Foucault: Power/Knowledge: Truth and Power

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.

Foucault: Power/Knowledge: Two Lectures

Foucault, Michel, & Gordon, Colin. (1980). Power/knowledge : selected interviews and other writings, 1972-1977 (1st American ed.). New York: Pantheon Books.

Two Lectures:

He begins by outlining some of his research projects, and moves to identifying an “increasing vulnerability to criticism of things” (80). “So, the main point to be gleaned from these events of the last fifteen years, their predominant feature, is the local character of criticism” (81).

Foucault also identifies a “return to knowledge”, that he defines at, “a fact that we have repeatedly encountered…an entire thematic to the effect that it is not theory but life that matters not knowledge but reality, not books but money…there is something else to which we are witness, and which we might describe as an insurrection of subjugated knowledges” (81). These subjugated knowledges (both erudite knowledge and popular knowledge) all deal with, “historical knowledge of struggles” (83).

This leads to the emergence of a genealogical approach to research. “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 sue of this knowledge tactically today” (83). “It is not therefore via an empiricism that the genealogical project unfolds…What it really does it to entertain the claims to attention of local, discontinuous, disqualified, illegitimate knowledges against the claims of a unitary body of theory which would filter, hierarchies and order them in the name of some true knowledge and some arbitrary idea of what constitutes a science and its objects. Genealogies are therefore not positivistic returns to a more careful or exact form of science. They are pre3cisely anti-sciences” (83). “…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” (85). “If we were to characterize it in two terms, then ‘archaeology’ would be the appropriate methodology of this analysis of local discursivities, and ‘genealogy’ would be there tactics whereby, on the basis of the descriptions of these local discursivities, the subjected knowledges which were thus released would be brought into play” (85). “What is at stake in all these genealogies is the nature of this power which has surged into view in all its violence, aggression and absurdity in the course of the last forty years, contemporaneously, that is, with the collapse of Fascism and the decline of Stalinism” (87).

Remaining in the first lecture, there is an extended discussion of the nature of power. Power is examined as a construct of economy, and asked whether or not this is not constraining. Power is not simply modeled on the commodity (89), but Foucault wonders how one can conduct a non-economic study of power. Power has been historically seen as a tool of repression, “…repression no longer occupies the place that oppression occupies in relation to the contract, that is, it is not abuse, but is, on the contrary, the mere effect of the continuation of a relation of domination” (92).

In the second lecture, Foucault begins by examine the relations of power, truth and right in the relation to one another like a triangle. “My problem is…: What rules of right are implemented by the relations of power in the production of discourses of truth? (93). “There can be no possible exercise of power without a certain economy of discourses of truth which operates through and on the basis of this association” (93).

Foucault then moves onto the concept of sovereignty. “When we say that sovereignty is the central problem of right in Western societies, what we mean basically is that the essential function of the discourse and techniques of right has been to efface the domination intrinsic to power in order to present that latter at the level of appearance under two different aspects: on the one hand, as the legitimate rights of sovereignty, and on the other, as the legal obligation to obey it” (95).

He then promotes five different methodological precautions to his study, which he summarizes as follows: “I would say that we should direct our researches on the nature of power not towards the juridical edifice of sovereignty…but towards domination and the material operators of power, towards forms of subjection and the inflections and utilizations of their localized systems, and towards strategic apparatuses” (102).

Foucault then goes on to talk about the rupture in the ways in which power has been enforced. It is through surveillance (104), it is the greatest invention of bourgeois society (105), it is crucial for the development of capitalism (105) and it involves the creation of a “society of normalization” (107).

Žižek : Welcome to the Desert of the Real!

Žižek, Slavoj. (2002). Welcome to the desert of the real! : five essays on 11 September and related dates. London ; New York: Verso.

As with many books that I would attempt to summarize, this contains much too much content to do justice in such an abbreviated space. However, because I find this quite helpful, I plod on.

“We ‘feel free’ because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom…our ‘freedoms’ themselves serve to mask and sustain our deeper unfreedom” (2). We are asked, in our enlightened societies, to understand that we are free, but this freedom is also masked by an unfreedom, a requirement to obey, to conform, etc. The same is for the choice of democracy or fundamentalism: you are free to choose whatever you would like, as long as it is liberal democracy. See Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, etc.

This book reads like another Zizek book that I read, Iraq: Borrowed Kettle. It is full of striking insights that challenge the reader on each turn, but it bounces from one to another with such speed and seeming haste that it is less simple to string together a coherent theme. That may just be the point.

He talks about the passion for the real that has engulfed our society, and it can be seen everywhere. We want the real so much that it has become unreal. We drink coffee without caffeine, we have beer without alcohol, we have wars without (our) deaths. In fact, the title of the book comes from the scene in the Matrix when Neo is first confronted with real reality (i.e., outside the scope of the computer’s overt control).

This passion for the real is identified as having a core, and this is, “this identification with—this heroic gesture of fully assuming—the dirty obscene underside of Power: the heroic attitude of ‘Somebody has to do the dirty work, so let’s do it!’, a kind of mirror-reversal of the Beautiful Soul which refuses to recognize itself in its result. We find this stance also in the properly Rightist admiration for the celebration of heroes who are ready to do the necessary dirty work: it is easy to do a noble thing for one’s country, up to sacrificing one’s life for it-it is much more difficult to commit a crime for one’s country…” (30).

This helps to transition to Agamben’s Homo Sacer, the person who can be killed but not sacrificed, the living dead. The passion for the real leads some to be treated differently, as existing entirely outside of the law.

He then looks at the “clash of civilization” thesis that has been punted around since Huntington. He rejects this in favor of a clash within civilizations: The anthrax scare was more than likely the cause of Rightist fundamentalists, for example. It isn’t Bush verses Bin Laden, it is all of us against them. Also, there are those who operate between the civilizations, who take up an almost National Homo Sacer position, like Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

Zizek then examines happiness, claiming that it is the betrayal of desire, and giving three ways in which the Czechoslovakian population of the 70s and 80s was happy: their material needs were satisfied, there was the Party to blame for things that didn’t go well and there was the “Other Place…which one was allowed to dream about, and even visit sometimes” (59). This was all disturbed by desire.

We then are taken on a general critique of liberal democracies and tolerance. One must understand that tolerance is not an absolute, and that a society doesn’t need both strong and weak, rich and poor, victim and torturer. He then goes on to introduce a contemporary version of Homo Sacer: Homo Sucker.

“In the good old German Democratic Republic, it was impossible for the same person to combine three features: conviction ()belief in the official ideology), intelligence, and honesty. If you believed and were intelligent, you were not honest; if you were intelligenta dn honest, you were not a believer; if you were a believer and honest, you were not intelligent. Does not the same also hold for the ideology of liberal democracy? If you (pretend to) take the hegemonic liberal ideology seriously, you cannot be both intelligent and honest: you are either stupid or a corrupted cynic. So, if I may indulge in a rather tasteless allusion to Agamben’s Homo sacer, I can risk the claim that the predominant liberal mode of subjectivity today is Homo sucker: while he tries to exploit and manipulate others, he ends up being the ultimate sucker himself. When we think we are making fun of the ruling ideology, we are merely strengthening its hold over us” (71).

There is a continued critique of liberal democracy, with the final section of the 3^rd chapter making an interesting argument. Regarding the murder of Pim Fortuyn, the Dutch politician who was a blend of Rightist populism and political correctness could not be allowed to live. He was, at the same time, gay, friendly with immigrants, and yet held a Le Pen attitude towards further immigration. “…perhaps he had to die because he was living proof that the opposition between Rightist populism and liberal tolerance is a false one, that we are dealing with two sides of the same coin. Should we not, therefore, be striving for the exact opposite of the unfortunate Fortuyn: not the Fascist with a human face, but the freedom fighter with an inhuman face?” (82).

He continues on to skewer the US and their position on torture, how future wars are not to be fought between nations, but between armies and groups of Homo Sacer, how liberals worked to open the discussion to torture (I’m against it, but…), how we all may be Homo Sacer at the end of the day, etc.

How to break out of this? He highlights the case of IDF forces who refused to fight. This represented an ethical act, an act that ruptured the hegemonic discourse of Israel enjoining the Palestinian armed forces to keep their people under control, then attacking when they can not, then blaming the armed forces for not keeping control and attacking IDF forces. “The point is simply that the IDF reservists’ refusal revealed an aspect of the situation which totally undermines the simple opposition of civilized liberal Israelis fighting Islamic fanatics: the aspect precisely, of reducing a whole nation to the status of Homo sacer, submitting them to a network of written and unwritten regulations which deprive them of their autonomy as members of a political community” (126-7).

The attacks of 9/11 did not represent an evil that was any greater than any other major global tragedy, as they have been made out to represent. They were an attempt to awake the Nietzscian Last Man from his eternal “bliss”.

And much more…

Agamben: Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life

Agamben, Giorgio. (1998). Homo sacer: soverign power and bare life (D. Heller-Roazen, Trans.). Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.

This is an incredibly dense text, and I hesitate to even attempt to create an abstract for it. I continue only through the faith that it will help me return to the text in the future to further my understanding.

The book begins, as many do, on the cover. There is a picture of the architectural plans for the Auschwitz camp made so famous for brutally killing so many. This is what Agamben refers to as the camp. For him, the camp has replaced the city as the totalizing, “fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West” (181).

Agamben’s text is delineated into three sections, each of which is separated by a movement that he calls “Threshold”. The first is an examination of Sovereignty, relying, at least in part on Schmitt’s definition of Sovereignty as being the one who decides on the exception. The second section is an exploration of the idea of Homo Sacer, the person who can not be sacrificed, but who can be killed. The third section highlights the role of the camp in the biopolitical matrix of the West.

He begins his first section by examining the difference between the two Greek meanings of the word “life”. The first is zoe, or life that is common to all living beings. The second is bios, which is a way of living, life tinted with custom. Our zoe has been replaced by a bios; it has been subsumed through the process of biopolitics.

“In particular, the development and triumph of capitalism would not have been possible, from this perspective, without the disciplinary control achieved by the new bio-power, which, through a series of appropriate technologies, so to speak created the “docile bodies” that it needed” (3).

He goes on to say that the, “fundamental categorical pair of Western politics is not that of friend/enemy but that of bare life/political existence, zoe/bios, exclusion/inclusion” (8). This is clearly a response to the Schmittian notion of politics written in The Concept of the Political. This “categorical pair” can be seen in many places, which will be explored later in the book.

The “Paradox of Sovereignty” is then explored. This inconsistency takes place in the nature of sovereignty to be both inside and outside of the juridical order. Agamben then returns to a Schmitt concept and discusses the sovereign’s ability to decide upon the exception. The exception is discussed as being the ban that the sovereign can inflict upon subjects. This ban is, in Agamben’s analysis, evident in a relational form and it highlights the paradox of sovereignty: it can be stated that there is nothing outside of the law, while at the same time the sovereign can place things outside of that law.

This brings us to Home Sacer. This is the person who is the living dead of Agamben’s philosophy. These people have been relegated by the sovereign to be outside of the law, they are people who can not be sacrificed (i.e., they can’t have the privilege of being sacrificed to something greater), but who can be killed. These are the inmates of Guantanamo Bay. These are the undocumented workers who have no legal standing in a society.

Agamben also examines the idea of constituting power and constituted power and eventually relates them to the violence that posits law and the violence that preserves law. Constituted power is power that exists in a structure, i.e., the three branches of government. Constituting power is the potentiality, the power “of the people”. Constituted power is in the state, constituting power is outside of the state.

Homo Sacer and the Sovereign are juxtaposed as representing two sides of the same object: “At the two extreme limits of the order, the sovereign and homo sacer present two symmetrical figures that have the same structure and are correlative: the sovereign is the one with respect to whom all men are potentially hominess sacri, and homo sacer is the one with respect to whom all men act as sovereigns” (84).

The ban is examined in relation to the wolf (lupus, wargus). The ban is broken down etymologically to mean both “at the mercy of” and additionally “out of free will” (110). This duality is also juxtaposed with the idea of bare life, bare existence and how that is compared with ideas of human nature. This is where the grey area between being human and being animal appears.

Life is where the political takes place. This is the elevating of the Foucadian concept of biopolitics to its logical conclusion. The body becomes the template for the acting out of discipline by the sovereign. See: habeas corpus. The entire concept of life has been called into question. Agamben highlights suicide, euthanasia and issues of the beginning and ending of life. The idea of “neomorts” is touched on: those people who have, “the legal status of corpses but would maintain some of the characteristics of life for the sake of future transplants” (164). Eventually, we move into a discussion of eugenics and advances in genetic studies.

“If today there is no longer any one clear figure of the sacred man, it is perhaps because we are all virtually hominess sacri” (115).

There is much to this book that I was not able to cover here. It is excellent and deserves another reading.