THE USES OF NATURE: SOCIAL POWER AND REPRESENTATION - Making Sense of Nature - page 190

their own particular interests through persuading the wider society that
these are shared or common interests. Marx's notion of 'ideology' and
Antonio Gramsci's concept of 'hegemony' are just two examples of how
Marxists have, historically, highlighted the differential power of some
to 'set the agenda' for a wider society. Likewise, radical feminists have
long pointed to the powerful discursive dimensions of patriarchy, wherein
men, in different ways, define, communicate and enforce particular ideas
of 'masculinity', 'femininity' and 'gender roles' that tend to disempower
women. 6 Foucault, in part because he took issue with the conventional
social science idea that social groups have distinct and coherent 'inter-
ests', was mostly unwilling to concede that soft power was a capacity far
less 'decentred' than he often insisted it was.

• Arguably soft power works as much by concealing and constraining knowledge,

discourse and information as by creating and mobilising it
Though Foucault usefully pointed to the 'productive' aspects of soft
power (as I noted), he's been criticised for underplaying the power of
some to withhold knowledge deliberately or to represent the world in highly
and knowingly selective ways . Historian of science Peter Galison has called
the study of such power 'anti-epistemology' (Galison, 2004). Such study
need not rely on the Marxian notion of 'false consciousness', a notion
that Foucauldians have understandably been suspicious of (as well as
many Marxists). 7 We might also add that power sometimes operates
when epistemic actors or communities use uncertainty (e.g. about the
extent of future climate change) as a basis for inaction or slowing down
reform. It operates too when they rule out certain lines of inquiry, lead-
ing to what we might call 'systematic ignorance'. For instance, Daniel
Kleinman and Sainath Suryanarayanan (2012) have shown that profes-
sional agro-ecologists have favoured a particular hypothesis to explain
Colony Collapse Disorder in bee populations. By committing research
time and resources to testing this hypothesis, they have excluded alter-
native explanations advanced by beekeepers, ones that point to harmful
manufactured insecticides as the root cause.

•

Arguably some forms of social power empower those subject to them
The political theorist Mark Haugaard (2012) has detected an implicit
'zero-sum' conception of social power in much of Foucault's work. This
conception, he argues, ignores forms of social power that are 'positive
sum'. These forms increase the capacities of one or more of the parties
involved to act; the relatively disempowered can become empowered by
being subject to the advice, guidance or counsel of others in positions
of authority or influence. For Haugaard, this is only a seeming paradox
and it calls into question purely negative evaluations of social power as
something that distorts, corrupts or oppresses. Arguably a 'just society',
however 'justice' is defined, requires social power relationships in order
that injustice be minimised. The case considered in Box 6.1 suggests as
much, among many other similar cases.