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Notes from A
Foucault Primer: Discourse, Power and the Subject (1993) by McHoul and Grace; NYU Press Foucault’s
Discourse of Power Francis Bacon: “Knowledge is Power.” We typically think of Bacon’s famous maxim as supportive
of the scientific method and its devotion to inductive forms of reasoning as
the key to unlocking the power of nature. But in the past century,
philosophers have considered the idea that knowledge (European science) is
the method of imposing conceptions of nature on others. Michel Foucault (1926-84) was a philosopher and
historian whose mission was to explore who we are as produced by systems of
thought produced and supported by academic disciplines. Study of the history
if ideas from Hegel onward have emphasized the progressive and continuous nature
of this evolution. As time passes, our understanding of life and human nature
is improving, so is our understanding of how to create a harmonious society.
Foucault described the evolution of these systems as discontinuous, multiple,
and not necessarily progressive. He was dubious about notions of absolute
truth or any definitive answer to political questions. Instead, he was
interested in how disciplinary ‘knowledges’
function: how they change and transform. He also emphasized the power of
ideas to shape our understanding of who we are. Foucault said, “It would be wrong to say that the
soul is an illusion, or an ideological effect. On the contrary, it exists, it
has a reality, it is produced permanently around,
on, within the body by the functioning of power.” (Discipline and Power) Foucault sought a broader conception of society
than an economic model. (Marxists argue that ideas are the superstructural effects of ‘real’ economic forces.)
Foucault believed that the discourse which dominates in any given era is only
one possible form among others. He would argue that our quest to discover a
text’s meaning in its author’s mind or intention is contingent upon an
understanding of the historical circumstances in which a text was produced
and the discourse of power shaping public opinion at that time. In Madness
and Civilization, he analyzed how conceptions of madness changed not
necessarily for the better in the years between the Renaissance and the
Enlightenment. During the Renaissance madness was not considered to be a
disease or illness, and the mad were not excluded from the rest of society.
Rather, they were considered to be under the influence of folly- a benign or
even wise and revelatory mode of thought. The great confinement of the mad
during the early nineteenth century was, therefore, neither a necessary nor
an inevitable development, and it had been initiated in accordance with
prevalent liberal notions about the deserving and undeserving poor. The
cultural rule being enforced was that you were either
willing and able to work, or you could be detained and incarcerated as
a social undesirable based on the ‘scientific analysis’ of a board of
experts. The folly of the mad was disqualified as inadequate and naïve, and the example of the insane asylum served to
enforces ‘normal’ vs. ‘pathological’ behavior in society. In Discipline
and Power, Foucault studied the history of criminology and its forbears.
He was interested in the transformation of modes of punishment from
spectacular retribution via various forms of gruesome public execution to the
modern form of punishment in which the ‘criminal’ is subjected to constant
watch under the gaze of scientific surveillance in a penitentiary. Science
transforms behavior into data which in turn produces an implicit hierarchy of
thought. We thus develop ideas of the good citizen vs. the delinquent
criminal.
The predominant system of thought is the
prevailing discourse of power. How might this idea apply to our understanding
of the master- slave dialectic?
Further
Reading: Foucault Discourse, as defined by Foucault, refers
to: ways of constituting knowledge, together with the social practices,
forms of subjectivity and power relations which inhere in such knowledges and relations between them. Discourses are
more than ways of thinking and producing meaning. They constitute the
'nature' of the body, unconscious and conscious mind and emotional life of
the subjects they seek to govern (Weedon, 1987, p.
108). ... a form of power that
circulates in the social field and can attach to strategies of domination as
well as those of resistance ( Diamond and Quinby,
1988, p. 185). Foucault's work is imbued with an
attention to history, not in the traditional sense of the word but in
attending to what he has variously termed the 'archaeology' or 'genealogy' of
knowledge production. That is, he looks at the continuities and
discontinuities between 'epistemes' (taken by
Foucault to mean the knowledge systems which primarily informed the thinking
during certain periods of history: a different one being said to dominate
each epistemological age), and the social context in which certain knowledges and practices emerged as permissable
and desirable or changed. In his view knowledge is inextricably connected to
power, such that they are often written as power/knowledge. Foucault's conceptual analysis of
a major shift in (western) cultural practices, from 'sovereign power' to
'disciplinary power', in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
(1979), is a good example of his method of genealogy. He charts the
transition from a top-down form of social control in the form of physical
coercion meted out by the sovereign to a more diffuse and insidious form of
social surveillance and process of 'normalisation'.
The latter, says Foucault, is encapsulated by Bentham's Panopticon;
a nineteenth century prison system in which prison cells were arranged around
a central watchtower from which the supervisor could watch inmates, yet the
inmates could never be certain when they were being watched, therefore, over
time, they began to police their own behaviour. The
Panopticon has became the metaphor for the
processes whereby disciplinary 'technologies', together with the emergence of
a normative social science, 'police' both the mind and body of the modern
individual (see Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1982, p.
143-67). Power, in Weedon's
(1987) interpretation of Foucault is: a dynamic of control and lack of control between discourses
and the subjects, constituted by discourses, who are their agents. Power is
exercised within discourses in the ways in which they constitute and govern
individual subjects (p. 113). Foucault's focus is upon questions
of how some discourses have shaped and created meaning systems that have
gained the status and currency of 'truth', and dominate how we define and
organize both ourselves and our social world, whilst other alternative
discourses are marginalised and subjugated, yet
potentially 'offer' sites where hegemonic practices can be contested,
challenged and 'resisted'. He has looked specifically at the social
construction of madness, punishment and sexuality. In Foucault's view, there
is no fixed and definitive structuring of either social (or personal)
identity or practices, as there is in a socially determined view in which the
subject is completely socialized. Rather, both the formation of identities
and practices are related to, or are a function of, historically specific
discourses. An understanding of how these and other discursive constructions
are formed may open the way for change and contestation. Foucault developed the concept of
the 'discursive field' as part of his attempt to understand the relationship
between language, social institutions, subjectivity and power. Discursive
fields, such as the law or the family, contain a number of competing and
contradictory discourses with varying degrees of power to give meaning to and
organize social institutions and processes. They also 'offer' a range of
modes of subjectivity (Weedon, 1987, p. 35). It
follows then that, if relations of power are dispersed and fragmented
throughout the social field, so must resistance to power be (Diamond & Quinby, 1988, p. 185). Foucault argues though, in The
Order of Discourse, that the 'will to truth' is the major system of
exclusion that forges discourse and which 'tends to exert a sort of pressure
and something like a power of constraint on other discourses', and goes on
further to ask the question 'what is at stake in the will to truth, in the
will to utter this 'true' discourse, if not desire and power?' (1970, cited
in Shapiro 1984, p. 113-4). Thus, there are both discourses
that constrain the production of knowledge, dissent and difference and some
that enable 'new' knowledges and difference(s). The
questions that arise within this framework, are to do with how some
discourses maintain their authority, how some 'voices' get heard whilst
others are silenced, who benefits and how - that is, questions addressing
issues of power/ empowerment/ disempowerment. |
