Foucault

Robert Nola

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780714649153
• eBook ISBN: 9781135231774
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Five eminent critics explore the validity of Foucault's ideas on such questions as the fit between power and knowledge and the tension between historicist and universalist claims.The very possibility of a critical stance is a recurring theme in all of Foucault's works, and the contributors vary in the ways that they relate to his key views on truth and reason in relation to power and government.

Knowledge, Discourse, Power and Genealogy in Foucault

ROBERT NOLA

Both in Foucault’s writings and in commentaries upon them, the expressions ‘knowledge’, ‘power’, ‘discourse’, ‘genealogy’, ‘power/knowledge’ and ‘power/discourse’ (sometimes with a hyphen in place of the solidus or backslash) occur with a frequency which is often inversely related to the degree of understanding they produce. In the case of the last two expressions, it is assumed that there must be some significant relation that the solidus could stand for amid the many evident implausible connections. A critical analysis of what is signified needs to move beyond bland characterisations such as ‘knowledge occurs in a social context’. Finding a significant relation remained a problem even for Foucault up to the year before his death, as the following confession reveals:

you have to understand that when I read – and I know it has been attributed to me – the thesis ‘Knowledge is power’, or ‘Power is knowledge’, I begin to laugh, since studying their relation is precisely my problem. If they were identical, I would not have to study them and I would be spared a lot of fatigue as a result. The very fact that I pose the question of their relation proves clearly that I do not identify them.¹

Earlier remarks to the contrary, Foucault finally believed that some strong relation other than identity had to hold between power and knowledge,² but he did not envisage that at best only occasional historically contingent connections of causal dependence might hold. One task of this paper is to set out some possible links. No critical evaluation of Foucault’s various accounts of power will be given here.³ Instead, we will assume only the following: ‘one defines the exercise of power as a mode of action upon the actions of others’.⁴ That is, power relations can either increase or decrease the range of actions of people, including their acts of believing and discoursing. Foucault includes even the question and answer interplay of an interview as an example of this kind of power;⁵ but such an account is too broad and needs serious modification – a matter not pursued here.⁶

Most of this paper is devoted to the knowledge/discourse side of the link. What will be argued is that Foucault, in fact, ignores traditional concerns about knowledge (outlined in the section entitled ‘Knowledge: a Brief View of the Traditional Account’) while needing them, though he does make contact with some current concerns in the philosophy of science about theory change through a bizarre theory of discourse and its objects. Most of the next section, ‘Foucault on Knowledge, Discourse and Objects’, is devoted to this theory and the relation of discourse to knowledge through the notions of connaissance and savoir. Lastly, some comments will be made about Foucault’s genealogical, as opposed to traditional, epistemological explanations of our beliefs.

The Power/Knowledge Nexus

The idea that there is some connection between power and knowledge is at least as old as Francis Bacon’s remark: ‘Human knowledge and human power come to the same thing’.⁷ There are two ways in which the Baconian aphorism can be understood: we only have the power (or ability) to bring about certain effects in nature if we know that particular causes bring about particular effects, or if we know how to manipulate causes to bring about desired effects. The philosopher Gilbert Ryle⁸ brought to our attention the old Aristotelian distinction between two sorts of knowledge: knowing how to, which denotes a human skill, ability, capacity, and sometimes power to do certain things (such as speak French, perform a biopsy, and so on); and knowing that in which our knowledge in science and elsewhere has propositional content (for example, the content that the Earth rotates). This yields one strong interpretation of the ‘knowledge/power’ slogan: knowing how to do something is just to have an ability (or power) to do that thing. But there is no such obvious strong link between power and knowing that.

However, there can be power/knowledge that connections of contingent causal dependence. Expressing this as a counterfactual⁹ relation, humans would not have the abilities, or powers, to produce certain effects (for whatever end) if they were to lack (scientific) knowledge that concerning cause-effect relations. Bacon unnecessarily restricts the effects to those produced in the natural world, but his claim can be expanded to include the production of effects in our social and cultural world and effects upon people, including Foucauldian social-scientific knowledge which enhances our powers over others. Let us call the causal dependence of power on knowledge that the ‘K⇒P Thesis’ (where ‘⇒’ indicates causal dependence and points to the causally dependent item). The thesis claims that for any enhancement of powers, P, there is some body of (scientific) knowledge that, K, such that P causally depends on K.

The thesis leaves open the possibility that there can be bodies of knowledge which do not now (or ever) enhance (human) powers over nature or other people. However, the thesis is not generally true. For a great deal of human history, our powers were enhanced through primitive technologies such as tool-making, without there obviously having been anything like a body of (scientific) knowledge to help produce them. Nor is knowledge necessary for power. Plato made the point in the Meno (97D–98D) that true belief can be just as efficacious as knowledge; so the same powers can arise from true belief as from knowledge. Lastly, false belief might not always leave us powerless.¹⁰

What of the converse, the idea that power leads to, or produces, knowledge? Let us call this the ‘P⇒K Thesis’, in which knowledge that is said to be causally dependent on power. Such a thesis would claim that for any body of (scientific) knowledge that, K, there is some power, P, such that K is causally dependent on P. The hunt is now on to find the powers, if any, upon which each body of knowledge we possess allegedly causally depends.

If the two theses of dependence are conjoined, then there is alleged to be a spiral-like interdependent link between sorts of power and particular bits of knowledge. That various sorts of human power are able to produce effects in the world and on people, depends on the level of development of our scientific knowledge (or on the truth-likeness of our beliefs). These, in turn, may well depend on other quite different powers and abilities used in the processes of knowledge (or belief) production.

That Foucault has a broadly encompassing view of the causal interdependence of power and knowledge is indicated in what he regards as the ‘guiding principle’ of his research:

My problem is rather this: what rules of right are implemented by [a] the relations of power in the production of discourses of truth? Or alternatively, [b] what type of power is susceptible of producing discourses of truth that [c] in a 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, [d] there are manifold relations of power which permeate, characterise and constitute the social body, and these relations of power cannot themselves be established, consolidated nor implemented without the production, accumulation, circulation and functioning of a discourse. [e] There can be no possible exercise of power without a certain economy of discourses of truth which operates through and on the basis of this association. [f] We are subjected to the production of truth through power and [g] we cannot exercise power except through the production of truth. This is the case for every society, but I believe that in ours the relationship between power, right and truth is organised in a highly specific fashion.¹¹

The bracketed letters have been added. Prescinding from talk of right, the K⇒P Thesis can be found at [c], [d], [e] and [g]; the P⇒K Thesis can be found at [a], [b] and [f]. Moreover, it is clear that the theses apply to all societies, to all knowledge and to all power. The strength of these claims is part of the difference between Foucault and Bacon. But another difference also emerges. There is no mention of knowledge in the above; rather, three different items are allegedly linked with power: truth, discourses, and discourses of truth. Clearly, our discourses may express what we believe, or believe to be true (which might be construed as Foucauldian ‘discourses of truth’), but not all our discourse is true or even expresses knowledge.

Knowledge is linked with power in the first chapter of Discipline and Punish. From the particular case of the punishment of the would-be regicide Damiens and changing penal and punishment practices, Foucault generalises to talk of punishment inflicted on bodies, and power relations concerning the soul and the social sciences. Ultimately, his peroration culminates in sweeping generalisations about power/knowledge which allegedly challenge our whole epistemological tradition: ‘Perhaps, too, we should abandon a whole tradition that allows us to imagine that knowledge can exist only where the power relations are suspended and that knowledge can develop only outside its injunctions, its demands, and its interests.… that the renunciation of power is one of the conditions of knowledge’.¹² Remarks such as these have led some to think that the power/knowledge doctrine is a rival which overthrows theories of knowledge that have dominated our thinking from Descartes, if not before. Whether this is the case will be discussed below.

Foucault continues in a radical vein:

We should admit rather that power produces knowledge (and not simply by encouraging it because it serves power or by applying it because it is useful); that power and knowledge directly imply one another; that there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations.¹³

This expresses strong versions of both the K⇒P and the P⇒K theses. The parenthetical remark rules out more modest Baconian views of the power/knowledge link in which the goal of power is to produce knowledge of cause-effect relations which can then enhance our abilities to do useful things. Lastly, we often think of persons as the bearers (subjects) of knowledge and as those who are either free of, or who exercise, power. But not Foucault, for whom the power/knowledge relations, not the subject, are fundamental: ‘In short, it is not the activity of the subject of knowledge that produces a corpus of knowledge, useful or resistant to power, but power-knowledge, the processes and struggles that traverse it and of which it is made up, that determines the forms and possible domains of knowledge’.¹⁴ Are these highly general remarks about the fundamental role of power/knowledge, all culled from the one paragraph, ultimately intelligible? If they are, are they true?

Before we can even begin to answer these questions, a fundamental ambiguity in the very formulation of the P⇒K Thesis needs to be cleared away. First, there is an act/content confusion. Suppose that A is a person who knows that p (where ‘p’ is, say, the claim that the Earth rotates daily). What does power allegedly cause? The content of A’s knowledge, namely, that p? Or does it cause the act of A’s knowing that p? Neither of these are plausible candidates. The first is incoherent, while the second is false; at best what causes A to know, rather than believe, that p is the evidence, or reasons, for the Earth’s rotation (provided by Copernicus, Galileo and others). Power is not involved in what we might call the product of a process of coming to know, namely, A’s knowledge that p. If power were involved then that would detract from A’s knowing that p. In contrast, A could get the (true) belief that p by means which had nothing to do with evidential justification, such as power. This point is as old as Plato’s discussion in the Theaetetus (201 A-C) that true belief does not become knowledge through persuasion.¹⁵

Instances of the P⇒K Thesis can, in one guise, be found in Bacon. Though scientific hypotheses may be confirmed or disconfirmed by observation, Bacon points out that often observations emerge from experiments. He argues that experimentation depends on our powers and abilities; the world often hides its nature and does not readily reveal itself to us unless we actively intervene in experimental situations. So there are some (contingent) relations of causal dependence of certain kinds of scientific knowledge upon power.¹⁶ As an example, consider the nineteenth-century French physicist Jean Foucault, who suspended a large swinging pendulum from the dome of the Panthéon in Paris and then noted the change in the axis of swing. He might well have exercised power in setting up and performing the experiment; this is part of the process of getting evidence (the changing axis of swing) which helps support the claim that A knows that p. But the final product, knowledge that p (as distinct from the true belief that p) is arrived at by consideration of the evidence and not by any power relationship. Thus power (to conduct an experiment) does not yield knowledge as a product; at best, it sets in motion processes which yield evidence necessary for knowledge.

Bacon envisaged other kinds of power producing knowledge. In the utopian The New Atlantis, Bacon proposed that society should be so organised that research institutes, not wholly dissimilar to those now familiar to us, be set up to pursue experimental research in all sciences. But again, the connection is one of contingent causal dependence between social and economic forces and the processes involved in the production of scientific knowledge, not strictly the content of scientific knowledge itself (that is, the product). In the light of this, the P⇒K Thesis is misleading in other ways: it does not concern what makes knowledge, but at best power processes that might be historically involved in processes for producing knowledge.

Knowledge: a Brief View of the Traditional Account

One of the problems with the slogan ‘power/knowledge’ is that the rather abstract term ‘knowledge’ stands for a wide variety of different items. Indicative of these are the several grammatical constructions into which the word ‘know’ enters in English, some of which are marked in other languages by different terms; if these constructions are not distinguished, then confusion arises in epistemology. Let us begin by assuming that it is people who know. We have already noted two distinct uses of ‘know’: (1) ‘A knows how to…’, where the remainder of the construction is filled by a description referring to an activity or power, and (2) ‘A knows that…’, where the remainder is filled by a complete sentence expressing a propositional content. Further constructions include the following: (3) ‘A person knows…’, where the construction is completed by a noun or noun phrase such as ‘the Pope’, ‘the way home’, ‘the works of Shakespeare’ and so on. Talk of knowing objects can be found in Plato; however, since Russell’s early writings,¹⁷ this kind of knowledge has been further divided into knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description of those things with which we are not directly acquainted (for example, historical events or persons). The distinction between (2) and (3) is not marked by separate words in English, but in French it is commonly marked by two different epistemological w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Foucault as Historian
• Foucault’s Problematic
• Knowledge and Political Reason
• Foucault and the Possibility of Historical Transcendence
• Knowledge, Discourse, Power and Genealogy in Foucault
• Notes on Contributors
• Index