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| Power/Knowledge. A Think/Tank? |
I was lucky to read these materials in the most romantic way possible: with my wife in the passenger seat dj'ing the text-to-speech as we drove to a national park. We worked through each essay together, pausing frequently to parse out the delphic pronouncements and self-referential rambling into something resembling an understanding of his points. This was very much a team effort, both of us making progress when the other became stuck. Here is what we found.
Lecture One: 7 January 1976
subjugated knowledges - "genealogy" - war by another means
To start at the end, it seems that Foucault wants to understand how the world really works, and ultimately is a philosopher of history. There is, underneath the verbiage, a commitment to objective truth and the ability to describe with accuracy. But his vision was inconsistent with many then-prevailing visions - particularly what he saw in Marxism, psychoanalysis, and, I guess, Enlightenment - the prime narratives of Western European history, particularly progress and the objectivity of science - that he feels the need to break down to get where he wants to go. He makes impressive progress.
And so he begins. He starts by criticizing what he calls "global, totalitarian theories," including especially Marxism and psychoanalysis. He believes that such grand unifying theories necessarily simplify and abstract, often to reality's detriment, and that they are not useful unless we ignore their inconsistencies (throughout below, italicized emphases are his, bold are mine):
these tools [the global theories] have only been provided on the condition that the theoretical unity of these discourses was in some sense put in abeyance, or at least curtailed, divided, overthrown, caricatured, theatricalised, or what you will. In each case, the attempt to think in terms of a totality has in fact proved a hindrance to research.We took this to mean that it is obvious that they cannot explain everything - but the problem is that they maybe pretend to. As will come up later, a problem with this pretending is that it expresses itself as suppressive force exerted against other forms of knowledge, which themselves are valuable to do better history. They require ignoring or discounting other evidence.
And what is this other evidence? He calls it other forms of knowledge.
we have repeatedly encountered, at least at a superficial level, in the course of most recent times, an entire thematic to the effect that it is not theory but life that matters, not knowledge but reality, not books but money etc.; but it also seems to me that over and above, and arising out of this thematic, there is something else to which we are witness, and which we might describe as an insurrection of subjugated knowledges. . . [I]t is not even a sociology of delinquency, that has made it possible to produce an effective criticism of the asylum and likewise of the prison, but rather the immediate emergence of historical contents.In other words, the grand unifying theories didn't provide critiques of the prison system. The facts on the ground did, within the historical context of how they came to be the facts on the ground. He goes a step further, saying that those grand unifying theories are "designed to mask" the "ruptural effects of conflict and struggle" that facts-on-the-ground-in-context would show us have existed (the "subjugated" part). So there are dominant and insurrectionist "knowledges" which coexist, and digging out the latter has appeared to him to be a productive area of inquiry.
Yet this is not his main point. It is introduction. His main point is something related to the examination of the world to develop history:
with what in fact were these buried, subjugated knowledges really concerned? They were concerned with a historical knowledge of struggles. In the specialised areas of erudition as in the disqualified, popular knowledge there lay the memory of hostile encounters which even up to this day have been confined to the margins of knowledge.Hmmm. So we have grand unifying theories posed as explanations for everything, which are not good explanations of the real world but purposefully dominate our understanding, snuffing out competitors. And Foucault is interested in this snuffing out as a historical fact, of power struggle. And he says that this struggle has left marks - both on the winners, and the losers. A trace, a "memory." He calls this the "genealogy," which is a word for this concept that did not work well for me at all. But at least he provides a definition:
Let us give the term genealogy to the union of erudite knowledge and local memories which allows us to establish a historical knowledge of struggles and to make use of this knowledge tactically today.At this point, I had not looked into the peculiar history of the word genealogy as used by Nietzsche. I guessed that he was getting at something like a dialectic: seeing high theory in tension with local knowledge, the truth emerges from the relationship, or something. But he later criticizes this as too simplistic and I see on closer inspection that this is, in fact, the case. Rather, he seems to me to be saying that a traceable lineage of struggle is present in every event we can examine. And he seems to think that this is useful, somehow (to use "tactically"). And how is it useful?
By comparison, then, and in contrast to the various projects which aim to inscribe knowledges in the hierarchical order of power associated with science, a genealogy should be seen as a kind of attempt to emancipate historical knowledges from that subjection, to render them, that is, capable of opposition and of struggle against the coercion of a theoretical, unitary, formal and scientific discourse. It is based on a reactivation of local knowledges - of minor knowledges, as Deleuze might call them - in opposition to the scientific hierarchisation of knowledges and the effects intrinsic to their power: this, then, is the project of these disordered and fragmentary genealogies. If we were to characterise it in two terms, then 'archaeology' would be the appropriate methodology of this analysis of local discursivities, and 'genealogy' would be the tactics whereby, on the basis of the descriptions of these local discursivities, the subjected knowledges which were thus released would be brought into play.In this description, and in all others that I read, the only use to which Foucault suggests the newly-freed knowledges ought be put is: to "bring them into play." And to what end? He does not say, other than to do history. And also maybe to fight the power.
From the inherent struggle-ness of all things, Foucault is especially concerned with claims to legitimacy that the organized and hierarchical sciences make, which become apparent in the examination of how those hierarchies treat opposing views. And in thinking about the way that "knowledge" (savoir) involves claims to authority, we come to "power" (pouvoir).
[With respect to people claiming Marxism is a science:] What types of knowledge do you want to disqualify in the very instant of your demand: 'Is it a science'? . .. [W]hich subjects of experience and knowledge-do you then want to 'diminish' . . . Which theoretical-political avant garde do you want to enthrone in order to isolate it from all the discontinuous forms of knowledge that circulate about it? . . . you are investing [your views] with the effects of a power which the West since Medieval times has attributed to science and has reserved for those engaged in scientific discourse.Anybody else would probably go ahead and define power-knowledge now, but not Michel Foucault. Instead, he heads off on a very long characterization of the history of the concept of power that I am not going to reproduce because, like all lengthy characterizations, it's pretty uninteresting. What I can say is that with respect to knowledge but also apparently in every other respect, Foucault wants to re-examine and criticize the study of power. He describes all prior study of power as either 1) a rights-based conception that treats power as a kind of stuff to be traded, and 2) some kind of force to produce Marxist historical-economic destiny ("Is [power's] essential end and purpose to serve the economy? Is it destined to realise, consolidate, maintain and reproduce the relations appropriate to the economy and essential to its functioning?"). He also takes issue with the idea that power is that which represses, in the Freudian sense, though he says he's used the idea himself a lot.
He has something else in mind, which really seems like the whole point of his huge digression into characterizing other peoples' conceptions of power. His point is that power is war, sort of. He asks whether it might not be the case that "relations of power that function in a society such as ours essentially rest upon a definite relation of forces that is established at a determinate, historically specifiable moment, in war and by war." He describes political power as that which "puts an end to war," by installing, or trying to install
the reign of peace in civil society, [which] by no means implies that it suspends the effects of war or neutralises the disequilibrium revealed in the final battle. The role of political power, on this hypothesis, is perpetually to reinscribe this relation through a form of unspoken warfare; to re-inscribe it in social institutions, in economic inequalities, in language, in the bodies themselves of each and everyone of us. [This] consists in seeing politics as sanctioning and upholding the disequilibrium of forces that was displayed in war [and] that none of the political struggles, the conflicts waged over power, with power, for power, the alterations in the relations of forces, the favouring of certain tendencies, the reinforcements etc., etc., that come about within this 'civil peace' -that none of these phenomena in a political system should be interpreted except as the continuation of war. They should, that is to say, be understood as episodes, factions and displacements in that same war. Even when one writes the history of peace and its institutions, it is always the history of this war that one is writing.Mind boom! This is a powerful idea. It is remarkably absolutist given his proclaimed aversion to global totalitarian theories (which his own has absolutely become). And I know it is not uniquely his, though it is well stated here. He ascribes it to Nietzche, but says he is not totally satisfied to leave things here.
To review:
* Global theorizing dominates subjugated knowledges.
* New insight is coming mostly from the latter today (1977).
* Everywhere we look, we can see that the thing we are looking at bears the marks of struggle. Genealogy.
* Power can be understood as a sort of repression, but that might not be wholly satisfactory.
Ultimately he is leading toward, or working around, the concept known today as power/knowledge. That any claim to truth involves an exercise of power, and any exercise of power involves a claim to truth. This is le pouvoir-savoir - the inescapable interconnectedness of knowledge and power. The next challenge is to locate where this stuff lies (and spoiler alert: it's everywhere).
Lecture Two: 14 January 1976
locus of investigation - individual motives - individual actors-in-power - infinitesimal elements - the simultaneous unimportance and importance of the specifics
It is pretty clear that regardless of whether Foucault was the first to say it, the idea that power is hidden in everything has permeated intellectual and academic discipline and dialogue for decades upon decades. And this reminds me very strongly about the argument between D'Andrade and Scheper-Hughes (among others), about what the ramifications of this might be. I could reinterpret D'Andrade as saying, on the one hand, that the purpose of science is to elucidate these relationships, while Scheper-Hughes is saying that the purpose is to do something about those relationships once seen. Perhaps. [edited to add: having now read Kenneth Burke, I could also see D'Andrade as arguing for anthropologist as sufferer of truth (scene), and Scheper-Hughes for anthropologist as tragic hero (agent). Perhaps.].
And so it is interesting that Foucault seems to take sides in this debate, in his own, weird, way. He does so by setting out a series of "methodological precautions" that, within themselves, appear to be participating in this metalogue. And I think he really nails it.
"there were a certain number of methodological precautions that seemed requisite to its pursuit"
1. In full:
it seemed important to accept that the analysis in question [power/knowledge] should not concern itself with the regulated and legitimate forms of power in their central locations, with the general mechanisms through which they operate, and the continual effects of these. On the contrary, it should be concerned with power at its extremities, in its ultimate destinations, with those points where it becomes capillary, that is, in its more regional and local forms and institutions. Its paramount concern, in fact, should be with the point where power surmounts the rules of right which organise and delimit it and extends itself beyond them, invests itself in institutions, becomes embodied in techniques, and equips itself with instruments and eventually even violent means of material intervention. To give an example: rather than try to discover where and how the right of punishment is founded on sovereignty, how it is presented in the theory of monarchical right or in that of democratic right, I have tried to see in what ways punishment and the power of punishment are effectively embodied in a certain number of local, regional, material institutions, which are concerned with torture or imprisonment, and to place these in the climate-at once institutional and physical, regulated and violent-of the effective apparatuses of punishment. In other words, one should try to locate power at the extreme points of its exercise, where it is always less legal in character.Foucault is opposing the study of power as a centralized sovereignty. This is all theoretical and abstract and incorrect, he says. So stop paying attention to the king, and eye ye toward the gendarmes. He appears to advocate for an understanding of on-the-ground, execution-by-burning-tire, who-is-lighting-the-match-and-how-did-that-happen sorts of historical-sociological inquiries. He might say, then, that the political theories that legitimize or interrogate the the event of a necklacing are of very little use in describing its causalities. The point is that there is an exercise of power involved. The grand unifying theory is not the cause, but the result.
Turning toward environmentalism for a moment, this has very interesting implications for the study both of extractive industry and environmental politics and regulation. It is quite familiar to define the industrial act as an exercise of power - that is celebrated. The tearing into the earth, the imposition, the dominance. Foucault perhaps would find this expressed most fully in the mineshaft, upon which the edifice of entire governments may be built, and where power flows both out of and into the ground. But the new thing perhaps is that the imposition of that power, in both directions, has left the scars, in both directions, of subjugated earth-knowledge and subjugated humanism. And in contraposition environmentalism rises insurrectionist from those same scars, and may be understood as the continuation of the war against man and nature.
What I hoped, at this point, is that Foucault is not suggesting that we should focus only on the extremities of power, i.e., the people lighting the tires or working in the mine. For at what point do we cross over irrevocably to unanswerable questions about human nature and psychology and individual motivation, when all we are looking at are the people at the endpoint? And he was ready for me.
2. In relevant part:
A second methodological precaution urged that the analysis should not concern itself with power at the level of conscious intention or decision; that it should not attempt to consider power from its internal point of view and that it should refrain from posing the labyrinthine and unanswerable question: 'Who then has power and what has he in mind? What is the aim of someone who possesses power?' Instead, it is a case of studying power at the point where its intention, if it has one, is completely invested in its real and effective practices. What is needed is a study of power in its external visage, at the point where it is in direct and immediate relationship with that which we can provisionally call its object, its target, its field of application, there- that is to say-where it installs itself and produces its real effects. Let us not, therefore, ask why certain people want to dominate, what they seek, what is their overall strategy. Let us ask, instead, how things work at the level of on-going subjugation, at the level of those continuous and uninterrupted processes which subject our bodies, govern our gestures, dictate our behaviours etc. . . .He does not appear to be saying that motive is irrelevant, but rather that it is unknowable ("the labyrinthine and unanswerable question."). Rather, the proof is in the occurrence, the actus reus rather than mens rea, what happened rather than what was meant. He is interested, he says, in "how things work," which I take to mean, again, the history of the event. Which may contain a genealogy of struggle-ness that can be located, even when the motive cannot be, and likely will be visible in the actual actions of actual people in the actual world.
And the next question is if we are to look at the gendarmes, but not the minds of the gendarmes, then is he saying that we should just look at the gendarmes? No. He seems to be saying to look at the gendarmes first.
3. In part:
A third methodological precaution relates to the fact that power is not to be taken to be a phenomenon of one individual's consolidated and homogeneous domination over others, or that of one group or class over others. What, by contrast, should always be kept in mind is that power, if we do not take too distant a view of it, is not that which makes the difference between those who exclusively possess and retain it, and those who do not have it and submit to it. Power must by analysed as something which circulates, or rather as something which only functions in the form of a chain. It is never localised here or there, never in anybody's hands, never appropriated as a commodity or piece of wealth. Power is employed and exercised through a net-like organisation. And not only do individuals circulate between its threads; they are always in the position of simultaneously undergoing and exercising this power. They are not only its inert or consenting target; they are always also the elements of its articulation. . . . The individual, that is, is not the vis-a-vis of power; it is, I believe, one of its prime effects. The individual is an effect of power, and at the same time, or precisely to the extent to which it is that effect, it is the element of its articulation. The individual which power has constituted is at the same time its vehicle.This was less clear (the last bit about the individual, I do not get). But what I do take from this is that the gendarmerie, in its individuals and its aggregate, is both a force of suppression and a suppressed force; they/it exist(s) within a network or ecology of power relationships that are the reason for everything they do. And so does everything else.
4. And finally, this is the important one. So I'm going to take it in full. The historical rising-and-gathering-together-ness of power relationships.
There is a fourth methodological precaution that follows from this: when I say that power establishes a network through which it freely circulates, this is true only up to a certain point. In much the same fashion we could say that therefore we all have a fascism in our heads, or, more profoundly, that we all have a power in our bodies. But I do not believe that one should conclude from that that power is the best distributed thing in the world, although in some sense that is indeed so. We are not dealing with a sort of democratic or anarchic distribution of power through bodies. That is to say, it seems to me - and this then would be the fourth methodological precaution - that the important thing is not to attempt some kind of deduction of power starting from its centre and aimed at the discovery of the extent to which it permeates into the base, of the degree to which it reproduces itself down to and including the most molecular elements of society. One must rather conduct an ascending analysis of power, starting, that is, from its infinitesimal mechanisms, which each have their own history, their own trajectory, their own techniques and tactics, and then see how these mechanisms of power have been - and continue to be - invested, colonised, utilised, involuted, transformed, displaced, extended etc., by ever more general mechanisms and by forms of global domination.
It is not that this global domination extends itself right to the base in a plurality of repercussions: I believe that the manner in which the phenomena, the techniques and the procedures of power enter into play at the most basic levels must be analysed, that the way in which these procedures are displaced, extended and altered must certainly be demonstrated; but above all what must be shown is the manner in which they are invested and annexed by more global phenomena and the subtle fashion in which more general powers or economic interests are able to engage with these technologies that are at once both relatively autonomous of power and act as its infinitesimal elements.The subject of all of this are the "phenomena, the techniques, and the procedures of power." The historical, verifiable, objective aspect of power existential. Foucault seems to be saying that power exists at a micro level, and is recruited or absorbed ("invested and annexed") by "more global" or "more general powers or economic interests." There is, somehow, a relationship of structure or hierarchy by which micro-elements of power (the technologies, the "infinitesimal elements") are aggregated or accumulated together. A violence between two, times a million, makes a movement, or a government.
In order to make this clearer, one might cite the example of madness. The descending type of analysis, the one of which I believe one ought to be wary, will say that the bourgeoisie has, since the sixteenth or seventeenth century, been the dominant class; from this premise, it will then set out to deduce the internment of the insane. One can always make this deduction, it is always easily done and that is precisely what I would hold against it. It is in fact a simple matter to show that since lunatics are precisely those persons who are useless to industrial production, one is obliged to dispense with them. One could argue similarly in regard to infantile sexuality- and several thinkers, including Wilhelm Reich have indeed sought to do so up to a certain point. Given the domination of the bourgeois class, how can one understand the repression of infantile sexuality? Well, very simply - given that the human body had become essentially a force of production from the time of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, all the forms of its expenditure which did not lend themselves to the constitution of the productive forces - and were therefore exposed as redundant- were banned, excluded and repressed.
These kinds of deduction are always possible. They are simultaneously correct and false. Above all they are too glib, because one can always do exactly the opposite and show, precisely by appeal to the principle of the dominance of the bourgeois class, that the forms of control of infantile sexuality could in no way have been predicted. On the contrary, it is equally plausible to suggest that what was needed was sexual training, the encouragement of a sexual precociousness, given that what was fundamentally at stake was the constitution of a labour force whose optimal state, as we well know, at least at the beginning of the nineteenth century, was to be infinite: the greater the labour force, the better able would the system of capitalist production have been to fulfil and improve its functions.
I believe that anything can be deduced from the general phenomenon of the domination of the bourgeois class.This is, in a nutshell, the D'Andrade critique of the militant anthropology. Sloppy deduction is bad science. And it is fascinating to read Foucault and see that he is warning against the very use to which his own work is often put. To deduce from the universal existence of power dynamics an oppression to be condemned and remedied seems like a perfectly nature extension of what he is saying, except that he said not to do it. What, then, is the alternative?
What needs to be done is something quite different. One needs to investigate historically, and beginning from the lowest level, how mechanisms of power have been able to function. In regard to the confinement of the insane, for example, or the repression and interdiction of sexuality, we need to see the manner in which, at the effective level of the family, of the immediate environment, of the cells and most basic units of society, these phenomena of repression or exclusion possessed their instruments and their logic, in response to a certain number of needs. We need to identify the agents responsible for them, their real agents (those which constituted the immediate social entourage, the family, parents, doctors etc.), and not be content to lump them under the formula of a generalised bourgeoisie. We need to see how these mechanisms of power, at a given moment, in a precise conjuncture and by means of a certain number of transformations, have begun to become economically advantageous and politically useful. I think that in this way one could easily manage to demonstrate that what the bourgeoisie needed, or that in which its system discovered its real interests, was not the exclusion of the mad or the surveillance and prohibition of infantile masturbation (for, to repeat, such a system can perfectly well tolerate quite opposite practices), but rather, the techniques and procedures themselves of such an exclusion. It is the mechanisms of that exclusion that are necessary, the apparatuses of surveillance, the medicalisation of sexuality, of madness, of delinquency, all the micro-mechanisms of power, that came, from a certain moment in time, to represent the interests of the bourgeoisie. Or even better, we could say that to the extent to which this view of the bourgeoisie and of its interests appears to lack content, at least in regard to the problems with which we are here concerned, it reflects the fact that it was not the bourgeoisie itself which thought that madness had to be excluded or infantile sexuality repressed. What in fact happened instead was that the mechanisms of the exclusion of madness, and of the surveillance of infantile sexuality, began from a particular point in time, and for reasons which need to be studied, to reveal their political usefulness and to lend themselves to economic profit, and that as a natural consequence, all of a sudden, they came to be colonised and maintained by global mechanisms and the entire State system. It is only if we grasp these techniques of power and demonstrate the economic advantages or political utility that derives from them in a given context for specific reasons, that we can understand how these mechanisms come to be effectively incorporated into the social whole.Mind boom part two! Foucault edition!
I was not expecting to find in Foucault a passionate defense of inductive history, of evidence-based case-making. Of briefcraft, for the love of it. Yet here it is. Who benefits from this arrangement? Let us examine it and trace its origins, step by step. I love it. And this, I must admit, surprised me most deeply.
To review:
* look at the facts on the ground, and you will find power there
* don't worry about motive, it's hopeless
* remember that power is an omnidirectional network
* trace upwards
Truth and Power: The Interview
power/knowledge
I cannot imagine how insufferable it would be to have to sit in a room with these three as they talked to each other. But again, within the length and abstraction, structure does emerge.
As I am rather running out of steam at the moment, I am going to drop some text blocks and come back and think about them later.
on the nature of history (one of my favorite bits)
One can agree that structuralism formed the most systematic effort to evacuate the concept of the event, not only from ethnology but from a whole series of other sciences and in the extreme case from history. In that sense, I don't see who could be more of an anti-structuralist than myself. But the important thing is to avoid trying to do for the event what was previously done with the concept of structure. It's not a matter of locating everything on one level, that of the event, but of realising that there are actually a whole order of levels of different types of events differing in amplitude, chronological breadth, and capacity to produce effects. The problem is at once to distinguish among events, to differentiate the networks and levels to which they belong, and to reconstitute the lines along which they are connected and engender one another. From this follows a refusal of analyses couched in terms of the symbolic field or the domain of signifying structures, and a recourse to analyses in terms of the genealogy of relations of force, strategic developments, and tactics. Here I believe one's point of reference should not be to the great model of language (langue) and signs, but to that of war and battle. The history which bears and determines us has the form of a war rather than that of a language: relations of power, not relations of meaning. History has no 'meaning', though this is not to say that it is absurd or incoherent. On the contrary, it is intelligible and should be susceptible of analysis down to the smallest detail- but this in accordance with the intelligibility of struggles, of strategies and tactics. Neither the dialectic, as logic of contradictions, nor semiotics, as the structure of communication, can account for the intrinsic intelligibility of conflicts. 'Dialectic' is a way of evading always open and hazardous reality of conflict by reducing it to a Hegelian skeleton, and 'semiology' is a way of avoiding its violent, bloody and lethal character by reducing it to the calm Platonic form of language and dialogue.
and
I wanted to see how these problems of constitution could be
resolved within a historical framework, instead of referring
them back to a constituent object (madness, criminality or
whatever). But this historical contextualisation needed to be
something more than the simple relativisation of the
phenomenological subject. I don't believe the problem can
be solved by historicising the subject as posited by the
phenomenologists, fabricating a subject that evolves through
the course of history. One has to dispense with the constituent
subject, to get rid of the subject itself, that's to say,
to arrive at an analysis which can account for the constitution
of the subject within a historical framework. And this is
what I would call genealogy, that is, a form of history which
can account for the constitution of knowledges, discourses,
domains of objects etc., without having to make reference to
a subject which is either transcendental in relation to the
field of events or runs in its empty sameness throughout the
course of history.
on the difficulty of ideology and repression as useful concepts
The notion of ideology appears to me to be difficult to make
use of, for three reasons. The first is that, like it or not, it
always stands in virtual opposition to something else which
is supposed to count as truth. Now I believe that the
problem does not consist in drawing the line between that in
a discourse which falls under the category of scientificity or
truth, and that which comes under some other category, but
in seeing historically how effects of truth are produced
within discourses which in themselves are neither true nor
false. The second drawback is that the concept of ideology
refers, I think necessarily, to something of the order of a
subject. Thirdly, ideology stands in a secondary position
relative to something which functions as its infrastructure,
as its material, economic determinant, etc. For these three
reasons, I think that this is a notion that cannot be used
without circumspection
The notion of repression is a more insidious one, or at
all events I myself have had much more trouble in freeing
myself of it, in so far as it does indeed appear to correspond
so well with a whole range of phenomena which belong
among the effects of power. When I wrote Madness and
Civilisation, I made at least an implicit use of this notion of
repression. I think indeed that I was positing the existence
of a sort of living, voluble and anxious madness which the
mechanisms of power and psychiatry were supposed to have
come to repress and reduce to silence. But it seems to me
now that the notion of repression is quite inadequate for
capturing what is precisely the productive aspect of power.
In defining the effects of power as repression, one adopts a
purely juridical conception of such power, one identifies
power with a law which says no, power is taken above all as
carrying the force of a prohibition. Now I believe that this is
a wholly negative, narrow, skeletal conception of power,
one which has been curiously widespread. If power were
never anything but repressive, if it never did anything but to
say no, do you really think one would be brought to obey it?
What makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is
simply the fact that it doesn't only weigh on us as a force
that says no, but that it traverses and produces things, it
induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse. It
needs to be considered as a productive network which runs
through the whole social body, much more than as a
negative instance whose function is repression. In Discipline
and Punish what I wanted to show was how, from the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries onwards, there was a
veritable technological take-off in the productivity of power.
Not only did the monarchies of the Classical period develop
great state apparatuses (the army, the police and fiscal
administration), but above all there was established at this
period what one might call a new 'economy' of power, that
is to say procedures which allowed the effects of power to
circulate in a manner at once continuous, uninterrupted,
adapted and 'individualised' throughout the entire social
body. These new techniques are both much more efficient
and much less wasteful (less costly economically, less risky
in their results, less open to loopholes and resistances) than
the techniques previously employed which were based on a
mixture of more or less forced tolerances (from recognised
privileges to endemic criminality) and costly ostentation
(spectacular and discontinuous interventions of power, the
most violent form of which was the 'exemplary', because
exceptional, punishment).
power/knowledge
\Finally, a question you have been asked before: the
work you do, these preoccupations of yours, the results
you arrive at, what use can one finally make of all this in
everyday political struggles? You have spoken previously
of local struggles as the specific site of confrontation
with power, outside and beyond all such global,
general instances as parties or classes. What does this
imply about the role of intellectuals? If one isn.'t an
'organic' intellectual acting as the spokesman for a
global organisation, if one doesn't purport to function
as the bringer, the master of truth, what position is the
intellectual to assume?/
One may even say that the role of the specific intellectual must
become more and more important in proportion to the
political responsibilities which he is obliged willy-nilly to
accept, as a nuclear scientist, computer expert, pharmacologist,
etc. It would be a dangerous error to discount him
politically in his specific relation to a local form of power,
either on the grounds that this is a specialist matter which
doesn't concern the masses (which is doubly wrong: they are
already aware of it, and in any case implicated in it), or that
the specific intellectual serves the interests of State or
Capital (which is true, but at the same time shows the
strategic position he occupies), or, again, on the grounds
that he propagates a scientific ideology (which isn't always
true, and is anyway certainly a secondary matter compared
with the fundamental point: the effects proper to true
discourses)
The important thing here, I believe, is that truth isn't
outside power, or lacking in power: contrary to a myth
whose history and functions would repay further study,
truth isn't the reward of free spirits, the child of protracted
solitude, nor the privilege of those who have succeeded in
liberating themselves. Truth is a thing of this world: it is
produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint.
And it induces regular effects of power. Each society has its
regime of truth, its 'general politics' of truth: that is, the
types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as
true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to
distinguish true and false statements, the means by which
each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded
value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are
charged with saying what counts as true.
In societies like ours, the 'political economy' of truth is
characterised by five important traits. 'Truth' is centred on
the form of scientific discourse and the institutions which
produce it; it is subject to constant economic and political
incitement (the demand for truth, as much for economic
production as for political power); it is the object, under
diverse forms, of immense diffusion and consumption
(circulating through apparatuses of education and information
whose extent is relatively broad in the social body, not
withstanding certain strict limitations); it is produced and
transmitted under the control, dominant if not exclusive, of
a few great political and economic apparatuses (university,
army, writing, media); lastly, it is the issue of a whole
political debate and social confrontation ('ideological'
struggles) .
It seems to me that what must now be taken into account
in the intellectual is not the 'bearer of universal values'.
Rather, it's the person occupying a specific position-but
whose specificity is linked, in a society like ours, to the
general functioning of an apparatus of truth. In other words,
the intellectual has a three-fold specificity: that of his class
position (whether as petty-bourgeois in the service of
capitalism or 'organic' intellectual of the proletariat); that of
his conditions of life and work, linked to his condition as an
intellectual (his field of research, his place in a laboratory,
the political and economic demands to which he submits or
against which he rebels, in the university, the hospital, etc.);
lastly, the specificity of the politics of truth in our societies.
And it's with this last factor that his position can take on a
general significance and that his local, specific struggle can
have effects and implications which are not simply professional
or sectoral. The intellectual can operate and struggle
at the general level of that regime of truth which is so
essential to the structure and functioning of our society.
There is a battle 'for truth', or at least 'around truth' - it
being understood once again that by truth I do not mean
'the ensemble of truths which are to be discovered and
accepted', but rather 'the ensemble of rules according to
which the true and the false are separated and specific
effects of power attached to the true', it being understood
also that it's not a matter of a battle 'on behalf' of the truth,
but of a battle about the status of truth and the economic
and political role it plays. It is necessary to think of the
political problems of intellectuals not in terms of 'science'
and 'ideology', but in terms of 'truth' and 'power'. And thus
the question of the professionalisation of intellectuals and
the division between intellectual and manual labour can be
envisaged in a new way.
All this must seem very confused and uncertain. Uncertain
indeed, and what I am saying here is above all to be
taken as a hypothesis. In order for it to be a little less
confused, however, I would like to put forward a few
Truth and Power 133
'propositions' - not firm assertions, but simply suggestions
to be further tested and evaluated.
'Truth' is to be understood as a system of ordered
procedures for the production, regulation, distribution,
circulation and operation of statements.
'Truth' is linked in a circular relation with systems of
power which produce and sustain it, and to effects of power
which it induces and which extend it. A 'regime' of truth.
This regime is not merely ideological or superstructural; it
was a condition of the formation and development of
capitalism. And it's this same regime which, subject to
certain modifications, operates in the socialist countries (I
leave open here the question of China, about which 1 know
little).
The essential political problem for the intellectual is not
to criticise the ideological contents supposedly linked to
science, or to ensure that his own scientific practice is
accompanied by a correct ideology, but that of ascertaining
the possibility of constituting a new politics of truth. The
problem is not changing people's consciousnesses-or
what's in their heads- but the political, economic, institutional
regime of the production of truth.
It's not a matter of emancipating truth from every system
of power (which would be a chimera, for truth is already
power) but of detaching the power of truth from the forms
of hegemony, social, economic and cultural, within which it
operates at the present time.
Ultimately, this does appear to be a claim for the value of demystification, although for what exactly, who knows. But if you want to understand the world, Foucault had a more interesting take on how to go about it than anybody else I've read recently.
Update 10/18/2018
Rather than subject myself to the remainder of the Foucauldian ouvre unfiltered, I next read Schwan & Schapiro, How to Read Foucault's Discipline and Punish (2011). As I read it during car rides and hikes, I did not take notes. I will mark here simply that I found the first two sections heavy going, and the third and fourth much lighter fare. In the Discipline analysis, I was reminded more strongly than ever of James Scott's Seeing Like a State. I was also brought low with the extent to which I, while teaching, may participate in the disciplining of my students, not in the now-synonymous sense of punishment, but in the Foucauldian sense of regimentation and self-control. Describing society as a series of prison-like boxes which set inscrutable standards against which we are expected to throw ourselves sounds a little too familiar.
I marked out a couple passages as well, that I found compelling:
* Foucault also insists that we should not think of ‘the individual’ as simply an ‘ideological representation’ or falsehood, since it is a ‘reality fabricated by this specific technology of power’ that he calls ‘discipline’ (194). He argues that we need to stop thinking in terms of power as a force that is negative, as something that ‘excludes’, ‘represses’, ‘censors’, ‘abstracts’, ‘masks’, or ‘conceals’ (a notion that Foucault calls the ‘Repressive Hypothesis’ in his next work, known in English as The History of Sexuality: Volume I). More succinctly, he simply states here that power ‘produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production’ (194).
This is similar to his early claim that the exam, with its hierarchical surveillance and normalizing judgment, made possible the techniques of ‘distribution and classification, maximum extraction of forces and time, continuous genetic accumulation, optimum combination of aptitudes and, thereby, the fabrication of cellular, organic, genetic and combinatory individuality’ (192).
The notion that expressing our individuality is a feature of our weakness, rather than our strength, will be surprising to many. Foucault radically implies that the politics of personal identity, from the late 1960s onward, was a mistake, given that in the modern system of discipline we could say that to be marked as having an identity is a feature of disempowerment. It might be worth considering this claim in relation to the new social networks, where people display their likes and dislikes on the internet. Does not this invite others to judge, and implicitly normalize, us? By laying bare and constantly recording our personalities, are we not complicit in our own imprisonment?And:
Why would the prison system want to increase the production of criminals? Foucault’s explanation for this is that this production was strategically useful for helping to establish and consolidate bourgeois domination. The impetus for penal reform in the late eighteenth century had been ‘the struggle against illegalities’ (273), but in spite of the codes that Foucault describes in Part Two on Punishment, a new ‘popular illegality’ began to develop in the movements between 1780 and the Revolution of 1848. This rising form of illegality was far more threatening than the older version of tolerated illegality, because the newer version was increasingly politicized and directed against middle-class rule. The modern forms of illegality from the Revolution onward increasingly ‘linked together social conflicts, the struggles against the political régimes, the resistance to the movement of industrialization, the effects of the economic crises’ (273). There was a three-fold process of politicized resistance in a new mode of illegality.
Firstly, Foucault speaks of ‘the development of the political dimension of popular illegalities’ (273). This change of perspective happened as previously local practices of resistance, like refusing to pay taxes, popular attacks on food hoarders and forcing shop-keepers to sell products for reasonable prices in times of shortages became, during this period, a feature of ‘directly political struggles, whose aim was not simply to extract concessions from the state or to rescind some intolerable measure, but to change the government and the very structure of power’ (273). In other words, popular resistance moved beyond seeking reforms to demanding revolution, and illegal practices were one manifestation of these demands.
Secondly, this ‘political dimension of illegality’ grew more complex as it became increasingly linked with and articulated into working-class struggles (‘strikes, prohibited coalitions, illegal associations’, 273) and the popular republican political parties that grew with every attempt by the state to restrict them through new laws. With this passage, the working class’s fights were increasingly less against particular ‘agents of injustice’ (274) – the police, judges, or ministers – and more against the very concept of the law and justice itself, specifically the model of law and justice as established by the increasingly dominant bourgeoisie and their mode of capitalist production. After practising ‘illegality’ by resisting Ancien Régime laws, plebeians moved to a political recognition that the new bourgeois concept of liberal ‘justice’ was usually class-defined (for example with the laws against unions) and therefore justice was not neutral, but biased in favour of certain classes. Consequently, ‘[a] whole series of illegalities was inscribed in struggles in which those struggling knew that they were confronting both the law and the class that had imposed it’ (274). The lower classes began to see criminals as their comrades, rather than alien others, in class struggles against the wealthy.
Lastly, the result of new forms of law put into place by state, landowners, or employers was to increase the ‘occasions of offences’ (275) and place individuals who would otherwise not have committed crimes into positions where they were either accused of doing so or had, willingly or not, turned to illegal activities. As authorities implicitly forced the ‘honest’ poor towards crime for survival, they unwittingly facilitated communication between different social groups, as those who normally would not have thought of themselves as similar to criminals began to align themselves more sympathetically with their fate.
With this ‘threefold diffusion of popular illegalities’ at the turn of the nineteenth century came their ‘insertion in a general political outlook’ and a new relationship between crime and ‘social struggles’ developed, even if Foucault does not see evidence of a full-fledged ‘massive movement of illegality that was both political and social’ (275). While ‘the possible overthrow of power’ was not inherent in all these forms of popular illegalities, ‘a good many were able to turn themselves to account in overall political struggles and sometimes even to lead directly to them’ (274).
Not surprisingly then, in this climate, the middle classes, throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, felt increasing anxiety about the working class as an ‘immoral and outlaw class’ (275). Foucault suggests that such fears facilitated a significant shift from the eighteenth century, which had felt that the interests or drives towards crime could belong to anyone, to a more explicitly class-coded concern that criminals overwhelmingly come from the lower classes.
Quoting from several legal sources written in the early nineteenth century, Foucault notes that ‘law and justice’ barely hide their ‘class dissymmetry’ (276). He argues that the middle class isolated ‘one form of illegality’ and helped ‘to organize [it] as a relatively enclosed, but penetrable, milieu’ (276). The form of illegality that it cultivates to neutralize the other, more political and popular forms of illegality, is ‘delinquency’ (277). Delinquency is ‘an illegality that the “carceral system”’ has cultivated and inserted into society as a tactic. ‘In short, although the juridical opposition is between legality and illegal practice, the strategic opposition is between illegalities and delinquency’ (277).
Thus, prison cannot be considered as failing when it produces the ‘pathologized subject’ of crime in the form of the delinquent, which is a ‘specific type, a politically or economically less dangerous – and, on occasion, usable – form of illegality’ (277). While those in favour of prisons might say that they want to diminish illegality, they actually, as Foucault claims, use the material architecture of the prison and its mechanisms of gaining knowledge over its inhabitants as a device to increase delinquency outside of prison. Why?
If the tight space of the prison is a laboratory for the creation of delinquency, middle-class interests can produce ‘[d]elinquency, controlled illegality,’ to work on behalf of the ‘illegality of the dominant groups’ (279). What makes the transformation of illegality into delinquency ‘useful’ for middle-class and capitalist interests? Firstly, there are financial benefits, for instance through the prostitution industry or, more recently, arms or drug trafficking: ‘the delinquent milieu was in complicity with a self-interested Puritanism: an illicit fiscal agent operating over illegal practices… the existence of a legal prohibition creates around it a field of illegal practices, which one manages to supervise, while extracting from it an illicit profit’ (279–80).
Secondly, delinquents are useful because they act as a means for authorities to supervise the ‘vague, swarming mass of a population’ by inserting individuals within this population who can be forced to be informers, since they are in the post-penal phase of supervision of ‘constant surveillance’ (278) and vulnerable to being threatened with the loss of freedom and return to prison. Similarly, delinquents can insert illegalities, like prostitution or drug use, into working-class neighbourhoods in ways that can effectively disrupt their internal cohesion, by destroying families, for instance, and political organization by working-class activists. A more recent example might be how black civil rights was thrown off-track by the rise in heroin and crack cocaine dealing, which seems never to have been ‘handled’ properly by the police. Delinquents can also be sent as a labouring force to the colonies, although Foucault does not consider this the main factor.
Delinquency is also a useful way of destroying working-class and left-wing political resistance because delinquents have a ‘political use’ as police informers and agents provocateurs (people who stir up trouble for the police to react with force), as a clandestine, informal police force that can collect information on people and neighbourhoods otherwise impenetrable by the police (280). Delinquents also allow for ‘the infiltration of political parties and workers’ associations, the recruitment of thugs against strikers and rioters’ (280), and here Foucault cites Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon that describes how Napoleon’s nephew seized power, in ways prescient of how twentieth-century fascist parties would arm and deploy thugs against left-wing and workers’ parties. In sum, then, Foucault defines delinquency as ‘a diversion of illegality for the illicit circuits of profit and power of the dominant class’ (280).
Not only is the delinquent a useful tool for authorities to penetrate neighbourhoods that might otherwise be difficult for them, even physically, to enter, it is also a cheaper system of control as informal agents are not as costly as salaried ones. The other goal in producing delinquency is that it also justifies authority’s power to control the whole population. Think about how ‘folk devils’ are created to remove civil rights. The idea of ‘protecting’ us from internet paedophiles or terrorists, for instance, opens the way for legislation that the police can read everyone’s mail. Foucault says that the delinquency system allows for the ‘documentary system’ of gathering knowledge to be generalized from its operation in prisons to now be used on the entire population, thus presuming criminality as something that covers everyone. Delinquency acts as ‘a political observatory’; it ‘constitutes a means of perpetual surveillance of the population: an apparatus that makes it possible to supervise, through the delinquents themselves, the whole social field’ (281).
To sum up, prison provides the justification for continuing to survey people after they are released, it acts as a recruiting ground for informers, brings offenders into contact with each other so that they have a network that will help place them outside, and it makes it difficult for criminals to be reintegrated into society, so that it becomes ‘all too easy for former prisoners to carry out the tasks assigned to them’ (282). Delinquency is produced by a combination of the prison and the police, and these three elements (police-prison-delinquency) form a ‘structural feature’ (282) of modern society.
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