In a recent chapter in a Handbook on governmentality, I describe “a distinctive family” (Rose 2000, 19) of research questions – usefully described as “how” questions and “how possible” questions (Foucault 1982). These questions are set in contrast to the more common “why” question brought to research on governing. The suggestion is that “how possible” questions provide a more useful starting place for reflecting on complex social relations. Before I consider this proposition in greater depth, we need to get a handle on just what “how possible” questions ask, what a “how possible” question looks like. 

Here are some sample “how possible” questions to start us thinking: “how have certain things (e.g., the psychiatric hospital come to pass?  What is it possible or impossible to think? Under what conditions is it possible to think certain things and impossible to think others? (Gougelet 2014). 

Asking these sorts of questions, explains Foucault, allows us to explore the ways in which power relations are “rooted deep in the social nexus, not reconstituted ‘above’ society as a supplementary structure [for example, “the State”] whose radical effacement one could perhaps dream of” (Foucault 1982, 222). The last comment here about dreaming of radical effacement refers to the temptation to think that it might be easy to target a single/simple source of power (in for example something referred to as “the State”). By contrast in Foucault’s account power relations are “rooted deep” in the social nexus – no simple “solution” here! Dean (1999, 29) describes how, from this point of view, power is “not a zero-sum game played within an a priori structural distribution. It is rather the (mobile and open) resultant of the loose and changing assemblage of governmental techniques, practices and rationalities”.

Let’s linger on this “social nexus” for a moment. To see what Foucault’s analytic target comprises in this term, I propose a hypothetical: “when you ask a ‘why’ question of your material, what kind of answer could you offer?” Most commonly, the form of explanation turns to individuals and their motivations, or to social groups and their ambitions (e.g. “interest groups”). As signalled above there may be a temptation to “blame” “the State”, or some other “structure”. 

For Foucault-influenced analytic approaches these forms of explanation are limited in their usefulness. The position is taken that social relations and social practices are more complicated than these foci allow. These complicated social relations constitute Foucault’s “social nexus”, described by Foucault (2007, 108) as an “ensemble” of “institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, calculations and tactics” through which governing takes place. The challenge becomes finding ways to question this “social nexus”. WPR is offered as one means to open up the “social nexus” to critical interrogation. 

WPR and “how possible” questions

Put simply, the goal in deploying WPR as an analytic strategy is to consider and question how the “social nexus” has come to be. This goal is pursued through looking at how particular aspects of social activities and existence are problematised. A key component of this analysis is the “problem representation”. To reflect critically on identified problem representations, we ask how they become/became possible – how were they possible? 

You may not immediately recognise WPR is this description. Connections with “how possible” formulations become clearer when we examine the WPR questions. Most explicitly, Question 2 (see Chart in Bacchi and Goodwin 2016, 20) asks: “What deep-seated presuppositions or assumptions underlie this representation of ‘the problem’ (problem representation)”. In effect, we are asking what meanings (presuppositions, assumptions, “unexamined ways of thinking” [Foucault 1994, 456], knowledges/discourses) need to be in place for this problem representation to be intelligible (to be possible). To understand how specific policies and their problematisations become possible, it is necessary to identify the forms of thought that made these practices intelligible and practicable.

Consider the example I often use involving the application of WPR to the commonly endorsed reform policy of training schemes for women. These schemes constitute women’s lack of training as “the problem”. They also rely upon certain knowledge forms – e.g., the proposal to train women relies on a particular understanding of how “people” develop “skills” – a behavioural focus in other words – and an ontological conception of “people” as having something called “skills”. The proposal to train women relies upon these meanings to make sense. The knowledges (physiology, psychology, philosophy, etc.) producing these meanings, in effect, make possible the proposal of training schemes. 

Foucault spoke about the need to examine precisely what is done and what is said through considering the “conditions” that are/were necessary to these practices. Asking “how possible” questions destabilizes presumably fixed entities and opens them up to this form of critical interrogation. This approach allowed Foucault to query the assumed “existence” of objects of knowledge, such as “madness” (Foucault 1972) or “sexuality” (Foucault 1986). Asking “how possible” reveals the contingency of assumed “objects” and “subjects”, and the power relations involved in their formation. 

This form of analysis provides the grounds for thinking differently. In relation to his study of prison systems, Foucault (2020) notes that he wanted to indicate what the “postulates of thought” were that need to be re-examined if one intended to transform the penal system. Attention is directed precisely to “what is done” rather than to the motives or intentions of people, which would invoke the interior consciousness Foucault was challenging (see Research Hub, 30 Sept. 2019). The analytic task becomes examining how it is possible for those things to be done, “constructing their external relations of intelligibility” and the knowledges (discourses) upon which they rely (Foucault 1991: 77) The analytic target becomes “the connections, encounters, blockages, plays of forces, strategies and so on” in order “to show that things ‘weren’t as necessary as all that” (Foucault 1991: 76), demonstrating a clear challenge to deterministic views of social relations.

The focus on what is said invites an analysis of “what could be said”, what it is possible to say. Thinking again of our “how possible” formulation (above) – what meanings need to be in place for what is said to be intelligible? where do those meanings come from? Should they be interrogated? Asking, as Foucault (1972, 59) does, “What is it possible to speak of?”, provides a novel and powerful form of political analysis. Poststructural policy analysis aims to study, not people’s views, but how it is possible for such views to exist. 

Jennifer Bonham and I develop this thinking to produce a form of poststructural interview analysis, with the acronym PIA (Poststructural Interview Analysis; Bacchi and Bonham 2016). 

Process 2 in PIA calls for “Producing Genealogies of ‘What is said’”. I provide a brief extract here to elaborate what this involves, with bracketed comments in italics to signal connections with “how possible” thinking: 

Such genealogies look to identify the “conditions” necessary in a particular period “for this or that enunciation to be formulated” [i.e., to be possible] (Foucault 1972: 15 fn 2). Attention is directed to the multitudes of practices—the “processes, procedures and apparatuses” (Tamboukou 1999: 202)—involved in the production of “what is said” as “sayable”, as “within the true” [i.e. as possible]. Take, for example, the comments “I felt depressed” or “We work with mental trauma”. The political target is not how psychology or psychiatry control or label people but all the interconnected practices that make depression and mental trauma apparent and intelligible [i.e., possible], and give these knowledge formations authority. (Bacchi and Bonham 2016, 116).

For both WPR and PIA the focus on heterogeneous relations rather than on “fixity” undermines any sense of linear causality, of one thing (or a few things) causing another – a form of thinking about causation that is common when “why” questions are asked. In a Foucault-influenced analytic strategy, there is a “sort of multiplication or pluralization of causes” (Foucault 1991, 76), a proliferation of “events” as the random results of “the interweaving of relations of power and domination (Tamboukou 1999, 207). “Everything depends on everything else” (Veyne 1997, p. 170): “in Foucault it is not a question of one set of changes ‘influencing’ or ‘causing’ others but of a complex series of interactions which allow the production of possible objects of history” (O’Farrell 2005, 38). 

I trust that this brief excursion into “how possible” questions has provided some indication of what it means to tackle “the social nexus”. I hope it has also produced a curiosity about “how possible” questions and their potential as political interventions. 

I find myself asking frequent questions prompted by keeping “how possible” to the fore in my thinking: “How has this come to be?” “What is assumed if this occurrence is to be taken for granted as truth?” “Where did this thing/position/argument come from?” “What meanings/knowledges/discourses does it rely upon?” “Do I need to question those meanings/knowledges/discourses?” “Do I need to re-think how I assume their credibility?”

Lots of food for thought!

References

Bacchi, C. 2023. Governmentalizing “policy studies”. In W. Walters and M. Tazzioli (Eds) Handbook on Governmentality. Massachusetts: Edward Elgar. pp. 54-71. 

Bacchi, C. and Bonham, J. 2016. Appendix: Poststructural Interview Analysis: Politicizing “personhood”. In C. Bacchi and S. Goodwin, Poststructural Policy Analysis: A guide to practice. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 113-122. 

Bacchi, C. and Goodwin, S. 2016. Poststructural Policy Analysis: A Guide to Practice. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Dean, M. 1999. Governmentality: Power and rule in modern society. London: Sage. 

Foucault, M. 1972. Histoire de la folie a l’age classique [History of Madness in the Classical Age] (Paris: Gallimard).

Foucault, M. 1980. The History of Sexuality, Vol. I. An Introduction New York: Vintage Books. 

Foucault, M. 1982. How is Power Exercised? In H. L. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow (eds), Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Brighton: Harvester Press, pp. 216–226.

Foucault, M 1991. Politics and the study of discourse, in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon & Peter Miller (eds.), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

Foucault, M. 1994 [1981]. So is it important to think? In J.D. Faubion, (Ed.), Power: Essential works of Foucault 1954–1984, vol. 3, Hurley, R. and others (trans.). London: Penguin. 

Foucault, M. 2020. What is called “Punishing”? In Michel Foucault, Power: The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954-1984. Penguin Books.

O’Farrell, C. 2005. Michel Foucault. London: Sage.

Rose, N. 2000. Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought, 2nd edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

Tamboukou, M. 1999. Writing genealogies: An exploration of Foucault’s stra-tegies for doing research. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 20 (2), 201–217. Veyne, P. 1997. Foucault revolutionizes history. In A.I. Davidson (Ed.), Foucault and his Interlocutors, Porter, C. (trans.), Chicago: University of Chicago Press