic), the immobile and the under-housed do not compete in the struggle for power and resources" (Simmie, 1974: 137). The Skeffington Committee of 1969 proposed that not only active minorities but also passive majorities should be encouraged to participate in the process, and community development officers were appointed to act as intermediaries. Yet James Simmie charges that "it is clear that those without power do not carry much weight in the final mediation", and that "participation without power is a charade" (ibid: 138). For Ray Pahl (quoted by Simmie: 139), developers, estate agents, local authorities, pressure groups, insurance companies all act as 'social gatekeepers' countermanding resource distribution, setting bureaucratic rules and procedures of allocation. David Harvey notes that institutions which exist to arbitrate between diverse social groups are "far more able to take account of small pressures (special lobbies and special interests) than they are able to react to the needs and wishes of large groups" (quoted in Simmie, ibid). Planners and vested interests are charged with interpreting calls for increased participation in ways that were favourable to their own needs, and the framework of government was decried as without a regime of oversight on the use of power (ibid, 138, 140). Things don't seem to have changed much in the last thirty years. One recent critic described the consultation process around the London Olympic bid as "typified by a lack of public debate", "undemocratic" and "tokenist" (Marike van Harskamp in Games Monitor, 2008).

So it was with a sense of deja vu that Project Mimique took up a challenge from Mark Brown of This Land is Ours and a word from Horsemouth Folk, and addressed the framework of public consultation set out by the London Borough of Hackney. The review which follows below, of a largely Foucauldian literature base, is our attempt to unpack the conception rather than the terminology of the Local Development Framework, Statement of Community Involvement, draft version March 2005 (SCI), and from there to expand on the implications of public consultation on Foucauldian positions exploring truth, power, and the subject. The premise of the essay is that there is no correct way to proceed on public consultation, fraught as it is with governmental intrigue. Rather, there is an attempt here to apply a continuous critique of the choices made by the authors of the document and subsequent ramifications.

The SCI document is a statutory one. Central government "gives strong emphasis to community involvement, stressing that it should be both continuous and effective, particularly in the early stages of plan preparation". The SCI sets out standards for the Council to measure its effectiveness in consultation processes, and demonstrates how they will meet the legal demands of the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004. Let us say first that we are sure that this is a model policy, one that fully conforms to the key themes of New Labour: cost- effectiveness, engagement of key stakeholders, social inclusion. Populace are rationalised as 'community' rather than 'civil society', a strategic choice of New Labour government and one implicated in the closure of conflict. Fundamentally, the document stands as a measure of professional performance, it defers to a "calculable technology" (Rose, 1999: 153) and as such attempts to render professional expertise governable. And it might succeed if outcomes other than mechanist counts of workshops, public meetings and citizen panels were demanded. What is needed is an account of power and decision- making, and a detailing of the neo-corporatist devolution of consultation process to consultancies.

What's in a name: 'community'

'Community' has been hailed as saviour of a beleaguered apparatus since 1812, when the Reverend Thomas Chalmers advocated the 'principle of community' as mainstay against a tide of revolutionary fervour sweeping urban areas of the UK (Harvey, 1981: 117). Chalmers advocated public improvements and support for local institutions such as the Church. Harvey traces this tendency from Chalmers to Octavia Hill, Jane Addams and Joseph Chamberlain, French campaigners for moral reform and US 'progressives' at the end of the nineteenth century, through to the directives of the Garden City movement and contemporary initiatives for public participation. He identifies "a continuous trend of bourgeois response to the problems of civil strife and social unrest" (ibid) in the use of the word.

These days, the term has little purchase on radical struggle, though as a recourse to a resemblance[1], effects co-option of progressive democrats engaged in locality-based politics. In an argument more sophisticated than most advocates of community, John Mollenkopf describes a "dynamic tension" between accumulation imperatives and social interaction or 'community' formation. "By appreciating the strong but asymmetric and ultimately antagonistic interdependence," he argues, "we can clarify the duet between urban growth and crisis" (1981: 320). 'Community' he defines as a dimension or a continuum of bonds built on trust and reciprocity, divided by conflicts of interest. Mollenkopf argues that Marxian theories stressing accumulation to the detriment of community formation lack "an adequate vocabulary for analysing politics" (ibid: 321). The fundaments of community -- ethnic and kinship ties, propinquity, voluntary associations, shared political beliefs -- have, he asserts, far more to do with political participation than class. The accumulation process prepares the way for expanding collective relationships which in turn are often antagonistic to market values. "Mediating institutions, including the city itself as a social invention, contain, moderate and reflect this basic tension" (ibid: 322) and intensify the potential for conflict.

For Foucauldian critic Nikolas Rose -- and this is really the tone of this paper -- the term comes into visibility as a technique of governance, fostering active practices of self- management and construction of identities. Such 'government through community', he argues, is in part a reforging of political subjectivity through communitarian norms yet the 'achievement' of community is nothing more than "the birth-to- presence of a form of being which pre-exists" (Rose, ibid: 177). Rose contends that we witness the emergence of a new 'game of power' -- community-civility -- operating in a field he terms 'ethico-politics' which he places alongside the Foucauldian dispositifs of discipline and bio-power. "Civility was also instituted through strategies which attempted to construct well-regulated liberty through creating practices of normality, rationality and sensibility. These practices governed through freedom, to the extent that they sought to invent the conditions in which subjects themselves would enact the responsibilities that composed their liberties" (ibid: 72). Ethico- politics "reworks the government of souls in the context of the increasing role that culture and consumption mechanisms play in the regulation of forms of life, identity and self- techniques"; it "concerns itself with the self-techniques necessary for responsible self-government and the relations between one's obligation to oneself and one's obligation to others" (ibid: 188). Rose argues that ethico-politics is constituted by powerful tensions surrounding communitarian positions: the dual imperatives of common norms and cultural diversity, and the contradiction between the moral high ground established by communitarianism and the everyday practicalities of policy governance.

Moral discourses

So what is communitarianism? We refer here to communitarianism as an ideology, not the philosophical school exemplified by Charles Taylor and Michael Sandel, among others. Ruth Levitas (1998) identifies three main strands: a moral functionalist trend defined as 'responsive communitarianism' outlined by the movement's leading thinker, Amitzai Etzioni, the anti- capitalist social liberalism of John Gray, and a Christian libertarianism delineated by John Macmurray. Communitarian thinking has been championed by both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, and echoed in the pronouncements of think-tanks as diverse as Demos and IPPR, the Institute for Economic Affairs, the Centre for Policy Studies and the Social Market Foundation. However, as will become obvious, the communitarianism of New Labour is that of Etzioni, despite John Gray's repositioning in the New Labour camp, though Brown himself echoes Gray's attachment to 'fairness', and Blair stated admiration of Macmurray. What is clear is that not just governance but a whole spectrum of contemporary politics has become restructured through a diversity of communitarian critiques[2]. The descriptions below are derived from Ruth Levitas' The Inclusive Society (Palgrave Macmillan, 1998).

Responsive communitarianism

Etzioni sets out his position in two publications, a rhetorical flourish entitled The Spirit of Community (1995), which advocates social order above individual rights, freedoms and autonomy, and a more analytical volume, The New Golden Rule (1997), detailing the necessity of a Third Way between individualism and conformity. Socio-economic questions are ignored in his analysis. Etzioni calls for a remoralisation ("moral reintegration") of social life, which he sees as undermined by the permissiveness and individualism of the 1960s and 1980s. He advocates a "bounded autonomy", "a range of legitimate options within an affirmed normative framework" (quoted by Levitas: 91). Central to his argument is a need to correct a perceived imbalance between rights and responsibilities to reduce conflict. A rights-based discourse makes compromise and consensus hard to reach, while a "return to a language of social virtues, interests, and above all social responsibilities will reduce contentiousness and enhance social co-operation" (ibid). The responsive communitarian model of human nature is developmental and blatantly functionalist, stressing the importance of socialisation. Core values in society are to be arrived at by moral dialogue, at a local, national and international level. Critically, for this paper, Etzioni advocates constant social control through informal mechanisms of community, and public shaming and humiliation, while he suggests that a strong moral order reduces the need for legal sanctions. A key goal is to produce a compliant workforce. In The Parenting Deficit (1994) Etzioni excoriates the family as the epicentre of social collapse. "'Decades of widespread neglect of children' and lack of effective parenting are a major cause of crime, gang warfare, drug abuse, 'a poorly committed workforce, [...] a strong sense of entitlement and a weak sense of responsibility'" (ibid: 92). Paradoxically, he also exhibits a conservative commitment to gender equality, but describes infants as "the true barbarians at the gate" (ibid: 91).

Communitarian liberalism

While Etzioni stresses family breakdown, John Gray counterposes free market policies as the destroyer of the social fabric. In many ways, Gray's position is anti- communitarian. In Beyond the New Right: Markets, Government and the Common Environment (1993), he describes the ideology as a fundamentalism which "fails to recognise the realities of a pluralist society or the value of autonomy" (ibid: 97). "The pursuit of a delusive organic community distracts from the humbler but indispensable task of filling out that thinner common culture of respect for civil society" (quoted by Levitas, ibid). Gray made a switch from philosopher of the New Right to New Labour by the 1997 election, though remained determined to redefine the boundaries of political debate to exclude social democracy. His analysis of the 1990s suggests that unconstrained markets undermine political and social stability, especially in the imposition of economic insecurity and mobility, and lead to anomie and social breakdown; and contrary to the New Right, he asserts that markets are embedded in the social formation, dependent on "trust, integrity and the other virtues of fair dealing". Endgames (1997) adopts the term 'communitarian liberal'; here Gray advocates the "dependency of individual autonomy on a strong network of reciprocal obligations". Communitarian liberalism is distinguished by the rejection of individual choice as ultimate virtue and denial of the moral supremacy of the market. Market competition is anathema to the provision of health and education, however, Gray rejects egalitarianism but recognises autonomy and pluralism. "We cannot capture a 'thick' common culture grounded in deep consensus on morality and history; but we must [...] strengthen and develop a thinner, yet durable and resilient, common culture of shared understandings of fairness and tolerance" (Levitas: 99).

In his appeal to a common culture, Levitas suggests that Gray believes that social inclusion is primarily a moral inclusion, and she states that his discussions of exclusion bear this out. Beyond the New Right sets out a programme for the local, familial and charitable, provision of welfare; the state exists to return individuals to a productive economy. "Most modern poverty is a cultural rather than merely an economic phenomenon", Gray contends (ibid: 100). Poverty is the result of family crisis, poor education, lack of human skills, depletion of skills across generations, and emergence of a 'dependency culture', leaving a residue ('underclass' is the term he uses) open to exploitation by radical movements. Gray views civil society and 'intermediate' institutions (Durkheim) appropriate vehicles to carry out a morally-integrative role. As with Etzioni, the language of rights is condemned as "universalistic, monolithic and antithetical to compromise". Equality may be defended only in so far as it is "demanded as a safeguard against exclusion". However, he also asserts that the New Right misunderstands welfare institutions, and contests their attempt to reimpose the family as illiberal and impossible.

Levitas charges that Gray neglects the question of power relationships within forms of common life, and thus the differential power to define what constitutes autonomy or fairness. She suggests that Gray shifted position within the New Right, rather than away from it. His philosophy is defined as a soft synthesis of liberal and conservative positions in a moral frame, in which the negative effects of markets are policed partly by a visibly authoritarian state but more effectively by constraining mechanisms of civil society. Gray defines the political task of the age as "reconciling the subversive dynamism of market institutions with the human need for local rootedness and strong and deep forms of common life" (ibid: 104). This is, Levitas says, a Third Way between social democracy and laissez-fair capitalism, and with the communitarian intervention, the territory of Labour debate has shifted definitively to the right.

Christian communitarianism

His early work in the 1930s, John Macmurray proclaimed himself a Christian socialist, a vague term, generally indicating an anti-Marxism. Tony Blair asserts himself a devotee. However, Macmurray details a romanticist libertarian position, a strange forebear to the communitarian debate. "True morality is personal morality", one cannot "test freedom by whether it conforms to morality; the question is whether morality conforms to freedom, and the idea of a moral law is 'an absurdity'" (ibid: 106). In Freedom in the Modern World (1932), Macmurray states: "There is no place in good human behaviour for the idea of obedience" (ibid). Obedience throws responsibility for human actions onto others, or indicates a refusal of trust in others. Morality lies in the sincerity of self, a minimum requirement is justice. In the direct relations of small societies, this can be achieved by common consent to a set of reciprocal rights and obligations, supported by trust, or if violated, by sanctions in public opinion. Community is not to act as moral policeman, but rather the positive force of trust and habit of co-operation. In larger societies, however, Macmurray believes justice can only be discharged through law.

Macmurray, asks the question: what is it to be human? His answer, "our capacity to think and feel for ourselves and to act accordingly" (ibid: 107). In his 1950s Gifford lectures, he argues that the individual self is an embedded self, the abstraction has no reality away from a community of persons. Mutual recognition is key here. Only in a relationship which assumes agency, responsibility and choice is a genuine meeting possible. Community is a group within which such relationships prevail. Citizenship he regards as an exclusionary device, community must be universal (in the absence of community, class struggle will break out). Leisure, not work, is where people may be fully human (Learning to Live, 1931). Macmurray, far from viewing the family as locus of social breakdown, elevates it as sustained by bonds of affection. And freedom is dependent on material equality: "the condition of a democratic culture [is] [...] something like an equal distribution of the common wealth" (Creative Society: A Study of the Relation of Christianity to Communism, 1935). Education should train men and women for freedom not for work. Children learn through reciprocal communication. A.S. Neill at Summerhill developed a Macmurray ethic: "a child should learn what he wants when he wants to learn it" (ibid: 110; Learning to Live, ibid).

It is easy to see that both Etzioni and Gray have defined New Labour policy initiatives, while Macmurray is a clear influence on the non-class-struggle anarchism of writers such as Colin Ward. In a pick-n-mix communitarianism, (one must assume there is a certain jostling for position, though outright antagonism does not seem to have broken out), Gray's discourse litters thinking on economic development and regeneration in the UK, while Etzioni has the definitive grasp on British social policy. When public consultation in planning programmes refer to 'community' they implicate and instrumentalise these frameworks of embedded norms and repressed conflict. They do this in opposition to the term 'civil society' which is more prominent in continental European discourse, where it represents in part a co-option of elites, but does allow for the possibility of disagreement.

'Civil society' is a term with connotations of criticism and resistance to the state and bureaucratic apparatus, and articulates the potential of an alternative social animus to that of the state-society relationships brought into being by the Keynsian welfare state. Counterposing the conceptions of Habermas and Foucault in relation to the term, Samantha Ashenden contends that the term 'civil society' fails to grasp the "complexities and dynamics" of (post)modern state-subject relations, based as it is on "a juridical account of power inadequate to the task of analysing contemporary strategies" of governance (Ashenden, 1999: 143). Furthermore, in the work of Habermas, Cohen and Arato, she argues that the concept is bound to a conception of criticism which "contains rather than resolves antimonies" (ibid), thus making the grounding of a critical account that much more difficult, although she acknowledges that the term "may have freedom-enhancing effects" (ibid). For Habermas at least, even though he regards the public sphere as progressively refeudalised by the mass media and welfare state reducing debate to a negotiation of interests, "the lifeworld, and in particular civil society, provides the possibility of an outside of power disclosed by the immanent features of communication" (ibid: 158); civil society is a "privileged site for the redemption of modernity" (ibid: 148), enabling a variant of deliberative democracy.

Foucauldian critics treat civil society much in the same way as community. Gordon (quoted by Ashenden, 154) refers to the term as a "'transactional reality' at the interface of political power and the government of populations". Here, civil society is a "ground for problematisation and the development of a set of innovative techniques of government; both an object and an end of government". The concept gears the social experience, and is a site of techniques governing the conduct of conduct. "As such," Ashenden continues, "the term civil society encompasses the tension between the natural and the managed within liberalism: it is not the point of their resolution" (ibid). Foucault himself cautions the way in which the term defines and limits our political imaginary (ibid: 158), while Michael Hardt avers a post-civil condition, a simulacrum of the social separate from the terrain of conflictive social forces, characterised by mobility, speed and flexibility. Here the citizen is interpellated as "an infinitely flexible placeholder for identity" and cybernetics is the 'new' paradigm of rule, though it has to be said that other aspects of Hardt's argument do not stand up to scrutiny.

The limits of pluralism

Not only civil society, but also the politics of identity have been strategically disregarded by the Statement of Community Involvement. Commodification of the sphere of everyday life (Lefebvre) fosters the potential for 'other subjectivities' -- "novel modes of individuality and allegiance, and their public legitimation" (Rose: 179), forming new problems for the government of the autonomous individual. Nikolas Rose dismisses leftist variants of the politics of identity as the "mirror image" of communitarianism, contending that they are traversed by "analogous moralisms and analogous practices of inclusion and exclusion", and he traduces them as a "therapeutic version of subjectivity". Yet Rose acknowledges a radical potential practically enacted in "hybridised, queer, subaltern and non- essentialised" collectivities in the extent to which they reject such moralities "in favour of an ethic of creativity" (ibid: 196). Such an "inescapable plural field" encourages "an agonistic politics of ethics", one that argues for an "experimental politics of life itself" (ibid: 194).

Agonism is one topic that has captured the imagination of post-structuralist critics of planning. Conflict is immanent to urban planning practice. John Ploger (2004) argues that planners should conceptualise antagonism through another frame -- 'strife' -- replacing (after Mouffe, 2000) 'enemies' with 'adversaries'. Antagonism as such is unresolvable and has to be dealt with by legal means, whereas agonism -- the "art of strife" -- demands an "endless communication". Agonism should be viewed as the ethos of a democracy respecting difference. "Public planning," he says, "should ideally be a place for strife about legitimate opinions and meanings on a road towards reasonable and commonly agreed solutions or consensus- building among mutual adversaries", eliding the fact that planning is a party to conflict not a neutral arbiter. Agonism in a Foucauldian schema allows for the possibility of insubordination, of "challenging the relation of power itself by escape or confrontation" (Tully, 1999), in a 'permanent provocation', which should keep those dedicated to 'communicative planning' on their toes.

The limits of pluralism lie with the refusal of liberal democracy to consider the 'unreasonable', to criminalise emergent experimental dissent. While such a tendency is evident in muted form in public consultation on planning (not criminalisation but dismissal, as we have found to our cost), some would argue that at the symbolic level, pluralism is about "the legitimisation of conflict and division, the emergence of individual liberty, and the assertion of equal liberty for all" (Mouffe, 1996, quoted in Vesalon, online: 28). Yet even Chantal Mouffe argues against a more 'total' variant of pluralism, one that emphasises "heterogeneity and incommensurability", as "impossible" and "naive" (ibid). We would argue that such an 'extremity' is a precondition of the liberty that a more narrow-minded pluralism exalts.

Public consultation at present is trapped within a liberal pluralist paradigm, where the 'reasonable' is defined by the planners' own logic and centralised dictat, and any who transgress either the discourse or the conception are ruled out of view. This pluralism combines with what Levitas asserts as a 'new Durkheimian hegemony' in the UK under New Labour, together they define the limits of public debate. With Durkheim in mind, one might hazard that intermediate institutions, like Hackney Council's Statement of Community Involvement, attempt to integrate individuals morally into a sphere ('the social') defined by the state. For Durkheim, such institutions are "essential if the state is not to oppress the individual: they are also necessary if the state is to be sufficiently free of the individual. They liberate the two conflicting forces, whilst linking them at the same time" (quoted by Levitas: 179)[3]. In a contrary fashion, one might argue that such institutions bind recipients into an agenda not of their own making, producing an affirmative subjectivity at war with, but amenable to the techniques of governance. We prefer to direct the reader also toward Nietzsche's third essay in On the Genealogy of Morals, where the anti-philosopher interrogates the ascetic ideal, or the will to nothingness, an ideal predicated on self-abnegation. The ascetic ideal redirects the ressentiment of the weak back on themselves, to make them own their own suffering, thus to reconcile them to life (Smith, 1996: xx) and expresses the will to power. "The happiness of 'minimal superiority' [...] is the means of consolation", while forms of community constitute "a modest pleasure" in the battle against depression (Nietzsche, 1996: 113). This, we contend is the moral predicate of the Statement of Community Involvement. It's a sadist conception, and public consultation remains a behaviourist enclosure.

Repression of conflict through the deployment of 'community' within public consultation, extends to the construction of the individual, who is constituted as a subject of that perennial dyad in New Labour discourse 'exclusion/inclusion', a discursive containment pivoting around the question of paid work. Levitas argues that social exclusion is a "conceptual device for bridging the gap between what is empirically observable and what is theoretically claimed" (1998: 188). She comments: "In contemporary politics, the concept of social exclusion itself is part of the discursive construction of social conflicts as pathological. But discursive containment may not hold, and the denial of fundamental conflicts of interest render the Third Way unstable" (ibid: 186). Reference to social exclusion indicates the growing importance of the European Union in UK policy arenas, and suggests that a parallel discourse of social inclusion, one framing a 'moral underclass', is in abeyance.

Levitas claims that social inclusion "has nothing to do with distributional equality, but means lifting the poor over the boundary of a minimum standard [...] while leaving untouched the overall pattern of inequality" (ibid: 156). She contends that as an active process, the term places moral responsibility firmly on the individual, producing a 'performative inclusion' or 'supply-side citizenship' (Raymond Plant), where inclusion is "enforced through [...] [the] benefits of paid work and the direct compulsion of benefit withdrawals and reductions" (ibid: 157). Performative inclusion attempts the "coercive and discursive creation of the self as first and foremost a worker" (ibid: 158). All this distracts attention from a class-divided society and "allows a view of society as basically benign to coexist with the visible reality of poverty. It does this by discursively placing the unwanted characteristics outside society" (ibid: 188).

Truth, power, and the subject

Relevant to the subject of public consultation in planning are the truth claims of expertise. Nikolas Rose (1996) asserts an arms-length government, developed in the nineteenth century, operating through the powers of truth and an array of professionals empowered to perform as experts. The last fifty years, he contends, have witnessed a fundamental shift in this 'government at a distance'. As advanced-liberal governance seeks to "degovernmentalise the state" and "destatise practices of government", the authority of expertise has been detached from the assemblage of political rule; experts are relocated within "a market, governed by competition, accountability and consumer demand" (Rose, 1996, 41). Advanced-liberal governance operates through the "regulated choices of individual citizens [...] Individuals [are] to be governed through their freedom [...] as members of heterogenous communities of allegiance" (ibid).

Ulrich Beck (1992) argues a paradox that while qualified expert judgement is still required to determine scientific[4] hazard 'objectively', "[t]he expansion of science presupposes and conducts a critique of science and the existing practice of experts in a period when...scientific civilisation is subjecting itself to a publicly-transmitted criticism that shakes its foundations and its own self conception" (ibid: 156). Rose highlights similarly a "simultaneous proliferation, fragmentation, contestation and delegitimation of experts in devices of social government" (Rose, 1996: 52). Since the 1960s, havens of expertise have been illuminated and broken up by techniques of critical oversight, such as environmental audits, strategic environmental assessment, the setting of standards, and in a much more pluralist sense, the statutory public consultation that occurs in urban planning. Yet audit and consultation are radically different. Both act to depoliticise conflict, yet while audit promises that "technical calculations will overrule existing logics of contestation between opposing interests" (ibid: 50), consultation fosters the illusion that interests that oppose the dominant logics of expert enclosures can win through by force of argument. Yet in the last instance, technical 'expertise' permeates the "field of judgement" where planning decision-making occurs, and within which expert "authority is concentrated, intensified, and rendered difficult to countermand" (ibid).

Beck identifies a tendency toward the scientisation of protest against science as lay people become experts themselves. Science "runs its own gauntlet" he says (Beck, 161), where scientific opinion is tested by politicisation, and "the publicly-transmitted criticism of the previous development becomes the motor for expansion" (ibid). The Foucauldians do not deny the development of lay expertise, but trace its development through welfare state agencies, where "a critique of professional domination makes way for a politics of need formation in which various clientele of the welfare state [...] claim user rights" (Dean, 1999: 154). Both trends are evident in Hackney in environmental circles. Rose argues that clients of welfare have come to understand themselves in new ways -- asserting "a will to be healthy", to enjoy "a maximised normality", that is to become self-governing. "The enhancement of powers of client as customer- consumer...specifies the subjects of rule [...]: as active individuals seeking to 'enterprise themselves', to maximise their quality of life through acts of choice" (ibid: 57). And a profound political shift occurs where, within ideology, "[t]he relation between the responsible individual and their self-governing community comes to substitute for that between social citizen and their common society" (Rose, 1996: 56). The terrain is deeply uncomfortable for community's critics.

This raises fundamental questions of a shifting relationship of power/knowledge within advanced liberalism and calls for a "principle of ethical as well as ontological scepticism" (Gordon, 1980: 236). The conception of power here is positive and productive, engaged in the 'installation' of a regime of truth. Power "needs to be considered as a productive network which runs through the social body, much more than as a negative instance whose function is repression" (Foucault, 1980: 119). Truth, meanwhile, is "produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint" (ibid: 131). Gordon and Foucault before him point to the constitutive interdependence of assemblages of power and forms of knowledge in the governmental dispositif. There is a struggle around the status of truth (Foucault, ibid: 132) and the political and economic influence it wields. Foucault asserts a political economy of truth centred on the form of scientific discourse and the institutions which produce it, subject to "constant economic and political incitement", the "object of immense diffusion and consumption", and the issue of political debate and social confrontation (ibid: 131). Meanwhile, discourse renders the real "rationalisable, transparent and programmable" (Gordon: 245).

Beck contends in Nietzschean fashion that science itself is a discourse without truth. "Scientific practice has definitively followed scientific theory into conjecture, self doubt and convention. Neither internally nor externally does science still enjoy the blessing of reason. It has become indispensable to and incapable of truth" (1992: 166). Belief may very well be the real enemy. Beck asserts that with its realisation of fallibility, science shifts its uncertainty to practical action, and at the same time invents an alternative justification in the reduction of uncertainty, a response to "highly advanced differentiation, hyper-complexity, self criticism and reflection" (ibid: 173). The proliferation of audits and database information gathering, for example around the governance of the late-night economy as well as documents such as the SCI, are testimony to such a process.

When mechanisms of public consultation are constituted, a field of possibilities opens up on which the activities of the resistant subject can inscribe themselves. Yet, power is "a set of actions on possible action; it incites, it induces, it seduces, it makes easier or more difficult; it releases or contrives, makes more probable or less; in the extreme, it constrains or forbids absolutely, but it is always a way of acting upon one or more acting subjects by virtue of their acting or being capable of action" (Foucault, 2002: 341). Yet such regimes of power do not falsify the human subject, rather they "establish, deploy, promote and intensify the truths of ourselves [...] Power [...] acts through practices that 'make up' subjects as free persons" (Rose, 1999: 95).

There is no outside to power. Power is always present, always disruptive (Thompson, 1999: 200). Power is like Borges map in the desert in its prime, contiguous with the social formation; dreams of primal liberty remain an abstraction. A multiplicity of relations of production, family, sexuality, are interwoven with those of power and reflexively govern each other, effecting a productivity of power linked to social programmes, and a 'microphysics' of power as power homes in on individuals and their conduct.

Every power relationship implicates a strategy of struggle, in which each side retains its definition. "Each constitutes for the other a kind of permanent limit, a point of possible reversal" (Foucault, 2002: 346). Again, Foucault emphasises, there is not only a reciprocal relationship between a relation of power and a strategy of struggle, "[i]t would not be possible for power relations to exist without points of insubordination that, by definition, are means of escape" (ibid: 347). Thus, he says, "it is possible for class struggle to be the guarantor of intelligibility", or perhaps for public consultation responses to act as the guarantor of intelligibility of the plan, a double-edged conception.

Alternatively, militancy in cognitive capitalism can attempt to subvert the political, economic and institutional regime of the production of truth, and mass intellectuality can work to construct a new politics of truth, to detach the power of truth from the forms of hegemony within which it operates (Foucault, 1980: 133). The problem here is how to effect "a modification in the rules of formation of statements accepted as scientifically 'true'" (ibid: 111). For Foucault, it is a question of what governs statements, the ways in which they influence each other to form a set of propositions which are scientifically acceptable and hence capable of being falsified. One must perhaps activate a set of difficulties for the regime of truth, define a conscious irritant in the politics of the scientific statement. Cognitive militants must deconstruct the internal regime of power, the effects of power circulating among scientific statements, and analyse how or why the regime undergoes global modification (ibid: 112).

Finally, "one has to dispense with the constituent subject" (ibid: 117), one must "go beyond the limits of the subject as presently known and constituted" (Thompson, 1999: 197). The subject of public consultation vanishes into the chasms opened up by regimes of truth, and Foucault proclaims the death of man, which causes problems for the humanist conception of resistance. Another Nietzschean effect of Foucault's theory is that any account of intersubjectivity is sparce; for Foucault, at least in his early work, experience of others is one of "sublime alterity" (ibid: 196). His theory of agonism stands in for the fact of conflict. "Nothing in man (sic) -- not even his body -- is sufficiently stable to serve as the basis for self recognition or for understanding other men" (Foucault, 1984, quoted by Thompson, ibid). Later on, "the subject is either divided from himself or divided from others" (Foucault, 1982, ibid: 197) by the force of a bisecting power cleaving the normal from the pathological, the good from the bad. Simon Thompson comments that the shaping of the subject by such individualising practices "creates its others; these can be seen as the underside of the operations of power [...] the other is no longer outside the structures in which the subject is located" (1999: 197).

In his latter years, Foucault turned his attention to the aesthetics of existence in Hellenic and Roman philosophy, the subject capable of self knowledge and self constitution. Care for the self is determined as ethically prior to concern for others, suggesting to Thompson that subjectivity may be ontologically prior to intersubjectivity in Foucault's thought. Thompson quotes Lois McNay: in Foucault's exegesis "other subjects [...] are defined as objects or narcissistic extensions of the primary subject" (ibid: 198), suggesting that responses to planning consultation may too become narcissistic extensions of the self. To attempt recognition of the other through planning consultation would be to rigidify the form of the plan. Here the notion of sublime alterity is helpful: the radically other remains a "blank resisting force". One might discern also an intersection of governmentality and subjectivity. Rose (1999: 41) opines the "multiple history of the objectification of the human being within the discourses that would govern them, and their subjectification in diverse practices and techniques", while Foucault asks: "How should one govern oneself by performing actions in which one is oneself the objective of those actions, the domain in which they are brought to bear, the instrument they employ, the subject that acts?" (1997: 87). Desertion or refusal remains a valid reprisal.

Project Mimique. October 2008.

Footnotes
1. Project Mimique would argue that assertions of community are a recourse to a resemblance, with moral inflection. In the framework of similitude, operating until the end of the sixteenth century and outlined by Foucault in the second chapter of The Order of Things, 'community' is both conventia, in that the signifier is situated adjacent to but separate from the relations of kinship or association, and aemulatio or emulation, "a sort of convenience, that has been freed from the law of place, and is able to function, without motion, from a distance" (Foucault, 2002b: 21). When people refer to 'community', the term may in fact dissimulate a lack of relationships. It may also operate as analogy or in sympathetic mode. Sympathy has "the dangerous powers of assimilating, of rendering things identical to each other, of mingling them, of causing their individuality to disappear" (ibid: 26).
2. Indeed, the penetration of communitarianism into the libertarian canon perhaps explains the development of what, in east London, has been termed 'neo-libertarianism', a non- class-struggle anarchism with Stalinist undertones, which polices the virtues of 'community' with show trials, exclusions and public slander.
3. In 1988, the French government brought in a residual benefit, the RMI (Revenu Minimum d'Insertion), emphasising the 'reciprocal' nature of solidarity. Levitas details how recipients of the RMI were required to sign a contract focusing on employment, but also addressing other aspects of daily living, behaviour and family relationships, negotiated with social workers. With the RMI, responsibility for unemployment is individualised in a similar fashion to US workfare (Spicker, in Levitas: 22), and solidarity becomes a lever for reducing social expenditure.
4. For the purposes of this paper we have inferred that urban planning is a 'science', mostly to allow Beck's insights. In a Foucauldian schema this is in fact incorrect. Foucault would regard planning as a discipline, a proto-science or a 'knowledge'.

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