RESPONSIBLE BELIEVING

S. Joel Garver

CHAPTER FIVE

The Power of "Truth":
Foucault and Doxastic Practices

Section II: Part C

Foucault on "Power"

To begin, it will be helpful to have grasp on what Foucault means by "power." For Foucault, power is not to be conceived in terms of brute force, political regimes, coercion, purely restrictively, or along similar lines. Though power is present in all the situations that would fall under those rubrics, power is, for Foucault, both a more comprehensive and a more positive notion. First, it is a universal force or mechanism from "infinitesimal mechanisms" that have often become "invested, colonized, utilized, involuted, transformed, displaced, extended, etc. by ever more general mechanisms and by force of global domination" (1980:99).

Thus an analysis of power moves upwards, ascending from these infinitesimal mechanisms towards the more global. Power, then, while it cannot be "localized here or there," is found on the lowest levels of human interaction which then can be "invested and annexed by more global phenomena" (1980:99). Since power is not localized, but rather "is everywhere...because it comes from everywhere" (1980:93), we must conceive of it as "employed and exercised through a net-like organisation" and circulating "in the form of a chain" among whose threads individuals circulate so that "they are always in the position of simultaneously undergoing and exercising power" (1980:98). These networks or sets of networks are not a simple organization but can be superimposed upon one another, cross paths, "sometimes cancel one another out, sometimes reinforce one another" (1980:98).

Foucault's notion of power can be, I think, helpfully compared to Nietzsche's notion of the will to power (drawn by Nietzsche from Schopenhauer 1969 and serving as an inspiration to Foucault) and also to Freud's notion of libido (though that has been trenchantly criticized by Jung 1961, 1969 and variously altered by others, e.g., Lacan 1977, Lyotard 1993; more generally see Elliott 1992).

For Freud, as is well known, libido was rather like a psychical constant that, if not given expression by ordinary means, would find expression elsewhere. Thus Freud defines libido as "that energy regarded as quantitative magnitude...of those instincts which have to do with all that may be comprised under the word 'love.' The nucleus of what we mean by love naturally consists...in sexual love with sexual union as its aim" (1957:177). Nevertheless, if heterosexual love is not expressed or some psychological mechanism prevents its expression, libido will find a way--homosexually in cases of narcissistic ego-ideal, painfully in the process of libido withdrawal in mourning, the inturning and withdrawal of libido in depression, libidinal introversion in neurotic nosogenesis, and so on. Thus libidinal energy is rather steady, though it may be shaped, routed, redirected, attached, detached, reproduced, introverted, and so on in various ways and to various ends with va rious effects.

Though the will to power is a far more general notion than that of libido (qualifying, if not constituting, everything in the cosmos), Nietzsche conceived of it in a similar fashion (see Nehemas 1985:74-105 and Deleuze 1983:39-72). Nietzsche writes,

Foucault's writings echo with Nietzschean phrases and, beyond that, ideas. Like Nietzsche's will to power, Foucault's concept of power is of a constant and ever present energy. Though it can distort, dominate, globalize, prove hegemonic and so on, it is also a positive, generative, necessary, and inescapable force.

Yet we should not think of Foucault's notion of power as an energy that comes packaged in discrete quanta to be possessed and distributed as one would a commodity. No, power "is neither given, nor exchanged, nor recovered, but rather exercised, and...it exists only in action" (1980:89). Economistic notions are specifically repudiated (and thus Marxist reductions of all power relations to the class contradiction; 1980:89-91).

Let's begin to draw the connections between power and knowledge (and justification, truth, subjectivity, discursive formations, and so on). While Foucault draws important and various relations and connections between power and knowledge, he does not collapse the two notions. In an interview he states,

Still, deep connections between knowledge and power are there. Let us take a closer look, keeping in mind that "truth," "knowledge," "subjectivity," and epistemic criteria function very closely in Foucault's writing, since he focuses on the social est ablishment of ideas.

Alcoff writes, "Foucault's notion of knowledge is that it always has ties to and is formed via its relationships with social, economic, and political practices" (1992:122). In this respect, however, Foucault is careful not to collapse all of knowledge into ideology and, further, questions the viability of traditional (e.g., Marxist) analyses of "ideology." If ideology is thought of simply as a body of supposed knowledge that really is just of function of class or "more broadly has strategic and functional relations to specific political and economic practices in a given society," then, on Foucault's account, the category is so broad as to be useless (Alcoff 1992:122). All knowledge--whether thought to be ideological or not--can be characterized in that way.

If the subjects of knowledge are within power, so much more are those systems of thought that are taken to be true and to count as knowledge. In "Nietzsche, Genealogy and History" Foucault describes how "devotion to truth" arises out of "the passion of scholars, their reciprocal hatred, their fanatical and unending discussion and their spirit of competition" (1977:142). This exercise of power in "devotion to truth" is tied also to "the will to knowledge: instinct, passion, the inquisitor's devotions, cruel subtlety, and malice" (1977:162). Through the exercises of power in relation to truth and knowledge we see "subjugated knowledge" lost in the "functionalist coherence of formal systematization" imposed by the dominant knowledge. Thus what is take n as truth (and consequently, knowledge) "is to be understood as a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation and operation of statements. 'Truth' is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it, to effects of power which it induced and which extend it" (1980:133). Truth and knowledge are "produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint" and yet they also induce "regular effects of power" (1980:131). Once again, power not only emerges from the construction of knowledge and truth as they arise in discursive formations, it also produces and sustains knowledge and truth.

This can be further seen in the fact that truth and knowledge cannot be emancipated "from every system of power (which would be a chimera, for truth is already power)" (1980:133). Foucault's project in his analyses (particularly those he describes as "genealogical"), then, is not to extricate truth (or knowledge or subjectivity) from networks of power, but rather to detach "the power of truth [knowledge, etc.] from the forms of hegemony, social, economic, and cultural, within which it operates at the present time" (1980:133). Truth and knowledge and the like are already intrinsically qualified by, formed within, and exerting power. By emphasizing "subjugated" forms of these Foucault seeks to use their power to unseat the dominant forms of power as manifested in present "regimes of truth" (1980:131).

The bottom line is this: the ideas of truth, knowledge, justification (or whatever normative epistemic notions are in play), subjectivity and so on are powerful ideas. They are powerful in a number of ways: which propositions (beliefs, statements) come to be taken as true (knowledge, justified) within a discursive formation is a function, in part, of power; what value is ascribed to these propositions is done so by means of power relations; how that truth (knowledge, etc.) is used, what influence it exerts, the kinds of effects it produces, and the means by which it is possessed are all qualified by power. One could go on along these lines, and though I shall not, a final reminder is in order.

Power's relation to knowledge can indeed be sinister, dominating, restrictive, or seen in terms of distortion (e.g., the Soviet "knowledge" of psychiatry that led to the placement of Old Believers within prison "hospitals"; the American "knowledge" of what people want that leads to the advertising of what they don't need). Power's functioning, however, cannot be restricted to such contexts. For Foucault power has had as much role, though a differently structured role, in the formation of the knowledge of human dignity and alienation possessed and utilized within the Catholic Worker movement or the knowledge that has led to better care, concern, and valuation of the environment. Whether these differing relations to power have epistemic importance or can be incorporated into a normative account will be a topic for the next section. These comments, then, I think, suffice as an outline of Foucault's descriptive account.