The Foucauldian Power-Knowledge Complex

For Foucault (1991:Chapter 1) the practices of power are judged more by the effectiveness with which subjects internalise their effects than by the extent to which they conform or comply with them. In that sense power is not so much above us, as around and among us. It is an immanent not an external force; or put another way, it is conceived as inseparable from its effects. In Foucault’s (1980, 1982) writings power is said to work through indirect techniques of self-regulation which make it

difficult to constitute oneself in ways other than those directed. Foucault (1991:Chapter 1) suggests that power is concerned with the techniques which govern the possible limits of action. Power for Foucault (1991:6) is best understood as a form of ‘government’ which works through a multiplicity of actions and reactions, rather than through a simple domination/resistance binary. On this understanding, power reaches deep inside an institution in an immanent rather than a hierarchical fashion, composing and recomposing all manner of arrangements in space and time, although not in any direction orchestrated by a centralised power. Power, in this sense, may be loosely considered to be everywhere, but it is more accurately described as diffuse and embedded in particular institutionalised spaces. Foucault’s (1982:1) notion of power is one of a normalising rather than a subjugating force which works on, not over, subjects.

According to Foucault (1980, 1982), power produces, among other things, knowledge, and the two concepts are welded together in a single entity: ‘power-knowledge’. The exercising of power opens new relations of power and creates new objects of understanding or rational inquiry, whereas knowledge immediately presupposes and constitutes power relations. Moreover, in producing knowledge, power produces truth. Truth denotes an abstract “system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation and operation of statements”

(Foucault, 1980:133). One example of this sort of truth is the scientific method, which is of fundamental importance in contemporary Western society. DuBois explains:

“At the discursive level, this ‘episteme’ distinguishes not truths from falsehoods but ‘what may from what may not be characterised as scientific’.

The episteme, in turn, is connected to the power relations that define and maintain it and to the grid of power that it gives rise to and legitimises, forming a ‘regime’ of truth. Knowledge, then, arrives in consciousness following a filtering: not only must particular statements submit to the regime of truth, but only they, from a multiplicity of possible statements, are constructed by it…When these discourses conform with the regime of truth – when the latter validates or approves the former – then certain discourses or bodies of knowledge are admitted into the category of ‘true knowledge’. In this process a ‘whole set of knowledges’ is rendered suspect, discredited, excluded, and ‘disqualified’ while another, in the case of development, becomes the basis for policy formation” (DuBois, 1991:7).

Foucault uses the phrases “archaeology of knowledge” (Foucault, 1972:4) and

“genealogy of power” (Foucault, 1980:23). Genealogy is the analysis of how one constellation of power-knowledge relations is displaced by another. Foucault’s analysis is a critique of the liberal-humanist separation of power and knowledge, and simultaneously a critique of the Marxist view of power as economic exploitation and class domination. Foucault (1980:Chapter 1) rejects both the liberal tradition and the totalising discourse of Marxism because they imply that there can ultimately be a knowledge untainted by relations of power. Foucault is concerned with three key questions relating to power: (i) Who has power? (ii) How is it exercised? and (iii) What are its effects?

The relationship of power and knowledge is neither unidirectional nor exterior. For Foucault (1979:194) 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”. Foucault (1982) has shown that what we most readily recognise as ‘power’ is the more or less stable, yet continually renegotiated, ossification of sets of relations, or lines of force, in Deleuze’s (1986, 1992) terminology. Power is, in other words, a complex strategic situation (Foucault, 1982).

In Foucault’s (1987:12) schema, repression and domination represent extreme versions and limiting cases of the operation of power – they involve a fixing of power relations in such “a way that they are perpetually asymmetrical”.

In Foucault’s (1982) terms power is relational and contingent. What we typically recognise as ‘power’ is the ossification of sets of relations forming a complex strategic situation. Foucault is not concerned with normative judgements about whether or not the operation of power is ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Power effects may be judged as positive or negative, but these do not automatically flow from Foucault’s understanding. Foucault merely provides a framework for sharpening our understanding of contemporary relations of power. These power relations are frequently cast in terms of binary oppositions such as ‘developed-underdeveloped’, and they are largely grounded in the logic of exclusion. Individuals are inserted into systems of knowledge which judge their capacities and which justify and require both outside intervention and the actions of the individuals on themselves (Foucault, 1979:185).

Knowledge is inseparable from power (Foucault, 1977:27). All forms of knowledge are intimately connected to power relations and therefore truth:

“isn’t outside power…Each society has its regime of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth; that is, the types of discourses which it accepts and make function as true” (Foucault, 1980:131).

Foucault systematised power in a way which distinguishes him from much post-modern thinking. Unlike post-post-modernists such as Rorty (1992) and Lyotard (1984), he does not see power as having a locus of sovereignty, but posits the alternative thesis that “power is exercised from innumerable points” (Foucault, 1990:94).

Modern power, for Foucault, is insidious, its relations of power not visibly emanating from a sovereign source, but masked as forms of truth and knowledge:

“[A] moving substrate of force relations which, by virtue of their inequality, constantly engender states of power, but the latter are always local and unstable…Power is everywhere, not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere” (Foucault, 1990:93).

Foucault is concerned with an oppositional “struggle against power, a struggle aimed at revealing and undermining power when it is most invisible and insidious”

(Foucault, 1977:208). The insights offered by Foucault appear to be very germane to our understanding of issues of exclusion, power and knowledge – all fundamental to development theory and practice. Taylor (in Hoy, 1986:92), however, argues that Foucault’s model lacks the “idea of liberation”, that it offers no real hope of resisting or overturning domination. This criticism is only valid “if the world does indeed operate according to the universal values and abstract model implicit in the reformist, liberal political strategy” espoused by Walzer and others (Racevskis, 1993:103).

Racevskis argues that:

“talk of freedom is meaningless unless thought is freed from its philosophically, politically, and ethically imposed confinement and thus is given the opportunity to realize the historical contingency of the real”

(Racevskis, 1993:103).

Foucault’s great accomplishment, according to Bernauer, has been to:

“free thought from a search for formal structures and place it in an historical field where it must confront the singular, contingent, and arbitrary that operate in what is put forward as universal, necessary, and obligatory” (Bernauer, 1990:19).

Foucault’s discourse cannot claim to impose a programme or to recommend a correct line of action. The value of his work is attributable to its manner of questioning itself, of questioning the very tradition that has given rise to it. For Foucault there are two kinds of operations of knowledge: (i) one conscious, rational, visible but superficial, serving to promote official goals and programmes; and (ii) the other unconscious, unobtrusive but most influential, determining moral norms and legitimating epistemological principles and standards (Rabinow, 1991; Morris & Patton, 1979;

Scott, 1990). What makes Foucault’s theorising effective is his ability to avoid ontological or essentialising notions of power. Foucault’s work may be seen as a

“testament to sustained critical rationality with political intent” (Rabinow, 1991:13).

An important point to consider is that Foucault was never prescriptive. He aimed to provide the tools for opposition but did not suggest who should use them, or to what ends. Nevertheless, his work consistently developed and argued a theory of knowledge and power in discourse.

Foucault’s (1977, 1979, 1980) political problematic centres on the interlinking of the practices and techniques of power with the production of knowledge. As Dean puts it:

“[O]ne finds in Foucault less the thesis of the mutual superimposition of knowledge onto power than an operating method that can pick out the fine stitching of many different forms of knowledge within the threads of power relations and organised systems of practices. If one was to put this into a more general thesis it would be of the interconnection and irreducibility of knowledge to power and power to knowledge” (Dean, 1994:162).

Foucault (1977:26-28; 1979:82-83) maintains that power is to be analysed at multiple points of its exercise rather than simply in terms of the historical development of state institutions and the language of legitimacy, law and sovereignty. He refers to this as the ‘microphysics of power’ which emphasises practices of government⁶, and should be seen as productive of forces, relations and identities, rather than as manifest in interdiction and operating by repression and deduction (Bernauer & Rasmussen, 1988). Foucault’s thoughts on power and government make possible a differentiated analysis of forms of power relations, and an analytic of resistance to power relations.

Rather than a theory of the state, Foucault (1980) proposes to analyse the operation of

6 Governmental practices problematise certain objects of knowledge (e.g. poverty) in so far as they are implicated in the exercise of power.

governmental power, the techniques and practices by which it works, and the rationalities and strategies invested in it. Foucault is concerned with the question of how particular types of power relations enable the state to act as a centralised, unified locale, and the implications of this for the conduct of life of the governed (Burchell, Gordon & Miller, 1991).

Knowledge can be said to be dominated by the primacy of discourse. Discursive relations are relations of power. Power relations serve to make the connections between the visible and the ‘sayable’ (the two poles of knowledge), yet they exist outside these poles. Deleuze summarises Foucault’s treatment of power in the following terms:

“Power is a relation between forces, or rather every relation between forces is a power relation…Force is never singular but essentially exists in relation with other forces, such that any force is already a relation, that is to say power:

force has no other subject or object than force…It is ‘an action upon an action, on existing actions, or on those which may arise in the present or in the future’; it is ‘a set of actions upon other actions’. We can therefore conceive of a necessarily open list of variables expressing a relation between forces or power relation, constituting actions upon actions: to incite, to induce, to seduce, to make easy or difficult, to enlarge or limit, to make more or less probable, and so on” (Deleuze, 1986:70).

Power, then, is not essentially repressive; it is not possessed, but is practised. In Foucauldian terms, we should think of power not as an attribute (and ask ‘what is it?’), but as an exercise (and ask ‘how does it work?’). In addition, forces have a capacity for resistance such that power is only exercised in relation to a resistance, each force having the power to affect and be affected by other forces. For Foucault, resistance to power is part of the exercise of power.

Power is a series of relations between forces and knowledge is a series of relations between forms. Power and knowledge are mutually dependent and exist in a relation of interiority to each other (Foucault, 1977). Although Foucault accords power a kind of primacy, power would exist without knowledge, whereas knowledge would have nothing to integrate without differential power relations. Another critical aspect of power, and one implicated in the power-knowledge nexus, concerns subjectivity.

This is crucial because in Foucault’s account of power the formation of subjects is

‘part and parcel’ of power’s productivity. Foucault (1982:208) writes: “My

objective…has been to create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects”. Subjects’ actions take place in discourse, and subjects themselves are produced through discourse. The interrelationships between power, knowledge and the subject are so systematic that it makes little sense to consider each component separately; they all condition, and form the conditions for, each other.

The Foucauldian account of power makes sense of the emphasis in 20^th century social theory upon ideology as the key means through which social relations of power and domination are sustained (Gramsci, 1971; Althusser, 1971; Hall, 1982), and the commonsense normalcy of mundane practices as the basis for the continuity and reproduction of relations of power. Foucault has shown how modern ‘biopower’ rests upon technologies and techniques of power which are embedded within the mundane practices of social institutions (e.g. schools, asylums or prisons) and are productive of social subjects.

A central problematic that this study grapples with is how a variety of strategies of power and knowledge apply themselves to the field of ICT, poverty and development.

It is a central thesis of the present study that discourse analysis adopting the Foucauldian power-knowledge framework is effective because it calls for permanent criticism and is able to exercise perpetual vigilance and scepticism toward the claims of government to prescribe the meaning of ICT, poverty and development.