On Foucault: Knowledge and the Inescapability of Power

Abstract: I provide a long-form reading of Michel Foucault’s “theory” of power/knowledge and how it relates to the production of subjects, and further connect this to a political critique that looks seriously at the “inescapability” of power.

The origin of power is the genesis of knowledge. The advent of the subject-producing power matrix is situated within the exposure to, and internalization of, knowledge: for one to become a “subject,” for one to enter a field of discourse, for one to participate in an arena of infinitesimal power strategies, one must first become baptized with the inculcation of knowledge. Let us begin, therefore, with the aim of mapping power along the trajectory of knowledge.

Foucault, defining the productive force of power, states:

A power relationship…can only be articulated on the basis of two elements that are indispensable if it is really to be a power relationship: that “the other” (the one over whom power is exercised) is recognized and maintained to the very end as a subject who acts; and that, faced with a relationship of power, a whole field of responses, reactions, results and possible inventions may open up.[1]

The focus of Foucaultian power is aptly captured in this conception. The “other” is constituted in a specific and defined field of measured responses: the “other” is metaphorically and symbolically “tied” to their very specific subject position. They are defined and confined by a particular set of attributes, conditions, and characteristics; they are categorized and classified accordingly. The true reason d’etre of power is not simply violence, which Foucault brackets as differentiable activity; nor is power centralized in singular bodies, groups or functions, such as the rule of the sovereign or the domination of one economic class over others. Rather, power includes an inherently productive force: it generates subjects. It generates subjects through an infinite number of subtle coercive networks; it defines, confines, classifies—in short, power disciplines. Coupled with an expansive—though nonetheless infinitely minute—web of “surveillance” techniques and mechanisms, power enacts its functions through the unceasing gaze of the contemporary panoptic machine: “The exercise of discipline presupposes a mechanism that coerces by means of observation; an apparatus in which the techniques that make it possible to see induce effects of power, and in which, conversely, the means of coercion make those on whom they are applied clearly visible.”[2]

But our analysis is not so concerned with the processes, mechanisms and properties of the ways in which power perpetuates its operation on subjects (after all, power never ceases its continuous production and reproduction—there is no “outside,” as Foucault would say). Here, our intention is to show the principle that lies beyond the scope of the power relationship, the arche not of power, but of the code from which power, and all its instruments and devices of coercion and production, is derived—the overarching force that drives and directs the production of subjects, the “force of law” which constitutes the thrust of power’s arc. Foucault remarks: “Power exists only as exercised by some on others, only when it is put into action, even though, of course, it is inscribed in a field of sparse available possibilities underpinned by permanent structures.”[3] What, therefore, acts as the generator of the process to “put power into action”? What is the nature of these “permanent structures” that “underpin” power? What, if anything, must exist prior to the emergence of a power structure, a relationship of dominance, a coercive, productive association? What is the true foundation of power?

To answer these questions, we must first turn to the “obligations” of the subject, or those responsibilities and duties imposed upon the subject by a social, economic and political configuration. These obligations are derived from this amalgam of forces, a context contingent in the trajectory of Western development but fully engendering the “reality” of a given age: by example, Foucault, referring to the proliferation of techniques of power that accumulated around the social shifts of the 1700s, will claim that “it was the new spatial and social distribution of industrial and agricultural wealth which demanded new social controls at the end of the eighteenth century.”[4] The point here is clear—that in order to effectively read the relationship between a subject and the context of their production, in order to mine the games of truth which masquerade as real individual duties, one must reconstruct the political and contested arena of its generation and dissemination.

Foucault begins by defining a central compulsion in the construction of a modality of obligation: “…one of the main moral obligations for any subject is to know oneself, to tell the truth about oneself, and to constitute oneself as an object of knowledge both for other people and for oneself.”[5] This obligatory self-understanding, which translates into a presentation of self-understanding to others, stands at the threshold of the history of Western metaphysics; Foucault, attempting an “archeological” exploration of the concept of “self-knowledge,” traces the development of this obligation as a product of the Greek notions of gnothi seauton (“know thyself”) and epimeleisthai seautou (“take care of thyself”). Though it is the Socratic dictum of gnothi seauton that continues to persist in contemporary culture, and has all-but overshadowed its action-based counterpart, Foucault demonstrates how it was actually the obligation to take care of oneself, to accept epimeleisthai seautou, which maintained priority in Greek philosophy. Foucault defines each term accordingly: gnothi seauton, the “Delphic principle,” “was not an abstract one concerning life; it was technical advice, a rule to be observed for the consultation of the oracle. ‘Know yourself meant ‘Do not suppose yourself to be a god.’”[6] Conversely, epimeleisthai seautou defined a set or series of actions that an individual was supposed to accept in order to marry one’s own ambitions, aspirations, thoughts and feelings with the conception of “truth”; by using self-exploration as a means to “judge” oneself, one could then discover the proper path to a rational life. But despite its differences, epimeleisthai seautou maintained an interconnected allegiance to the Delphic principle: “To take care of oneself consists of knowing oneself. Knowing oneself becomes the object of the quest of concern for self. Being occupied with oneself and political activities are linked.”[7]

There is, no doubt, a strong connection between the two concepts: to know oneself was a prerequisite to taking care of the self, and to take care of the self meant the acceptance of the obligation to know oneself—both were standards of conduct the individual subject was supposed to accept and internalize. Along with this inception of the Delphic principle, the concept of “parrhesia,” or “fearless speech,” emerged. The use of parrhesia presupposed a certain self-understanding, an ability to recognize and internalize the “truth” in order to then espouse the “truth” to a higher authority: “the truth the parrhesiastic discourse discloses is the truth of someone’s life, i.e., the kind of relation someone has to truth.”[8] For an individual to practice parrhesia, or to speak the “truth” to others, he or she must first understand the “truth,” internalize the “truth,” and exemplify the “truth” in their actions and decisions. Indeed, “parrhesia as it appears in the field of philosophical activity in Greco-Roman culture is not primarily a concept or theme, but a practice which tries to shape the specific relations individuals have to themselves.”[9] The foundation of parrhesia and the parrhesiastic discourse was the combination of gnothi seauton and epimeleisthai seautou: one had to know and take care of oneself, which meant identifying and accepting the “truth,” before one could effectively or “accurately” practice the art of fearless speech.

Parrhesia, having played a role in the Socratic discourses, was a precursor to the methods and mechanism established by Christianity. Though differing substantiality in form and function, the growth of Christian discourses reflected the same obligatory demand for self-knowledge; in the Christian tradition,

each person has the duty to know who he is, that is, to try to know what is happening inside him, to acknowledge faults, to recognize temptations, to locate desires; and everyone is obliged to disclose these things either to God or to others in the community and, hence, to bear public or private witness against oneself. The truth obligations of faith and the self are linked together. This link permits a purification of the soul impossible without self-knowledge.”[10]

The primacy and centrality of self-knowledge is undeniable, and, in the medieval era, this self-understanding (which usually was accompanied by the obligation to disclose oneself to a higher authority or in the presence of a public arena) manifested in two different, though still interconnected, methods: exomologesis and exagoreusis.

Foucault describes exomologesis as “a ritual of recognizing oneself as a sinner and penitent,”[11] in which, for Christians, the ritual “meant to recognize publicly the truth of their faith or to recognize publicly that they were Christians.”[12] The exomologetic subject would publically declare his or her sins, and would proceed to renounce him or herself in order to accept redemption in the eyes of God: “it was not a way for the sinner to explain his sins but a way to present himself as a sinner.”[13] In this sense, “penitence of sin does not have as its target the establishing of an identity but, instead, serves to mark the refusal of the self, the breaking away from self: ego non surn, ego.”[14] Declaration of sin, which in turn is grounded in the obligation to recognize one’s own sinful behavior, to understand the fact that one has sinned, and to act to reject one’s own sinful self, would lead to renunciation of the self, as the self was, inherently, a sinful self.

Exagoreusis was a far different mechanism. Connected to “obedience and contemplation,” exagoreusis defined its objective as the “permanent contemplation of God.” (2003; 165) Usually utilized by monks, the process of exagoreusis included the careful enunciation and elaboration of oneself to a higher authority: one could then cleanse oneself of all the thoughts, feelings and impulses that stood as obstacles in the relationship one maintained to God; in the exagoreusis practice, “the self must constitute itself through obedience.” (2003; 165) In this sense, one’s relationship to God (the eternal “truth,” the logos, the anchored point of transcendental stability) was manufactured in a discourse of obedience. To obey the Lord, to disclose all of one’s faults in the development of a relationship with the Lord, presupposed an intensive practice of self-understanding. Indeed,

the revelation of the truth about oneself cannot be dissociated from the obligation to renounce oneself. We have to sacrifice the self in order to discover the truth about ourselves, and we have to discover the truth about ourselves in order to sacrifice ourself. Truth and sacrifice, the truth about ourselves and the sacrifice of ourselves, are deeply and closely connected. And we have to understand this sacrifice not only as a radical change in the way of life but as the consequence of a formula like this: you will become the subject of the manifestation of truth when and only when you disappear or you destroy yourself as a real body or as a real existence.” (2007; 187-188)

Foucault goes on to suggest that there can be “no truth about the self without a sacrifice of the self.” (2007; 189) The self must be understood before it can be renounced; the movement from self-knowledge to self-renunciation is mediated by the “permanent structure” of the church and the various ways the church facilitates and encourages the subject’s commitment to the requirements of faith. Paradoxically, in order to know oneself under the Christian model, in order to fill oneself with the ultimate and final “truth” of God, one must renounce all that one is: a cyclical, ongoing process that develops through the medium of highly-specific disciplinary practices.

But exomologesis and exagoreusis were only precursors to the more advanced and subtle techniques of the modern Christian apparatus. The responsibility of self-understanding in the Christian tradition reached its zenith with the advent of the confessional—a process by which the individual subject (both clergy and laymen) professes his or her sins to a priest on a regular basis, which is, in turn, a sort-of evolutionary adaptation of exagoreusis. Where the demand for self-knowledge was already present in the various practices that contributed to the development of Christianity, the confessional reaffirmed the primacy of self-understanding in a more consistent and continuous way. Labeling the confessional as an essential instrument in what he calls “pastoral power,” Foucault sees the confessional’s development to be founded in the following obligatory standard:

Everyone, every Christian, has the duty to know who he is, what is happening in him. He has to know the faults he may have committed: he has to know the temptations to which he is exposed. And, moreover, everyone in Christianity is obliged to say these things to other people, to tell these things to other people, and hence, to bear witness against himself.[15]

The significance of self-knowledge cannot be ignored. Instead of renouncing oneself, however, the confessional forces individual subjects to “bear witness against themselves”: the difference, though small, is important, and stands as precursor to the systematic nightmares of Kafka and the existentialists. One need only recognize one’s own faults, sins, and flaws. The subject is a sinner by definition, a permanent and perennial source of fault that needs to constantly cleanse him or herself. In criticizing Foucault’s understanding of power, Baudrillard will nevertheless stumble upon the same mechanism of permanent repetition: “…there will always be something to liberate, to enjoy, and to exchange with others through words: now that’s real, that’s substantial, that’s prospective stock. That’s power.”[16] Renunciation is not necessarily the objective of the exercise. Rather, permanent and continuous self-evaluation, moderated by a standard designed by the church, assumes the primary function: “This form of power cannot be exercised without knowing the inside of people’s minds, without exploring their souls, without making them reveal their innermost secrets. It implies a knowledge of the conscience and an ability to direct it.”[17] This “knowledge” conforms to the ongoing “liberation” of the subject: continuous discipline in the face of a continuous deficiency in one’s status as “saved.”

Major shifts in the relations between European powers in the 16th and 17th centuries, accompanied by the principle of raison d’etat, witnessed a departure from—or perhaps an effective evolution of—this form of knowledge-power. A new political configuration of competing economic state entities, fueled by the enterprise of mercantilism, was accompanied by deep notions of territorial control and security. The horizon of the economic field, as it spilled unto the world map with infinite potentiality, was matched by a contested sense of the internal state relation between sovereign and subject. As various Enlightenment tracts of the time period suggests, this relationship was founded principally on concepts and ideals somehow outside of the political system, but which nevertheless function to bind relations and duties therein. But the ethic of mercantilism, at the end of the 18th century, began to experience a seismic shift in the manner in which governments and their people were construed. Liberalism, with a faith in the market economy, developed as a system of internal modes of political analysis. The question shifted from “what are the theoretical rights of man or sovereign by which we shall operate?” to “what are the mechanisms of governance most effective to the continued growth of the economic enterprise? How shall we limit government to best accommodate the natural forces of the market?” This shift, which constitutes the field of political economy, was predicated primarily on the belief in the market as a site of both juridical determination and knowledge-producing veridiction (based on the notion of a “natural” or “true” price). Since the primary of truth is to be found interlocked with the mechanisms of “natural” enterprise occurring within the context of the market, the market became the principle foundation for a enterprise of governance. As Foucault suggests, “the market now means that to be good government, government has to function according to truth.”[18]

The ultimate product of this shift from raison d’etat to liberalism and a faith in the truth derived from the open market economy was the production of a new kind of social subject, a subject no longer directly controlled for the purposes of this or that kind-of unlimited growth, but rather a subject that should be inadvertently disciplined through the mechanisms of the economy to conform to the new ethic of capitalistic competition. Under the standards of truth in this new regime, “the economy produces political signs that enable the structures, mechanisms and justifications of power to function.”[19] Since this “governmentality” operates through the political “enabling” of the economy’s functioning, the result is a dominant, new social ethos characterized by the demands of “enterprise.” As Foucault argues, “it is a matter of making the market, competition, and so the enterprise, into what could be called the formative power of society.”[20]

Once more, we see in this grand shift, the seeds of which were sown between the 17th and 18th centuries, the foundation of an apparatus of knowledge-production. There is no power here, save for the power of the market, and the power of the government to decide, through the use of “agenda” and “non-agenda,” when it can legitimately intervene. Either way, the functionality of the government is predicated on the truth-regime of the market. What matters here is not only the direct lines of knowledge which link a belief in the market to phenomena such as “natural price” and the internal limitation of governmental action along said parameters, but the faith in the operability of the market itself: there is a new knowledge at work and at stake here, a knowledge which, though growing out of the sociopolitical realignments of the time period, nevertheless structures the possible distribution of power in the social unit writ large.

This is to say: the evolution from raison d’etat to liberalism, and from liberalism to neo-liberalism later in the 19th and 20th centuries, is predicated on a shift in the “order of things,” insofar as that “order” is and can be interpreted in a framework or apparatus of knowledge. It is in response to a constellation of minute and infinite sources of social and economic contestation that this new knowledge, this new faith, is constructed upon an “invention of tradition”[21] which itself is a matter of knowledge. The statement “the market is the principle of governance” is a statement only functional within the parameters of truth determined by the limits of real social relations: the line of discourse runs from knowledge to power, rather than the reverse. The dictum to “know thyself” which linked the technologies of Greek politics to the Christian confessional is still very much alive, though considered now in the light of a new sun: the liberal man ought to know himself, surely, but he ought to know it as a liberal man. The enterprise-society forged in the reservoir of liberal thought is a society that demands its subjects to know themselves first and foremost as competitive entities; if the confessional demands a self-knowledge predicated on a lack, this modern liberal state demands the same self-knowledge predicated on the same type of lack, though it has merely shifted from the moral/spiritual realm to the strictly economic.

Finally, Foucault’s discussion of contemporary racism offers another perspective on the relationship between power and knowledge. Arguing that at the end of the 18th century two “technologies of power” emerged—one disciplinary, the other regulatory[22]—that underwrite the relevance and power of the contemporary “biopolitical apparatus,” which takes as its subject of knowledge the security and well-being of populations, Foucault sees in the modern age the growth of power mechanisms that splice the two technologies into an effective whole. Foucault observes: “Medicine is a power-knowledge that can be applied to both the body and the population, both the organism and biological processes, and it will therefore have both disciplinary effects and regulatory effects.”[23] Foucault will make a similar statement when, in comparing the ancient form of truth-validity as a form of “test” to the “inquiry” of the late Middle Ages, he suggests that “the inquiry is a form of knowledge-power.”[24] But what is it to speak of power-knowledge or knowledge-power? What is it to invoke this coupling—a coupling that Foucault seems otherwise to systematically disaggregate?

The role of this apparatus in its historical context becomes clearer as Foucault will define racism as

“primarily a way of introducing a break into the domain of life that is under power’s control: the break between what must live and what must die….It is a way of separating out the groups that exist within a population….This will allow power to treat that population as a mixture of races, or to be more accurate, to treat the species, to subdivide the species it controls, into the subspecies known, precisely, as races. That is the first function of racism: to fragment, to create caesuras within the biological continuum addressed by biopower.”[25]

This fragmentary power of racism can take on a myriad of forms and guises, installing a regime of truth through Darwinian theories of social evolution to craniometry, eugenics and beyond. That power “treats” the population is to say: power already has some mind as to what categories will inherit what racial elements. The subdivision of a species along these broadly racial lines, this tearing apart of a singular whole into manageable sub-categories, is again the application of a specific kind-of knowledge to the practices of its invention and continuation. Racism, no doubt, is a process, a real practice that occurs between subjects—and yet it is precisely this “between” that knowledge must bridge. As Foucault will claim, “biopolitics will derive its knowledge from, and define its power’s field of intervention in terms of, the birth rate, the mortality rate, various biological disabilities, and the effects of the environment.”[26] These are systematic contingencies facing situations of actual exchange among individuals; knowledge derives from this material facticity, though engenders the power to arrange this facticity in specific and coordinated ways. Again, the causal linkage runs from knowledge to power, with power acting reciprocally to realign the standards of knowledge. There would be no space for racism without the requisite knowledge-production of racial difference; the theory seems to predate the technology. The role of knowledge is, qua the subject, a matter of self-assessment: what elements of my being, what attributes, what signs determine my placement in this category above that one? The racial paradigm must be concentrated on a regiment of self-knowledge geared toward the reproduction of a particular profile, which either conforms to the regime of truth or fails to—either way rehearshing the spectacle of difference superimposed by the discursive parameters associated with this particular valence of knowledge-production.

As we briefly review the vicissitudes of Greco-Roman philosophy, Christian theology, liberalism and modern racism, it becomes readily clear that the history of Western metaphysical and religious thought culminates in the primacy of a single utility: knowledge. In particular, it is the requirement to “know oneself,” across a series of contexts, material limits and political modalities, the obligation of self-knowledge, that has assumed a seemingly a-historical role in the development of Western thought. But what attests to this primacy? Why has knowledge, which, through the development of science and subject-forming medical techniques in the renaissance and onwards throughout the 20th century and well into the contemporary age, controlled such instrumental influence in the Western imagination?

It is here that we can interrogate the relationship between power and knowledge. As Deleuze suggests, “these three dimensions—knowledge, power, and self—are irreducible, yet constantly imply one another. They are three ontologies.’” (1994; 332) But the “three ontologies” do not necessarily share a co-originality: rather, it is knowledge that first must be introduced before the self and power emerge. It is knowledge that acts as the genesis of both power and the self; but it is also knowledge that acts as the continuous narrative through which power and the self are affirmed, challenged, reaffirmed, solidified, negated, and so on. It is the ontology of knowledge that is the arche of the self and power: the Delphic principle called for the individual to know himself as a subordinate subject to the defied presence, as an actor in a specific discourse of power; the practitioner of parrhesia utilized the technique as a mechanism of power, challenging the authority of rulers, leaders, the demos, or the elected assembly—he manipulated the presence of “truth” into a form of “fearless speech,” a means to convince and henceforth alter the opinions of others, to direct the action of other free subjects; later, in the Socratic discourses, the role of parrhesia was one in which the internalization of “truth”—which is, in essence, only the internalization of a specific disciplinary model, the total acceptance of a very particular set and schema of ethics—was accomplished through the connection of the self to the rational life, a standard that helped facilitate the production socially-active subjects. The rise of Christianity and the development of exomologesis and exagoreusis presented a series of techniques that literally had the individual subject form itself and then renounce itself in the permanent service of a defied authority—exomologesis in particular used the forces of public observability in the service of subject-production. The role of the Christian confessional utilizes knowledge as a continuous form of subject-production, turning the individual into a subject that internalizes a disciplinary apparatus in order to identify and accordingly judge his or her own defined and categorized “flaws.” Similar vicissitudes highlight the rise of contemporary liberalism and modern forms of racism: as they demand a reorganization of political authority and legitimacy on synthetic metrics, we find merely a variation on a common theme of self-knowledge. One is called in the liberal light to be a subject of the market, a competitive subject who knows him or herself as principally a member of an economic family. For racism to operate, the same must be true—that one need recognize oneself as having the operative predicates that announce election into this subgroup.

To accept knowledge of oneself is to accept indoctrination into the networks and matrices of power that comprise the totality of social relationships: “Power never ceases its interrogation, its inquisition, its registration of truth: it institutionalizes, professionalizes, and rewards its pursuit.”[27] This is precisely because the “pursuit of truth” is tantamount to the “maintenance of power”; without knowledge, there is only violence. The pursuit of truth is rewarded because it is through truth that power surfaces: it is through truth that the standards and expectations of society, which in turn rely on a series of disciplinary mechanisms and instruments, come into being. The individual must first be exposed to the free acquisition of knowledge before he or she becomes a subject—only be recognizing one’s own subjectivity, one’s own position as determined by the structures and institutions of society, one’s own situation in the spectrum of inequalities, does one enter into the arena of power and conflict. Power is, in this light, an invitation out of ignorance. Deleuze was incorrect: “Everything is knowledge, and this is the first reason why there is no ‘savage experience’: there is nothing beneath or prior to knowledge.” (1994; 328) Rather, innocence is the state before knowledge: the serene state of a non-disciplined, un-socialized, un-civilized, de-powered individual—an individual that is, in essence, not a subject.

While commenting on a medical technique utilized by the French psychoanalyst Leuret, Foucault reminds us of the reaction the patient gives his doctor: “’Yes, I recognize that I am mad,’ the patient repeats, adding, ‘I recognize it, because you are forcing me to do so.’” (2007; 147) The method Leuret employed involved taking a patient (already excluded by the “normal” order, already excluded through the marginalizing, normalizing and rationalizing mechanisms of medical and psychiatric knowledge) and placing him under a cold shower; as the patient denied his supposed insanity, Leuret would turn the shower on, drenching the patient in ice-cold water. The technique culminated in, apart from a strong application of Foucault’s understanding of racisms, the crowning example of our hypothesis: “I recognize I am mad…because you are forcing me to do so.” This is the microcosmic example of the Western experience: the forced recognition of self-knowledge, the social prerequisite of subjectivity, the obligation to accept the primacy of knowledge. We are all, in a sense, made to recognize that we are mad, normal, and everything in between: the subject enters the power relationship because he or she is coerced, by his or her very acceptance into a social order, to recognize his or her own state of being. Self-knowledge is the raw gears of subject-production.

Another example strikes us: albeit an odd representation, an old Farside cartoon aptly captures the relationship between knowledge, the potential subject, and power. The cartoon depicts a scene in hell; an individual is shown pushing a cart, humming a supposedly happy tune to himself—his face is a mix between humorous aloofness and comical joy; two men stand in the foreground, sweating and clearly disturbed; two demons, removed from the individual’s range of hearing, whisper to one another: “You know, we’re just not reaching that guy.” Now, the scene is obviously meant to be humorous—it is, after all, nothing more than a cartoon. But Larson touched upon a fundamental truth of power. As we witness the two men in the foreground, made to labor as flames bellow around them, we understand that this is their punishment. They are in hell, and they know it. But the aloof individual, humming his tune, happily pushing his cart through the infernal caves, has yet to be “reached” in the same way. What do the demons exactly mean? The individual is still in hell—he is still doing the labor that is required of him. But there is something missing, something that the other two prisoners have acquired and he has somehow missed.

What he has yet to acquire is the knowledge of his situation. He has yet to be formed into a subject: he is naïve, ignorance, innocent. The demons have yet to communicate the knowledge necessary to punish him—hell means nothing if one thinks it is heaven. Accordingly, hell means nothing if all one knows is hell. The individual in the cartoon has relinquished his obligation to self-knowledge: he is not the exemplar of gnothi seuton, but of a radical ambivalence, a state of indifferent ignorance that threatens the entire grid of power—there is nothing beyond the horizon of hell for him, nothing that would require of him a knowledge of his situation, nothing upon which he can project the possibility of difference, change, or alteration. For him, there is nothing but what is directly in front of him—the network of possibilities has yet to open before him, he has yet to become “free,” and he has yet to be exposed to the media of information necessary to make him a subject of the demonic pandemonium. Like an animal, a being without the capacity for logos, the only thing others can enact upon him is violence: “The individual which power has constituted is at the same time its vehicle.”[28] Since power has yet to constitute the subject, since it has yet to create a landscape of “free choice,” it lacks the necessary “vehicle” of its continuation, it lacks the machinery, the fuel and the gears to reproduce itself. Ignorance is the bane of power; naiveté the ultimate counter to the forces of infinitesimal discipline.

Barring a Marxist critique, which goes beyond the scope of this particular paper, another important facet to this cartoon is the role of labor. Foucault will claim: “In order for men to be brought into labor, tied to labor, an operation is necessary, or a complex series of operations, by which men are effectively—not analytically but synthetically, bound to the production apparatus for which they labor. It takes this operation, or this synthesis affected by a political power, for man’s essence to appear as being labor.”[29] What is precisely missing in Larson’s humorous depiction is the presence of this “operation.” The man acts, but does not labor—his activity is simply that, an activity concerned only with the horizon of its immediate completion. It relates to nothing beyond itself—not the fires of hell, the demons in red-cloaks, or the standards of discipline and regulation that penetrate the infernal stage. Because it knows not its greater relationships, it threatens the system by its blank neutrality—its sheer dumb persistence in being. Without the knowledge to encapsulate the activity as an isolated image of a greater trajectory of subjugation, the man stands as an unintentional Praetorian against the forces of power-production.

As the main currents of Western thought have given rise to the descriptions, definitions, and analyses of power, in its multitudinous forms and its diverse guises, these projects, including Foucault’s, including the one we are engaged in at this very moment, all contribute to the spread, elaboration, articulation and ultimate legitimation of power. Baudrillard makes this point well, and challenges the discourse of power to reconsider its origin, Foucault himself: “Foucault’s discourse is a mirror of the powers it describes. It is there that its strength and its seduction lie, and not at all in its “truth index,” which is only its leitmotiv: these procedures of truth are of no importance, for Foucault’s discourse is not truer than any other.”[30] This is a powerful critique, one that seems to demand an answer to the question: well, Foucault, where do you stand in all this? For Baudrillard, Foucault misses the “symbolic” nature of power, and in missing it, reproduces the mythos of power as a real force. Foucault solidifies and adds continuity to the very processes that otherwise contest in instability and discontinuity. Of course Foucault will speak of discontinuity, etc.—but his speaking of it is a certain knowledge performance of its capacity to “be real.” Foucault becomes the site of a unique power matrix. Were there subjects before Foucault? Was there discourse? We could say: of course there was! There were real situations between individuals of asymmetrical power, of domination, of racism, of the categorization of “normal” and “pathological,” and so forth. And yet, this is to miss the point. To borrow from Foucault’s own understanding, “there is no power that is exercised without a series of aims and objects. But this does not mean that it results from the choice or decision of an individual subject.”[31] Fair enough; power exist, for the most part, removed from the intentions of a single force. But what of Foucault’s performance on this grid? What is his aim, if we take his discourse on power seriously as itself a power of discourse?

The result of his project, whether intentional or not, seems to be the production of the very forms of power to which he calls us to plead witness. Here there is the subject, he says; and so from whence there was only a body in a relation, we now have a subject. Here is not a juridical tool, but a discursive operation, he says; and so from whence there was only a dictum, a series of words that called for action, now there is the site of contingency and contestation, the opening of a rift that otherwise slept at noon. “Knowledge must struggle against a world without order,” Foucault begins, “without connectedness, without form, without beauty, without wisdom, without harmony, and without law….Knowledge can only be a violation of the things to be known, and not a perception, a recognition, an identification of or with those things.”[32] If knowledge is not a “recognition” or “identification,” what “knowledge,” what real discourse, do we derive from Foucault? What kind-of subject is formed in reading his pages—I am the same afterwards as I was before?

If knowledge operates as a “violation” in the order to things, then Foucault’s violation seems to be against the capacity of knowledge to violate. He makes a similar point in a disparate essay: “We must conceive discourse as a violence which we do to things, or in any case as a practice which we impose on them, and it is in this practice that the events of discourse find the principle of their regularity.”[33] It is in the systematic study Foucault launches that Baudrillard’s critique is most animated—insofar as the “events of the discourse” of power “find their principle of regularity” precisely in the statement thereby. One could see a beautiful connection between Foucault and Wittgenstein emerging here, with language-games and naming the operative features of power-production. Baudrillard will argue in likewise fashion: “Let everything be produced, be read, become real, visible, and marked with the sign of effectiveness; let everything be transcribed into force relations, into conceptual systems or into calculable energy; let everything be said, gathered, indexed and registered: this is how sex appears in pornography, but this is more generally the project of our whole culture…”[34] And this too seems to be Foucault’s project, insofar as he “transcribes” power from its original context into a discourse of power itself; that he “indexes” and “gathers” together these disparate events, only to regulate them within the bounds of a new theory, a new discourse on theory; that he seeks, in a Heideggerian manner of unconcealment, to make visible all that which hides beneath the blanket of “seduction.”

But Foucault’s discourse need not move in a “direction.” Its aim, if any, seems to open the spaces of contestation in such a way that they are still contested, that the nature of contestation becomes a point of political value. While “discourse transmits and produces power” it also has the capacity to “undermine and expose it, render it fragile and make it possible to thwart it. In like manner, silence and secrecy are a shelter for power, anchoring its prohibitions; but they also loosen its holds and provide for relatively obscure area of tolerance.”[35] And so Foucault responds to Baudrillard: “yes,” he seems to say, “I am guilty of what you speak—but if I do not speak, what does this do for us? It numbs us and turns us blind (recall Foucault’s reading of Oedipus). Yes, mine is a sort-of power, but the power that makes power contingent and malleable.”

What stands behind all of this--this will to truth, will to knowledge, will to power, and so forth—is again the right to self-knowledge. We read Foucault, we read Baudrillard reading Foucault, and then what? The destination involved in this circularity system of discourse is merely the education of the subject reading. And since “any system of education is a political way of maintaining or modifying the appropriation of discourses, along with the knowledges and powers which they carry,”[36] then the education to which we are called to bear witness begins and ends at the very threshold of our perspective (and indeed Foucault will call it a “perspectival problem” at one point). One wonders: what will a Foucault 500 years in the future say about a Foucault in the 20h century? Perhaps this: that he sustained the project of self-knowledge, perhaps not with the aim of liberation (for what would this look like?), but the aim of explanation and instrumentalization. In light of the knowledge we derive from Foucault, the instruments of power that he describes as instruments become just that—instruments to be wielded in the task of endlessly forming instruments. Self-knowledge, in this instance, becomes political knowledge: I understand better what discourses frame my continued performance as a subject, and thereby, as that subject, I am able to fashion a more exacting and strategic orientation towards the forces that compose the context of my contemplation. We are aptly reminded at this juncture that “political power is not absent from knowledge, it is woven together with it.”[37]

We can henceforth elaborate upon the crowing dictum of Western philosophy: “know thyself, for in knowing thyself, in accepting the obligations, duties and responsibilities necessary for the participation in civilization, you become a subject, and, as a subject, you become the vehicles, conduits and venues of infinitely minute forms of coercion, manipulation, and discipline.” Knowledge, the central drive of the Western imagination, the impulse at the heart of the Western circulatory system, is the gateway to power: even as knowledge is initially accepted, even as the individual comes to recognize him or herself as a subject, and recognize the modes of power that surround his or her daily life, knowledge enacts a continuous reappropriation that requires infinite repetition. Chance, fortuna, contingency, uncertainty: these are the driving forces that demand the infinite reassessment of knowledge, of our ability to synthesize and regulate, understand and therefore command. The more one reflects upon who he or she is, which is no doubt the ever-continuous goal of Western mediation, the more one enters into the complex network of power. To know thyself is to know where one stands—in relation to the Delphic oracle, the Lord, the aristocracy, the structured discourse of “truth,” the social inequalities, the political hierarchy, and every other relationship the individual maintains with the social world. To know oneself is, in short, to discipline oneself in accordance with a specific standard of existence—a standard of existence that in turn normalizes, marginalizes, excludes, and dominates.

Indeed, the individual is the site of a unique discourse, a discourse that demonstrates the paradoxical relationship between a potential subject, knowledge, and power, a discourse that acts as a culmination of “the strange and complex relationships developed in our societies between individuality, discourse, truth, and coercion.”[38] As we accept the legacy of Foucault, our exploration into the genealogical development of Western culture cannot ignore the paradoxical relationships between ideology and power: the archeological lens demonstrates how, in reality, the most contrasting and conflicting ideologies share a similar origin and a common framework. Our own tools of evaluation, of critique and rebellion are not as strong as we should suppose; the further down the rabbit hole we tumble, the more we come to realize just how closely related the ideologies that have dominated the Western conscience are to the forces, techniques and machines of power. We are the inheritors of a vast and impressive history, a history that has shaped the world in many ways—but a history that has nonetheless carried with it the dark shadow of inequality, of coercion, and, ultimately, of power. If the most significant tenets of Western philosophy are truly the most efficient instruments and channels of domination; if all that we have dualistically situated in opposition to power is really the foundation of power; if the obligation to know oneself is the necessary prerequisite to civilized life, and that obligation in turn translates into a duty to accept the terms and definitions of a system of complex power dynamics; well, where does this leave us?

[1] Michel Foucault, The Subject and Power, pp, 137-138

[2] Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, pp. 170-171

[3] Michel Foucault, The Subject and Power, p. 137

[4] Michel Foucault, Truth and Juridical Forms, p. 69

[5] Michel Foucault, The Politics of Truth, p. 151

[6] Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self, p. 147

[7] Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self, p. 152

[8] Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech, 102

[9] Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech, 106

[10] Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self, p. 162

[11] Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self, p. 162

[12] Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self, p. 162

[13] Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self, p. 163

[14] Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self, p. 164

[15] Michel Foucault, The Politics of Truth, p. 171

[16] Jean Baudrillard, Forget Foucault, p. 54

[17] Michel Foucault, The Subject and Power, p. 132

[18] Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, p. 32

[19] Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, p. 85

[20] Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, p. 148

[21] See Erich Hobsbawm, The Invention of Tradition

[22] Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, p. 249

[23] Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, p. 252

[24] Michel Foucault, Truth and Juridical Forms, p. 52

[25] Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, pp. 254-255

[26] Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, p. 245

[27] Michel Foucault, Two Lectures, p. 32

[28] Michel Foucault, Two Lectures, p. 36

[29] Michel Foucault, Truth and Juridical Forms, p. 86

[30] Jean Baudrillard, Forget Foucault, p. 30

[31] Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, p. 95

[32] Michel Foucault, Truth and Juridical Forms, p. 9

[33] Michel Foucault, Text, Discourse, Ideology, p. 67

[34] Jean Baudrillard, Forget Foucault, p. 37

[35] Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, p. 101

[36] Michel Foucault, Untying the Text, p. 64

[37] Michel Foucault, Truth and Juridical Forms, p. 32

[38] Michel Foucault, The Politics of Truth, p. 148