History as Power Knowledge and the Face of the OtherS. Lourdunathan

8/12/2019 History as Power Knowledge and the Face of the OtherS. Lourdunathan

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In other words the Focultian sense of power/knowledge is historical in the sense that the

production of knowledge by power centers has a history all throughout the human history; it

is an evolutionary process of social Darwinism. Power; knowledge would then is the

knowledge of how people are appropriated in the cultural scheme of power/knowledge

involutions.

This knowledge is based on techniques of social engineering (of course education is one of

the long-standing techniques of social engineering). Thus there is a close interconnection

amongst what is construed as Knowledge, Power and what is relegated as the Other. In this

article I begin first, to establish the salient features of what Foucault understands by

power/knowledge and the five methodological precautions one should be aware of in

accepting what is Truth, Right and Reason. Then I proceed to establish how Foucault in his

works historically and philosophically defends the face the Other, the despised subjects, and

how disciplinary techniques of knowledge and power play in totalizing institutions to use

persons as objects of power and knowledge, denying the face of the Other.

Historiography of Domination through Power/knowledge & Production of Truth

One of the major themes that Foucault addresses in his writings is regarding the notions of

Truth, Right and Reason in society. Foucault holds that power centers or totalizing

institutions produce what is Truth, Right and Reason by means of discourse. According to

him it is power/knowledge of a particular epoch produces, the episteme in the given epoch

conditions or imprisons the human persons as subjects of its institutional demands. The use of

the term discourse by Foucault needs to be taken into account here. By discourse, Foucault

refers to ways of constituting knowledge, together with the social practices, forms of

subjectivity and power relations which totalizing institutions use to produce universal

ideologies. These universal ideologies for instance is the ideology of Reason of modernity,

the ideology of Truth in Medieval scholasticism, the ideology of morality and sexuality

within the frame work of the tradition. In other words what is reasonable is the reason

produced by a specific ideology or episteme which is intended to sustain the power of the

dominance over or against the vulnerable ones.

He says: What rules of right are implemented by the relations of power in the productions of

discourse of truth? Or alternatively, what type of power is susceptible of producing

discourses of truth that in society such as ours are endowed with such potent effects? What I

mean is this: in a society such as ours, but basically in any society, there are manifold

relations of power which permeate, characterize and constitute the social body, and theserelations of power cannot themselves be established, consolidated nor implemented without

the production, accumulation, circulation and functioning of discourse. There can be no

possible exercise of power without a certain economy of discourse of truth, which operates

through and on the basis of association. We are subjected to production of truth through

power and we cannot exercise power except through the production of truth.... we are forced

to produce the truth of power that our society demands, of which it has need, in order to

function: we mustspeak the truth; we are constrained or condemned to confess or to discover


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the truth. Power never ceases its interrogation, its inquisition, its registration of truth: it

institutionalizes, professionalizes and rewards its pursuit. 1

Our discourses finds Foucault are clearly monitored discourses. They are discourses under

perpetual surveillance. They are speech act situations felitious or infelitious with reference to

the power/knowledge of the systems. In other words, our discourses or speech sites arecontrolled in such a manner that we utter what the authoritarian power wants/wishes to listen

to; we discourse in the manner the dominant discourse intends us so. We are disciplined by

power/knowledge relations. Through discipline/punishment the subject is conditioned to the

subject situations of the given totalizing in ideology.

There are two ways in which we /normally/ speak in a discourse situation. (i) we speak what

the power/knowledge determines as exact; we just speak that which power wants to listen as

if it is exactly befitting its fundamental position. (ii) we are normalized or conditioned to

speak in such a way to legitimize what power/knowledge holds to be true or reasonable

because power has the right to truth; rather what is true is what the power says to be true. Iam reminded of certain philosophical positions regarding epistemic validity of truth, verbal

testimony for instance). Thus a discourse within the paradigms of cultural power/knowledge,

produces its products, namely production of appropriated subjects (civilized persons); the

subjugation of the individual subjects as subjectivization of the subjects. We are thus, obliged

to enchain or obey to power/knowledge lacking any social cum ethical criticisms. We are

subsumed into the system as if we are the system. [Think of a caste-in-person within the

cultural frame of casteism. Think of a Christian in Christianity; think of a politician in the

politics of power; think of an educator within the politics of education for power domination

and achievement].

Even if there are critical positions they are critical within the domains such power/knowledge

structures. The consequence of such history of power/knowledge discourse is domination.

Historical representations are but the reproductions of dominant discourses. Hence history is

not only the history of all hitherto to existing society is the history of class struggle

(between) the oppressor and oppressed stood in constant opposition to one another (to be)

ended either in a revolutionary reconstruction of society at large or in the common ruin of

the contending class2 but a history of Power/knowledge dominating all societies throughout

history. For Foucault, The relations of power domination are not so much as external or

physical domination but the manifold forms of dominations that can be exercised within

society by which we are subjugated. We are normalized to the extent that we do not even

recognize the domination of power/knowledge. Hence according to Foucault (kindly pardonme for simplifying Foucault here), we as human subjects do have responsibility of the Other

to re-look history as against the traditional methods, the polymorphous techniques of

subjugation and restore the rightful claim to gaze at historical writings as a matter of

discourse for truth with reference to/from the vantage point of the alternate or subjugated

realities.

1 Michel Foucault, Lecture two: 14 January 1976. This lecture is published in Social and Political Philosophy:

Classical Western Texts in the Feminist and Multicultural Perspectives, by James P Sterba. Thomson, 2003,468-477.)2 Kark Marx & Friedeirc Engles, Manifesto of the Communist Party, Selected works, PPM, 1970, p. 35.


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The net result is that a vast majority of cultures and of their people is subsumed as the Other,

mad, powerless and abnormal. Hence what is to be trespassed, eroded, suspended, put to an

end in all seriousness is the dominant discourse of power/knowledge replacing with the

knowledge/power of the oppressed people an alternate discourse conceived by Foucault.

Methodological Precautions of Foucault

Foucault offers us five important methodological precautions in this regard.

1. Power as/in local operationFoucault proposes that our analysis on power/knowledge should not concern itself with

regulated and legitimate forms of power in their central locations, with the general

mechanisms through which they operate. On the contrary, our analysis should be concerned

with power at its extremities, in its ultimate destinations, with those points where it becomes

regional and local forms of institutions. (How power operates locally)

2. Power as ongoing subjugation and disciplining of bodiesIn the second methodological precaution, Foucault urges us not to concern ourselves with

power at the level of conscious intention or decision, in other words, we should not attempt to

consider power from its internal point of view. For example, we need not worry about who

has the power, what is his aim, etc. Rather, we need to study power in its external features, its

relationship which we called in the past the object of power, its target, and its field of

application. Therefore, it is not asking why certain people want to dominate, what they seek

and what their strategy is. Let us ask instead, how things work at the level of ongoing

subjugation, at the level of those continuous and uninterrupted processes, which subject our

bodies, govern our gestures, dictate our behavior etc.

3. Power not as individual/group property but as a net-work social organizationIn the third methodological precaution, Foucault explains the fact that power is not to be

taken to be a phenomenon of one individuals consolidated and homogeneous domination

over others or that of one group or class over others. He asks us to keep in mind that power

does not make difference between those who exclusively possess and retain it, and those who

do not have it and submit to it. Power must be analyzed as something, which circulates just

like a chain. Power is never localised here and there, never in anybodys hand, neverappropriated as a commodity or piece of wealth. For Foucault, power is employed and

exercised through a net-like organization. Individuals are only vehicles of power, not its point

of application.

4. Power as ascending technological trajectoryIn the fourth methodological precaution, Foucault reminds that we must conduct ascending

analysis of power, starting, that is, from its minute mechanisms, which each have their own

history, their own trajectory, their own techniques and tactics, and then see how these

mechanisms of power have been and continue to be invested, colonized, utilized,involuted, transformed, displaced, extended, etc., by ever more general mechanisms and by


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forms of global domination. In this process we should be careful not to attempt some kind of

deduction of power starting from its centre and aimed at the discovery of the extent to which

it reproduces itself down to and including the most molecular elements of society. Rather, we

need to analyze the manner in which the phenomena, the techniques and the procedures of

power enter into play at the most basic levels, that the way which these procedures are

displaced, extended and altered are clearly demonstrated, but above all what must be shownis the manner in which phenomena and the subtle fashion in which more general powers or

economic interests are able to engage with these technologies that are at once both relatively

autonomous of power and act as its infinitesimal elements.

5. Power as ideological apparatus and reproductionIn the fifth methodological precaution, Foucault alerts us that it is quite possible that the

major mechanism of power have been accompanied by ideological productions such as an

ideology or philosophy of that of education, parliamentary democracy, etc. But, what is more

important is the production of effective instruments for the formation and accumulation ofknowledgemethods of observation, techniques of registration, procedures for investigation

and research, apparatuses of control. All this means that power, when it is exercised through

these subtle mechanisms, cannot but evolve, organize and put into circulation a knowledge,

or rather apparatuses of knowledge, which are not ideological constructs.

To sum up, Foucault wants that we direct our researches on the nature of power and not

towards the juridical edifice of sovereignty, the State apparatuses and the ideologies which

accompany them, but towards domination and the material operators of power, towards forms

of subjection and the infections and utilization in their localised systems of operation, and

towards strategic apparatuses.

Power/Knowledge and Discourse

After having set his area of analysis and research, Foucault states that power is situated in the

disharmony of social practices and situations. The discourse within these social formations is

manifested in the economy of discourse. This fact makes Foucault to conclude that power is

directly tied to the economy of discourse itself. The discourse identified within social

structures brings power to existence in social relations and gives credibility to the ideology

that the exercise of power is created by these means.3At the same time, Foucault points out

the hindrance and difficulties discourses bring in to those who have power. He says,

Discourses are not once and for all subservient to power or raised up against it, any more than

silences are. We must make allowance for the concepts complex and unstable process

whereby discourse can be both an instrument and an effect of power, but also a hindrance, a

stumbling block, a point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategy. Discourse

transmits and produces power; it reinforces it, but also undermines and exposes it, renders it

3Raymie E McKerrow, Critical Rhetoric: Theory and Praxis, in Contemporary Rhetorical Theory, ed., by

John Lucaites, Celeste Michelle Condit, and Sally Caudill. New York: The Guilford Press, 1999, 448.


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fragile and makes it possible to thwart it.4Therefore, discourse becomes a tactical dimension

of how power relations work between institutions, groups, and individuals.

By power/knowledge, Foucault believes that those who are in power have specialist

knowledge. In cases such as these, the production of knowledge and the exercise of

administrative power intertwine, and each begins to enhance the other.5Cultural, social andpolitical Power produces specific episteme or knowledge structures which in turn reproduce

and perpetuate the dominant culture. Thus exhibits the reciprocal relation between power and

knowledge.

Foucault firmly believes that all our knowledge has a history of evolution. It has a history of

cultural reproduction of domination by means of which cultural authoritarianism is

perpetuated by specific modes of power relations as to disembark the vulnerable sections of

society. In so doing the face of the other, the vulnerable people is robbed into the structures

of power/knowledge as to reduce them faceless, homeless, mad, prisoners, sick and deprived.

Therefore the question is how to redeem the face of the Other, becomes vital in subalternattempts in terms of empowerment. This means that empowerment as a concept is not purely

social but deep down it is question of defacing or disempowering the power/knowledge

structures that established themselves as normative truth through different epoch.

As an illustration, Foucault, in his work Mental Illness and Psychology, he undertakes to

prove that mental illness is related to organic illness and not unreason as

power/knowledge defines it. From his study he comes to the conclusion that it is a mistake to

give the same meaning to illness, symptoms, and in mental pathology as in organic

pathology.6 He proposes to abandon the abstract meta-psychology that assumes organic

disturbances and personality changes in the same type of structure. In this process he also

proposes to analyze the specificity of mental illness and seeks concrete forms a mental illness

can take in the psychological life of an individual. As a result, he begins to analyze the

phenomenon of mental illness and its character and origin without reference to organic

analogies. The modern understanding of the mad also has its history and evolution in society.

He begins to tackle the problem of the mistaken notion of madness propagated and

perpetuated by power/knowledge and the consequent mistreatment of the mad in society.

Power/Knowledge and the Mad or Unreason7

Foucault was against any institutionalized forms of power that dominated the other in

society. Beginning his career in the hospital, Foucault finds that it is his ethical responsibilityto work for the face of the deprived Other as exposing the dirty face of dominance.

4Michel Foucault,Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings 1972-1977, ed., Colin Gordon.

New York: Pantheon Books, 1980.5Barry Allen, Power/Knowledge, in Critical Essays on Michel Foucault, ed., by Karlis Racevskis. New York:

G.K. Hall & CO, 1999, 70.6Michel Foucault,Mental Illness and Psychology, trans. ofMaladie mentale et psychologie(1962) by A.M.

Sheridan-Smith, foreword by Hubert Dreyfus. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987, 2. This work was

originally published asMaladie mentale et personnalit. Paris: PUF, 1954.7Unreason is special term Foucault uses to categorize knowledge and social behaviours that are not acceptable

to Reason. Reason is a dominant discourse coming from totalizing institutions.


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His experience with the patients, the atmosphere in the hospital and the relationship between

doctors and patients make him reflect deeply on society and the interaction of different

groups of people within society. He finds that institutional power/knowledge plays a vital role

in determining who and why a person is mad. In the preface to Madness and Civilization he

says, We must try to return, in history, to that zero point in the course of madness at which

madness is an undifferentiated experience, a not yet divided experience of division itself.8

Foucault argues that at that zero point in history, in the natural quality of human life in

society, madness is not differentiated. On this foundation he maintains that the modern

understanding of madness is fundamentally misguided. The primary reason for this opinion is

that modern psychiatric practice has profoundly alienating effects in its negative

understanding of madness as mental illness. The second reason he points out is that different

pathological behaviours are artificially united into a single category. On these grounds,

Foucault argues that it is erroneous to link the mental and organic pathologies into a single

concept: psychosomatic totality.9 Both pathologies require different methods of analysis.

These fundamental mistakes on the modern understanding of madness influenced bypower/knowledge make Foucault look back to classical medicine where these pathologies are

given autonomous, independent status and are treated individually.10

With this background, Foucault shifts the focus of his study to the understanding of the

sick persons consciousness in the pathological world. According to Foucault, it is a common

erroneous notion that mad people are unaware of themselves and their illness. They do indeed

know their anomalous condition. Therefore, he deems it necessary to examine their

consciousness: the ways in which such individuals may accept, reject, and interpret aspects of

their illness. As this morbid consciousness is deployed within a double reference normal

and pathological this split consciousness needs to be analyzed through the individuals

understanding and experience of time, space, body and inter-subjective relations.

Foucault suggests a cluster of approaches to contextualize individual experiences of

mental illness with respect to a broader cultural understanding of madness. For example, the

notion of madness in modern society as deviant (cultural illusion) excludes mad persons from

the mainstream of society and locks them up, while in olden society they occupied a central

position in religious and social activities. He highlights that madness has no pre-social

essence requiring social exclusion in modern society.11Madness acquires its density of being

in relation to the needs and demands of a given culture.

Foucault concludes that in a given culture, the theoretical organization of mental illness isbound up with a diverse system of institutional and social practices governed by

power/knowledge. This necessarily demands that the treatment of a mentally ill person take

into consideration the cultural context of that individual. But, the paradox of mental illness is

8Michel Foucault,Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. of abridged

version ofFolie et draison: Histoire de la folie lge classique(1961) by Richard Howard. New York:

Vintage Books, 1988, ix.9 In this concept organic and mental illness are linked together as one unity. In this unity an individual and his

or her pathological reactions to the surrounding environment are viewed together as a single action.

10 For further reference: Gary Gutting, Michel Foucaults Archaeology of Scientific Reason. Cambridge:

Cambridge University press, 1989, 56f; Lois McNay, Foucault: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: PolityPress, reprint, 1996, 15.

11 McNay, Foucault, 16.


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that the contradictions and constraints of the actual social conditions indicate the reasons for

morbid consciousness. The contemporary world makes schizophrenia possiblebecause our

culture reads the world in such a way that man himself cannot recognize himself in it. Only

the real conflict of the conditions of existence may serve as a structural model for the

paradoxes of the schizophrenic world.12

Mentally ill persons are considered as alien to reason and as the other in society. The

central argument he puts forward is that madness is not a self-evident behavioural or

biological fact but is the product of various socio-cultural practices produced by

power/knowledge. It has no pre-social essence but acquires a status of being in relation to the

needs and demands of a given culture.13 In this way, Foucault explains how

power/knowledge promotes both the (i) appropriation of the individuals as power bodies and

(ii) declinations of the Other to be excluded from the sight or regime of power/knowledge

structures.

Power/Knowledge and Disciplinary Techniques in Totalizing Institutions

To prove, that power/knowledge for its benefit confined people in prison; Foucault begins his

study with the classical experience of the Great Confinement, an event in 1656 that

confined over one percent of the population of Paris.14 The proximate cause of the

confinement was an economic crisis. This confinement was maintained even after economic

crisis. For instance, in the event of political crisis, confinement was used to prevent violence

by the unemployed; in time of prosperity confined people were used as cheap labourers.

By the seventeenth century, enormous houses of confinement are created in Paris. The

lettres de cachetgaveabsolute power to governors to confine all possible idlers that include

not only the mad, but also the poor, the sick, the promiscuous, blasphemers, rebellious

children, irresponsible parents, and so on. Persons in charge of the prison were bourgeois.

These bourgeois became governors officially representing royal power. They exercised all

types of power in prison over those who came under their jurisdiction. Prison for Foucault

was a power centre of repression under monarchy and bourgeois. The bourgeois use these

confinements to protect themselves from social uprising and agitations. In this context

Foucault calls confinement a police matter.15The prisoners are the outsiders or the Other to

be disciplined and punished.

The experience in houses of confinement effects a new type of ethical consciousness

regarding the moral worth of labour. Laziness assumes or treated as a form of rebellion. Thus,the idlers in confinement are forced to work without any utility or profit. Madness is no

longer considered to be innocence. It is understood as failure to assimilate into the

bourgeois order and its ethics of work.16The mad are bound to the rule of reason and are

judged according to the bourgeois morality. They who are considered alien to bourgeois

12 For further reference: Gary Gutting, Michel Foucaults Archaeology of Scientific Reason. Cambridge:

Cambridge University press, 1989, 56f; Lois McNay, Foucault: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Polity

Press, reprint, 1996, 15.

13 McNay, Foucault, 18.

14 Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 46-7.15

In Foucaults term, the job of the police is the articulation and administration of techniques of power so as toincrease the states control over its inhabitants. See: Foucault,Madness and Civilization, 46.16

Foucault,Madness and Civilization,58.


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morality and rationality are incorporated as the other and treated as deviants to the normal

society. This moral authority gives the wardens in confinement an absolute power over the

prisoners to put them to silence in dungeons. For Foucault, schools, hospitals and barracks

are also like that of prison totalizing power centres where power/knowledge in the form of

discipline deprives its inmates' basic rights and freedom. Foucault says, Discipline makes

individuals; it is the specific technique of a power that regards individuals both as objects andas instruments of its exercise.17 Disciplinary power makes and uses the docile bodies

through meticulous training and distribution in space. This is done through hierarchical

observation and normalizing judgments. The Panopticon18 model of observation and

surveillance is an integral part of the production and control of docile bodies. In this

Panopticon, the way of watching and being watched serves as means by which individuals

are linked together in a disciplinary space. Through surveillance control and spatial order

individual bodies are made docile to produce the results expected by institutions or society.

Instead of cultivating integral individuals the Panopticon model of society began to

manufacture individuals. Disciplinary power only aims at making individuals as objects to

be used for its purpose. The inmates of the Panopticon are made objects in several ways.First, they are reduced to a mute body with which communication is only one-way. No

dignity or identity of the person is taken into consideration. The person is reduced to a mere

number. Second, persons are reduced to docile bodies. They are made so as not to resist

punishment internally and externally. Third, they are subjected to merciless scrutiny as

objects of knowledge.19

People are being used as objects of control and knowledge even in this twenty-first

century. Panopticon and disciplinary power, which Foucault discusses in Discipline and

Punish, has gained technological advancement in the form of electronic surveillance through

video cameras and the Internet. The logic behind the use of this surveillance is that every

individual in society is a potential danger for social security. Panoptic disciplinary

mechanism aims at making deviants into docile bodies of self-disciplined individuals who,

through surveillance, internalize the constraints imposed by the confirming authority and

become useful citizens. As Foucault says, this type of knowledge is not made for

understanding; it is made for cutting.20Knowledge is collected for dividing and categorizing

people. This is nothing but the invisible sovereign power that Foucault speaks about in

Discipline and Punish.Thus, privacy, and civil liberty are denied.21

-------------

17Michel Foucault,Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. of Surveiller et punir: naissance de la

prison (1975) by A.M. Sheridan-Smith (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 170.18

The Panopticon was proposed as model prison by Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), Utilitarian philosopher and

theorist of British legal reform. The Panopticon (all-seeing) functioned as a round-the-clock surveillance

machine. Its design ensured that no prisoner could ever see the inspector who conducted surveillance from theprivileged central location within the radial configuration. The prisoner could never know when he was being

surveilledmental uncertainty that in itself would prove to be crucial instrument of discipline. Foucault

describes the implication of this Panopticism in his workDiscipline and Punish.19

Peter Lucas, Mind-Forged Manacles and Habits of the Soul: Foucaults Debt to Heidegger,Philosophy of

the Social Sciences 32/3 (2002): 318.20

Michel Foucault, Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, inThe Foucault Reader,trans. Catherine Porter, ed., Paul

Rabinow. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984, 88.21 Gareth Palmer, Big Brother: An Experiment in Governance, Television & News Media3/3 (2002): 298.

History as Power Knowledge and the Face of the OtherS. Lourdunathan

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