Detachment and Instrumentalism

This chapter begins a detailed analysis of the formal characteristics of governmental knowledge. Foundational to such knowledge is its external or detached posture (usually presented as ‘objectivity’). The significance of this is easy to overlook, since we are constantly told that such objectivity is simply a precondition for any valid knowledge. Yet detachment requires reversing the standpoint of normal, everyday social life, which is that of a participant immersed in a social context and involved in a network of relationships and behaviours which are habitual and taken for granted and with which they identify profoundly. By the same token, however, detachment enables a manipulative, external knowledge which is ‘rational’ in a formal sense. From the position of the uninvolved outsider, it is easier to envisage how social processes and relationships might be taken apart and put together again in a more ‘efficient’ or instrumentally rational way. Such detachment is not to be confused with disinterestedness; rather, it enables a purely instrumental perspective focused on manipulation and control. Irrespective of one’s purpose, to assume the conventions of governmental knowledge is to adopt the logic of technique and accept the pre-eminence of instrumental calculation, economic reasoning, and cost-benefit analysis. Governmental knowledge is never neutral: it is always on the side of management, bureaucratic and regulatory intervention, and the social technologies they embody.