Foucault, Michel, & Gordon, Colin. (1980). Power/knowledge : selected interviews and other writings, 1972-1977 (1st American ed.). New York: Pantheon Books.
Truth and Power:
This interview is concerned with Foucault’s understanding of the role of science, and how the ways in which questions are formulated can illuminate or obscure relevant facts. In Foucault’s first answer, he says that, in his examination of science and the ideological functions it aided, his questions always returned to this: power and knowledge (109).
He is critical of the dialectical approach to understanding history, as it, “is a way of evading the 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” (115).
Concerning his genealogical approach, Foucault explains the following: “But this historical contextualization needed to be something more than the simple relativisation of the phenomenological subject. I don’t believe the problem can be solved by historicizing 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” (117).
Foucault then takes issue with the applicability of the idea of ideology for three reasons: “it always stands in virtual opposition to something else which is supposed to count as truth”; “…[it] refers…to something of the order of a subject; and, “…[it] stands in a secondary position relative to something which functions as its infrastructure, as its material, economic determinant” (118).
Power is not just a concept working in the negative, to hold subjects down, etc. Power works and produces things. It, “induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse” (119). These new forms of power that Foucault is highlighting are much more efficient and much less wasteful in their allocation and promotion.
Power is also a concept that is broader than the State. “I don’t want to say that the State isn’t important; what I want to say is that relations of power, and hence the analysis that must be made of them, necessarily extend beyond the limits of the State. In two senses: first of all because the State, for all the omnipotence of its apparatuses, is far from being able to occupy the whole field of actual power relations, and further because the State can only operate on the basis of other, already existing power relations” (122).
There is then a discussion of the role of the intellectual, with a distinction being made between the specific intellectual and the general intellectual.
“The important thing here…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…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” (131).
“In societies like ours, the ‘political economy’ of truth is characterized by five important traits: “…centered on the form of scientific discourse”; “…subject to constant economic and political incitement”; “…object, under diverse forms, of immense diffusion and consumption”; “…produced and transmitted under the control…of a few great political and economic apparatuses”; and, “…it is the issue of a whole political debate and social confrontation” (131-2).
He suggests the following: “’Truth’ is to be understood as a system of ordered procedures for the reproduction, 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 induces and which extend it. A regime of truth. This regime is not merely ideological or super-structural; it was a condition of the formation and development of capitalism” (133).
The key is to divine how to produce new truth. You can not escape power, for truth is always power. It is a matter of discovering how to find emancapatory truth/power, knowledge/power.
