Power and Truth: Ideological Criticism

Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault

The Marxian Legacy

• Marx argues that for a given societal organization to remain in place, the means of production need to be reproduced.

• Labor is reproduced when workers are given a means of sustenance (i.e. wages). In the dialectic of Superstructure and Infrastructure, the dominance of the Superstructure is determined by the Infrastructure.

But how does this happen? What makes workers in a democratic society contribute to their own

subjugation?

Louis Althusser

• As a Structural Marxist, finds Marx’s theory too descriptive. Proposes to focus on how the superstructure operates in order to show that the relationship between the two “floors” of the “house that Marx built” are reciprocal rather than deterministic.

• Divides social institutions into two categories:

• 1. The Repressive State Apparatus: functions through violence (potential or actual)

• 2. The Ideological State Apparatus: functions through ideology (family, religion, education, law, political parties, trade unions, the arts, mass media).

• According to Althusser, the ISAs ensure the reproduction of the relations of production.

“Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”

According to “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” the dominant ISA is the educational system, which has displaced the church as a site of training that inculcates “submission to the rules of established order.”

Ideology has “no history,” no location, no traceable origins; like Freud’s unconscious, it is a constant force that suffuses all social practices. Since there is no position outside of ideology, it can only be known through its effects (but it cannot be demystified, as particular ideas can).

Ideology interpellates or “hails” individuals as subjects of and in this order, providing identificatory positions that we believe we have chosen freely. Ideology functions through images and ideas that lend a false sense of coherence, unity and collectivity even as it props up the individual’s sense of singularity and originality.

Interpellation:

Power and KnowledgePower and Knowledge

Michel FoucaultMichel Foucault

epistemes/discursive formations

• In 1966’s Les Mots et les choses (The Order of Things), an early Structuralist text, Foucault suggested that ways of constituting knowledge can alter according to shifts in “epistemes” (structures for organizing knowledge). Transformations in knowledge occur according to discontinuities and ruptures rather than any linear progression.

• In The Order of Things and The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), Foucault is primarily concerned with the following epistemes as ways of exploring major historical shifts in Western consciousness: • 1. Renaissance: Governed by conjectures concerning

the nature of God; mystical relationship between signs and things, as well as things and things.

• II. Classical (18th C.“Enlightenment”): Rationalism, governed by the ordering of the relationships of words/things according to taxonomic (classificatory) systems and binary oppositions.

• III. Modern: Governed by a new model of history (“In our time, history is that which transforms documents into monuments. In that area where, in the past, history deciphered the traces left by men, it now deploys a mass of elements that have to be grouped, made relevant, placed in relation to one another to form totalities; it might be said, to play on words a little, that in our time history aspires to the condition of archaeology, to the intrinsic description of the monument (Archaeology of Knowledge 7). This approach to history and knowledge yields questions about rationalism and the ability of signs to represent things.

•After The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), Foucault shifts from the concept of the “episteme” with the poststructuralist notion of the “discursive formation” to express his focus on the way in which power produces domains of knowledge. Discursive analysis would define all of his later work

DISCOURSE

DiscourseDiscourse

Discourses are systems of representation

Representation as a source for the production of social knowledge (rather than “meaning”).

Power produces domains of knowledge that determine a set of privileged truths through repression, exclusion, etc. of alternative

forms of knowledge.

“Nothing has any meaning outside of discourse.”

The subject emerges from the matrices of power (the power to produce knowledge) that define the coordinates of subjectivity.

Discourse, for Foucault, means ways of constituting knowledge; coherent sets of statements, rules and conventions that, in tandem with social practices and power relations, determine the regime of truth of a particular period and culture.

Discursive formations do not refer to “things,” as we might presume to be true of language. Rather, discourse both constitutes its object and generates knowledge about that object. For example, nineteenth century psychopathology:

• Constitutes (rather than “discovers”) mental illness as its object of study, produces (rather than “reveals”) “scientific” distinctions between the normal and the pathological.

• Defines and makes systemic the treatments of abnormality.

• Determines the arrangement of power roles (professor/student; doctor/health administrator/patient) within the institutions it generates (the sanitarium, the clinic, the university department, the psychotherapist’s office).

• At every level of a given discursive formation, what is known is the product of relations of force and power.

Power• Consists in the practices that privilege and institutionalize

certain articulations of knowledge by excluding, silencing or otherwise marginalizing alternative accounts.

• Determines the particular forms of knowledge (through discourse) at a given time. In this sense, power does not simply repress, it produces.

• For Foucault, the old cliché that knowledge = power must be revised to: power = knowledge, that is, power over something is expressed as the power to make that concept, physical body, or material thing knowable, classifiable.

• Power thus functions in much the same way as Ideology does for Althusser; matrices of power and knowledge produce a governable subject.

• Not a top-down model, but diffuse, what Foucault calls a “capillary functioning of power” that trains individuals to internalize the function of surveillance (to “police themselves”). Foucault argues that this constitution of the subject as a subject-position is at the core of the modern form of “biopower.”

The Panopticon