Power/knowledge Book

For hundreds of years the trend in the arts and philosophy in the West has been towards daily life and subjectivity, that is, extolling the importance of actual lived experience day-to-day. This is of course tied in with the bourgeois revolutions, the rise of democracies—or what passes for them—in the West, and the ongoing deterioration of shared communal/religious values. The ownership of a daily life puts everyone on equal footing. You may not hunt rare forms of geese in the marshy regions of your estate, or keep vintage bottles of port in your temperature-controlled wine cellar....but you do have a daily life. For example Vermeer’s paintings of matronly women carrying pails of water: These paintings serve to extol daily life, and in doing so they transfigure daily life into art. It’s no longer a given day in the fall of 1741 or whenever—when you paint it, the scene becomes to some extent Anytime Anywhere. The daily life becomes grand. The fact that someone is even paying attention to it is a change. We know what a given day looked like to one guy. The Ancients and Medievals, in general, didn’t give a shit about daily life. What did the inside of a medieval hovel in Provencal in the 1380s look like? What did families do in the evening? You don’t know, do you? What about Cicero’s house... what did that look like? Yeah you don’t know that either, but if Cicero were around now there’d be an MTV Cribs episode on him, and we’d all get to know what this big shot’s house looked like. (“This is where I deploy some of my best rhetoric, heh heh” [bedroom].)

Foucault can be seen as the political theorist of daily life (at least as far as I’m concerned at the moment; reviews of books beg for such big assertions). Power is grassroots, located in the pores of daily life. The starting points of power are local conditions and particular needs: “They [power structures] took shape in piecemeal fashion, prior to any class strategy designed to weld them into vast, coherent ensembles. It should be noted that these ensembles don’t consist in a homogenization, but rather of a complex play of supports in mutual engagement, different mechanisms of power which retain all their specific character.” There is something creepy and claustrophobic about this. And as usual, it’s difficult to pin down precisely what Foucault thinks. At times, he seems to think that power is situated in the individual; other times, it’s as if power relations are quietly embedded in societies and that this dense nexus of mutual engagements dictates how the individual players act.

I’ve heard the same critique of Foucault that I’ve heard about Wittgenstein: He doesn’t assert anything, he just tears down what’s already been asserted. Here is an example of Foucault walking on a balance beam looking down on two sides. He talks about the danger of “telescoping” the idea that everything is political to placing it all on individual responsibility. So don't do that. But neither should an analysis of the political be displaced as “glibly practiced today,” by saying “everything derives from the market economy, or from capitalist exploitation, or simply from the rottenness of our society (so that ... problems ... are put off until there is a ‘different’ society).” I guess this is a common criticism of Foucault, but his philosophy is primarily negative. He shows you the flaws of a given way of thinking, and then shows you the flaws of the opposite way of thinking. And there is no synthesis.

Anyhow, the traditional idea of power being imposed on the populace by the sovereign and the elite class is junked. Just as Barthes thought that in critical theory the Author should be killed, so Foucault thinks that in political theory the King should be beheaded.
Like in this quote:

“At the end of the eighteenth century, people dreamed of a society without crime. And then the dream evaporated. Crime was too useful for them [the people] to dream of anything as crazy—or ultimately as dangerous—as a society without crime. No crime means no police. What makes the presence and control of the police tolerable for the population, if not fear of the criminal?”

You could take the last sentence of this quote and think that Foucault is implying that the power elite whips up fear of the criminal in order to get the populace to comply with and support police interventions. But this is not what he’s saying. Foucault is saying that the populace at large demands that the police be there.

So I think he’s saying that the organic structures of societies—the things that are so deeply embedded that people in the society are only dimly aware of them—are a reflection of individual/collective notions of the world. It’s our fault for the way things are, not the government’s or anyone else’s. Foucault really sounds kind of “conservative” when talking about stuff like this. But for sure this might be due to the fact that he keeps talking to Maoist Marxists in this book.

Foucault also makes the point that when people talk about power it’s often discussed solely as it relates to oppression, censorship, negative qualities. But power also produces desirable things and has positive qualities. “It has been a tradition for humanism to assume that once someone gains power he ceases to know.... Modern humanism is … mistaken in drawing this line between knowledge and power. Knowledge and power are integrated with one another.... It is not possible for power to be exercised without knowledge, it is impossible for knowledge not to engender power. ‘Liberate scientific research from the demands of monopoly capitalism’: maybe it’s a good slogan, but it will never be more than a slogan.” Conservative!

Here he comes close to saying something positive: “The problem is not to choose a political ‘position’ (which is to choose from a preexisting set of possibilities) but to imagine and to bring into being new schemas of politicization.” So this fellow writes a lot about madhouses, prisons, the army etc. Why? I think it’s because Foucault sees these things as distillations of society as a whole; it’s all prison, it’s all the army, everyone’s trapped and funneled unwittingly into their current situation and everyone does things because of overarching power impetuses that they are only dimly aware of. Foucault thought we were all imprisoned, and hence his politics is about finding a way out. Foucault is seeking something transcendental!

Conservative?:

“One would have to be naïve as Baudelaire to think that the bourgeoisie is stupid or prudish. Rather it is intelligent and cynical.”

“In order to be able to fight a State that is more than just a government, the revolutionary movement must possess equivalent politico-military forces and hence must constitute itself as a party, organized internally the same way as a State apparatus with the same mechanisms of hierarchies and organization of powers.”

Separately, Foucault puts the blame on Stoicism, not Judaism, for Christianity’s ethos that sex needed to be restricted, and that Christianity was forced to take this on when it assimilated into the Roman State, in which Stoicism was the universal philosophy. Honestly, I don’t know how Foucault could arrive at this position. Christianity has only itself (and of course Judaism) to blame for its obsessive repression of the sexual, it seems to me, since centuries before Christianity became part of the Roman State we have Paul laying down the Jewish Law with multiple constraints on the sexual, followed by the early Church Fathers (Augustine excepted to some extent) who continued in this vein.

Here’s a priceless Foucault quote. He’s asked (in the midst of a heavily Marxist dialogue with a few others) who is against whom when it comes to class conflict, who is the enemy.

“This is just a hypothesis, but I would say it’s all against all. There aren’t immediately given subjects of the struggle, one the proletariat, the other the bourgeoisie. Who fights against whom? We all fight each other. And there is always within each of us something that fights something else.”