Ping Pong 65: Our Power, Their Knowledge
It was Marx paraphrasing Hegel who first remarked that humans set problems which they can themselves then solve. But Marx made this remark in the context of the inevitability of revolutions. It took two hundred years or so for another thinker, this time Foucault, to push this sentiment to its logical conclusion, and to attempt to understand how societies co-evolve with their ability to solve (or at least pose) their own problems. Or to put it as Foucault does, he was the first thinker to take really seriously the idea that human knowledge really was not independent of human society. It rather had to be understood as a product of a dynamic (or set or series of dynamics) within that society. That dynamic, he suggested, needed to be understood in terms of power.
The relationship which Foucault proposed at this point was a dual one. It was systems of power (regal, democratic, bureaucratic) that defined the problems which human understanding took and worked with. That is it was the systems of power in a society that human understanding actually tried to understand. It was societies that then labelled certain actions unacceptable (stealing, murder, bribery, buggery, charging interest, etc), and then attempted to understand why it was that only certain individuals acted in this way, while others did not. Likewise knowledge, about human concerns is designed to something, it has an effect. It will therefore open on power and ultimately be judged as effective or not through it. Power defines the conditions in which knowledge happens, whilst knowledge informs and creates new systems and kinds of power. However by this point it is clear that Foucault uses the words ‘power’ and ‘knowledge’ in a highly nuanced manner which requires some explication of its own. In this Rant I will first examine the nature of Foucault’s take on power and then knowledge, before going on to assess four principles by which these two distinct elements interact, and one way in which that interaction might be resisted.
For Foucault, traditional accounts of power got it all the wrong way around. Power was traditionally thought to be the property of kings, when it ought really to be the affair of the people. Power was for Foucault, the ability which humans have to require or oblige other humans to act in a certain way. If then by word (or physical violence) or threat or fear or custom or whatever, I can oblige another separate individual to act in a certain manner, then I might be said, Foucault argues, to have power over them. This power might be the power to make them confess to a crime, or it might just as easily be the power to persuade them to go for a drink. All society is then infused with such urgencies. A society exists as an interlocking series of power relations, that is, a system by which one human reaches across the void and requires other humans to act in some manner.
Such power then in contrast to that of the state bubbles up from below. It is created then not in abstract formulae and nice little treatises on government, but rather is the stuff of day to day action. But far more problematically, power understood in this way is not something to assume that one has or anything that one can hoard. On the contrary it exists only in action and the ability to use it. Theoretically Gordon Brown is therefore very powerful, and very hard to remove. That is, as he wields power as Prime Minister he has all the powers of the state at his disposal, and really could sort out corruption, if not the economy. And yet of course it is not that simple. His power actually only lasts as long as he can take his colleagues and the country with him. It has then a flaw of needing the trust and operation of others, to work. He needs then, Foucault’s second type of power, the power that bubbles up from people to govern effectively, and it is of course just this power that he has lost all claim to.
Knowledge is likewise for Foucault problematic and frequently misunderstood. Knowledge needs to be viewed (or at least it does when it exclusively concerns humanity) in terms of a locus of questions and an entire systemic set of approaches. As to what these questions are, and what that knowledge is understood to do, these are very much a product of a time. Who therefore are called mad, and who are merely touched by the divine, is the product of a time. Or again, the exact way in which one understands deviancy is always a product of epoch. Three hundred years ago, Foucault suggested, there was a great tendency to punish the action and not the soul. One understood then individuals and judged them by what they did and whether that was not acceptable to the state (or the king’s peace). Now however, the system is very different. We tend to build up ‘psychological profiles’ and seek to understand the individual criminals. In doing so, we not only appear of course ‘liberal’ (as what is better than understanding?) but also in effect punish or perhaps rather seek to control souls rather than actions. We build therefore ‘types’ (for example the paedophile) who can be defined by their delinquency, and whose very presence is thought to be an abuse. Foucault then maintains that in terms of knowledge, humanity has of itself generated a knowledge (and so not necessarily the knowledge one has of the physical world).
How then do these twin realities of power and knowledge intersect? Foucault throughout his work identified many possible points of juncture. In this essay I will however concentrate only on four of these nodes, two that originate in power and two in knowledge. These four axes might be characterized as the following: the power of the people; the power of the investigation; the creation of the system; and the creation of the type. Each of these will therefore be considered in turn before I then turn to the issue of resisting their effects.
The power of the people is therefore a power through interaction, to define a system or locus of relations and mutual obligations within which a society might be said to flourish and systems of knowledge develop. To live in a city, and be caught up in the high density relations of the nineteenth or twentieth century metropolis is clearly to live in a very different world to those individuals who remained in the country, and were caught up in relatively few interactions. This additional complexity is not merely that one can do more in a city, but also that who one is might really change. For example sexualities that were possible to quite easily to hold down in the country or in a small town, might well become far more complex and riven, as one becomes bound up within all the different voices, and possibilities of a city. Possibilities that include not only experimentations but also dangers and disease. What a human society does, and how it acts, what there is in it to understand, is therefore as much a product of all the interpenetrating power relations (that is, system of mutual obligations or excitement or merely effects) that criss-cross that society. To understand and even more to attempt to regulate a world, is therefore to have to encompass or at least allow for, the power relations of that world. This once again is the real problem of Gordon Brown and his administration. He simply has not understood how the society has changed, how new power relations and new affects of communication have opened up, in the last ten years or so whilst he has been governing. The world has shifted and the old way of doing things, which was relatively slow, and very top heavy (and pre-planned) has slipped by the wayside. He and his advisers are then left floundering around, and in effect powerless, as they have not worked out the new power dimensions, while the rest of the country looks on with amusement or bewilderment or perhaps occasional pity.
On the broadest of canvasses, power might be said to be the product of how humans interact within a society. It is this backdrop which defines any parameters for understanding society as a whole. And yet it very clearly has a second axis, one that then looks to a far more localized set of power relations, and creates a more intimate union between these and understanding. This locus is defined through acts of investigation. That is, truth is found because someone is looking for it. It is clearly a truism to say that one finds what one looks for; and yet of course one looks for it because of concerns that originated elsewhere. We look therefore, for a psychological condition which we can attach to underage sex, and find sure enough: the paedophile as a type is born (hence meaning that because we look for a ‘type’, some of the harmless are unfairly labelled, whilst some who commit crimes but don’t fit the profile fall through the net). Or again (and to use a totally different example). MPs had of course carried on with their expense claims for very many years, and we did not really care about it overmuch. No one cared or at least no one did until chequebook journalism, married with the Freedom of Information Act, and the agony of a long running court case, and certain journalists of a right wing newspaper, came together to produce the current scandal.
What one knows is therefore, always framed by what and why one was looking for in the first place. There are no doubt whole fields of knowledge that currently are closed to and for us, simply because we are blind to their entry points (this is not the same as not looking). This blind spot only dissolves when the systems of power in a society shift around and open up spaces (or rather demand the opening of spaces) for investigation and understanding. At such a time we will of course quite literally produce knowledge. That is, we will look for connections, and run experiments designed to demonstrate (or perhaps create) these links. Power creates therefore the circumstances in which certain individuals become able to experiment (and so become powerful) – hence they are given the power to produce results (what else is power?), and to then view these results, and the power that infuses them, as a system of knowledge. The experiments are therefore said to tell us something about the world, something more than merely power relations, a something that then spins off and become a type or known fact in its own right (all MPs are corrupt, and all paedophiles live with their mothers…)
On the side of knowledge, two likewise distinct domains are apparent. Firstly, our knowledge is, as mentioned above, systematic in its approach. Each epoch will therefore create a system or an approach to assess a series of problems. It is this approach that defines the way in which power can be directed or wielded. To live in a monarchy, and to understand the world as the product of single will (God and the king’s) is therefore to live in a very different system to that of a democracy (where the world is generated form the people, or at least ought to be). Or to give a more specific example, the creation of the notion of Madness in the early seventeenth century instigated an entirely different approach to how one understood both humanity but also oneself. One asked then the question (or at least one could) whether one was mad or could be mad? where previous eras had wondered whether they were possessed. This question, with its implied medicalisation, then pulled an entire domain of experiences away from the priest and towards the scientist. More than that, it demanded the creation of the oddest of understandings - namely the creation of a space where dreadful things can happen, and yet not even the devil ought to be blamed for them. Madness therefore demanded that humans re-thought both how they understood what they were, but also how their viewed justice and vengeance. In doing so, it defined new possibilities for power (the medic not the priest), and new ways that humans related to one another (are you mad?). This last point founded both a parallel non blame system of medical justice, and a whole spectrum of little madnesses, where individuals feel themselves or others to be a ‘bit’ insane.
But knowledge clearly does more than define the parameters of an entire system. It also defines what power wants to bite upon and articulate around within that system. Foucault gives the example of ‘the normal human’. This norm, which was the creation of the nineteenth century, was not an individual which was held up as a standard to which all citizens ought to conform. On the contrary, it was assumed that individuals would never conform to any normal type. The function of such types was therefore rather to position each individual in relation to a supposed ideal, so that they could understand their own differences in terms of what they should be. In a stroke all the randomness and potentially problematic violence within a society was caught up within an axis of knowledge. Criminals thought of themselves not as potential revolutionaries, but merely as small time (or large time) felons. An entire system based on incarceration was defined to order to ensure that this viewpoint was enforced. The potentially disparate elements within a society were thereby bought to heel. Those who might have disrupted the society from the genuine outside (as revolutionaries) were converted by the system of incarceration into criminals whose career, although outside the law, could be predicted and understood. The modern example is of course terrorism. The point of arbitrarily imprisoning supposed terrorists lies not in stopping acts of terrorism (it is never really likely to do that), but rather in containing its expression. We are creating in these prisons a ‘type’. The discontented will look to these people, these supposed terrorists, as role models for dissent. They become then the paradigm for violent disruptive action. As such their role is less to stop violence and more to ensure that it is expressed only in one way or in one organization. It becomes then something which the state can encompass and have the possibility to regulate. The real worry, the real threat of protests and violence which originate beyond the pale of human understanding is then mitigated and becomes no threat at all.
This last point leads one to the problem of resistance. If power and knowledge are everywhere, what is it that can resist them? Is it the stuff of matter, which no doubt by its very physical reality always contained elements which cannot be simply taken over by power? These elements, this inertia, is because not only does each portion of matter have other potentials, other powers within it, but also because it has real potential at every point to behave against type, and do stuff which power and knowledge do not want it to. I.e., power and knowledge need a world other than themselves in order to function. They exist therefore because there is something different to them, some stuff for them to control or understand, something for them to do. Reality therefore itself always remains distinct from powers and knowing – it maintains its identity and its ability to split otherwise than the path predicted for it. And yet this last point opens up a new problem. How exactly can one understand this openness of the body or of matter? Does one need to understand it in terms of affects, and the power of individuals to re-throw their ability to feel, and so their ability to be (and to do so in such a way that avoids the powers of the day)? Or must one understand this resistance as also including the way that the mind understands its own matter, its own stuff, and so link the ability to resist with the powers of the self? It is the consideration of these last two alternatives which will bring this series of Rants to a close.
