Knowledge pulsed by “war”. A review of the Foucaultean corpus around the politics of expert activity Uma revisão do corpus foucaultiano em torno da política da atividade especializada

Abstract

In recent decades, a field of studies has built up around expertise, which articulates various research perspectives and programs according to the ways of conceptualizing the relationship between science and politics, knowledge and power, of determining connections between them and the level of analysis for its approach. The Foucaultean corpus contains fruitful analytical tools for the substantive approach of the inherent politicality of knowledge, by questioning the instrumental readings of that relationship and including the activity of specialists in government strategies and in forms of resistance towards these strategies. However, the conceptualizations of expert knowledge from a Foucaultean matrix show some dispersion and, despite the progress of governmentality studies on this issue, the absence of reflection on the category of “expertise” introduces the risk that these analyzes may lead to a questionable relationship of coherence and correspondence between knowledge and governmental rationalities. Within the fields that study expertise, in this article we review the Foucaultean corpus and systematize other ways to discuss knowledge and its political condition. We examine the “war hypothesis”, we show its pulse when we create knowledge and we put these analytical categories into play in a small archival work on a documentary series of texts by Hayek, about the articulation of the neoliberal rationality of government. Methodologically, the corpus and the analysis of the texts used a cross section between an instrumental translation of such categories and a materialist perspective of discourse.