Episode #121 - Transcript

Hello, everyone. I’m Stephen West. This is Philosophize This!

I hope you love the show today.

So real quick, just to clarify something. Towards the end of last episode, I talked about doing a couple episodes on the late work of Wittgenstein and Heidegger. But, based on the emails I received after releasing last episode, it seems clear that people don’t really want to hear about it. They kind of want to just move on to postmodernism. Now, personally, I think to fully understand postmodernism it’s absolutely crucial to understand this transition from logical positivism to the mid-20th century where there’s more of a focus on behaviorism and pragmatism. But, look, let’s be honest here. At the end of the day, I’m a dancing monkey that’s doing episodes about what the majority of people want to hear about, or else I go out of business. So, with that in mind, today’s episode is part one of a series on Michel Foucault. And, if you’re at all confused about the context of these ideas and how they’re being brought up, send me an email. I’ll respond to as many as I can.

But, that said, if someone were going to write a short list of the quintessential postmodernist philosophers, of what’s meant when somebody says, “postmodernist philosopher,” Foucault is definitely going to be on that list. But, to some, relegating the work of Foucault and labeling it as merely being in the realm of philosophy doesn’t really do him justice, because his work oftentimes moves into areas that have nothing to do with philosophy. To some, you could easily refer to Foucault as a historian or a political theorist or a social commentator. Depending on what era of his life he wrote the book you’re reading, you could have very different impressions about what subject matters even were important to him. Now, this makes it completely impossible for us to cover the entire scope of Foucault’s work in a single episode. And it can kind of make it hard to find a clean entry point into covering his work.

But I think a really good place to start is for us to talk about the details of his 1975 book titled Discipline and Punish. Now, to a total outsider to the work of Michel Foucault, to somebody that just picked up and read Discipline and Punish one day, to that person, the book may seem to be just a history of criminology, a historical catalog of the ways we’ve treated and punished criminals over the centuries. But, as we’ll talk about later on today’s episode, Foucault’s actually making a much deeper point with this book. He’s making a point about the structures of where power lies in society and the relationship between the people in power and the average citizen. And, just so the first half of the podcast doesn’t come off completely like I’m doing some documentary on the history of how we’ve treated prisoners, throughout the episode I’m going to ask some questions when we come to the end of sections to sort of foreshadow why this may be much bigger than just Foucault talking about the history of criminology.

By the way, Foucault himself would never describe this book as a “history” of anything. Foucault hated the word “history” and almost never used it in his writing. He used words to describe this book more like a “genealogy” of the way we’ve treated criminals or an “archeology” of how criminals have been punished over the years. He hates the word “history” because so often the word “history” brings with it a connotation that we exist in our modern world at the end of this long, historical timeline of events that have led to near constant progress, this idea that, “Ah, we used to be these barbaric savages that followed the playbook of Machiavelli, the ends justify the means. We used to believe it was morally acceptable for the king or the people in power to brutally torture and kill someone that was guilty of a heinous crime. Oh, but then! But then history happened. Time went on. Progress was made. Great political theorists came along, great leaders. Great ethical philosophers did their work and we all realized the error of our ways and brought into existence a more modern world where everyone’s much more free, the people in power inhibiting the lives of the average citizen far less than they used to.”

Foucault is going to call this assumption about history into question and really dig deeper into the idea of “How much has really changed when it comes to the fundamental relationship between those in power and the citizens?” Foucault begins exploring this idea in chapter one of Discipline and Punish by laying the groundwork for the rest of the discussion and describing what it was like to be a criminal in Western Europe in the 1750s. Specifically, he gives an example of what the world was like at this time by describing an actual punishment that was carried out on a criminal in the year 1757. Listen to the punishment this person faced for the crimes they had committed. This punishment was to be implemented in public on the steps of the church, and the criminal was to be “taken and conveyed in a cart, wearing nothing but a shirt, holding a torch of burning wax weighing two pounds…then, on a scaffold that will be erected there, the flesh will be torn from his breasts, arms, thighs, and calves with red-hot pincers, his right hand, holding the knife with which he committed the said parricide, burnt with sulfur, and, on those places where the flesh will be torn away, poured molten lead, boiling oil, burning resin, wax and sulfur melted together, and then his body drawn and quartered by four horses and his limbs and body consumed by fire, reduced to ashes and his ashes thrown to the winds.”

That was an actual punishment carried out on an actual person in the year 1757. Now, a few things Foucault would want us to initially consider about this situation. One would be to recognize the fact that this sentence was handed down on what may as well be a distant alien planet to the planet that you live on. See, because it’s so easy to hear about a punishment like this, weigh it up against the moral intuitions that happened to be given to you in modern times, feel morally superior to the people that lived in the 1750s, and then write off their entire culture as just barbaric savagery from a bygone era that to even talk about is legitimizing a waste of time. What could we possibly learn from people that thought something like this was a good idea?

But the problem with this approach, to Foucault, is that if you always end the conversation here, number one, you never understand the historical context that explains why things were different back then, but number two, and more importantly to Foucault, that feeling of moral superiority so often gets us to never consider the similarities between the world back then and the world as it is now. More specifically, the power structures of that time, their relationship to the citizens, and how many aspects of them still persist to this day. Because think about it, this punishment was handed down in a world that was pre-American Revolution, pre-French Revolution. The nation-state that sentenced this prisoner to this punishment was not modeled after the Enlightenment. It was modeled more after a Renaissance-era interpretation of Machiavelli’s The Prince and Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes.

The stability of this particular society would have been grounded in social contract theory. Or, if you remember from the podcast episodes we did about this period, it’s the idea that upon birth each and every citizen of the nation-state effectively signs a social contract. The citizens sacrifice a certain amount to the state by way of taxation or public service or by other means, and in return they receive protection, protection from what Hobbes calls the state of nature, protection by a king or a magistrate or whatever sovereign body is in charge that guarantees certain natural rights for the people. Put another way, the citizen’s job is to sacrifice for the sovereign so that the sovereign can do their job of guaranteeing the natural rights of the population, including punishing criminals that disobey the law. This is a contract where both parties have a very important role if society is going to function.

Now, another thing you may remember from the episodes we did on Hobbes is that, when somebody commits a crime in one of these societies, the act is seen as a direct attack on the body politic. Not only that, but the crime is seen as a direct affront to every single citizen that has signed a social contract, each one of them making up a small piece of that leviathan that Hobbes describes. But, more importantly than either of those two things, when a crime is committed in one of these societies, it is seen as a direct affront to the authority of the king.

And it’s right here, Foucault thinks, that you can start to see the true primary function of the penal system in one of these societies in the 1750s. The goal of the criminal justice system back then was not justice. There was no real focus on a balancing of the scales in any sort of way. The goal of implementing these punishments was not fairness. People didn’t get the same punishment for the same crime, generally speaking. The true function of the criminal justice system, the reason these punishments were often dramatic and always carried out in front of everyone in the public as a spectacle, the primary function was its ability to maintain social order. And it achieved this goal in a couple of key ways.

First of all, this type of system was a fantastic deterrent of criminal behavior because, if you were someone who had plans that day of committing some sort of heinous criminal act, look no further than the guy getting his arms ripped off by red-hot pincers as a persuasive essay as to why you shouldn’t be doing that stuff. But the other reason this type of system was so good back then -- because in one of these societies when a crime is committed it directly calls into question the authority of the sovereign, these punishments being carried out in front of everybody on the church steps ended up being an extremely useful public spectacle because these punishments served as reinforcement of the fact, direct evidence of the fact to the population, that the sovereign was still upholding their end of the social contract.

The primary goal of this entire display was not justice; it was not fairness. It was the maintaining of order within the society. And Foucault would want to point out that, if you’re the sovereign, if you’re the person or group that’s been commissioned by one of these societies to maintain order, an absolutely crucial part of doing your job is to make sure that you’re still in power able to maintain order tomorrow or next week or a month from now. In other words, Foucault is saying, an intrinsic, necessary part of that task of maintaining order if you’re the sovereign is preserving the existing power structure. But just to ask one of those foreshadowing questions, what happens when the power structure no longer serves the needs of the people?

Now, Foucault would want to point out that not only did having a sovereign whose job it was to maintain order in this way work for us, but it worked well. In fact, it worked extremely well for hundreds of years. But, eventually, as is the case with any imperfect system, problems came up. The sovereign and other people in positions of power started to notice some patterns with societies that were structured this way and how they rise and fall. They started to run into some unintended consequences, flaws in the system that seemed to be repeating themselves over and over again. See, because when you’re in the business of publicly executing people for the sake of sending a message about where the power lies in a society, things don’t always play out seamlessly in that situation. For example, sometimes, when you try to publicly execute someone, they don’t die. I mean, something’s eventually going to go wrong, right? The equipment malfunctions. The horses aren’t cooperating that day. You try to hang somebody, but they, you know, they got like a six pack on their neck, and they just kind of hang there for a few hours, laughing at you.

Point is, these sorts of things happen sometimes, and when they did, it wasn’t a far leap for the population to start considering whether this was some sort of bad omen. Was this a sign that the authority of the sovereign was wavering, that they were no longer capable of carrying out their end of the social contract? But this wasn’t the only unintended consequence that started to crop up in these societies. For example, at the beginning of the episode we talked about a pretty extreme punishment in 1757 that Foucault cites in chapter 1 of Discipline and Punish. Well, it wasn’t entirely uncommon when one of these sorts of extreme punishments were carried out on someone that the population might think that the punishment greatly exceeded the severity of the crime that was being committed. When this sort of thing happened, it wasn’t entirely uncommon for the population to side with the criminal or, at the very least, call into question the authority of the sovereign and whether they’re still running things properly.

But probably the biggest unintended, negative consequence for the sovereign that nobody saw coming was that, when you have these sorts of brutal executions and punishments taking place in the public square every day in front of everyone, when society’s functioning well and the sovereign’s doing their job, there is zero doubt in anyone’s mind when it comes to who is in charge. There is zero question as to who you’ll have to answer to and how you’ll have to answer to them should you decide to go against the rules enforced by the existing power structure. But the flipside to that is that when things are not going well -- say there’s a famine or natural rights aren’t being guaranteed or even if there’s just a general public sentiment that the sovereign’s inept and some change needs to take place -- the flipside is that there is zero confusion in anyone’s mind when looking for the people in power that need to be overthrown and killed for this change to occur.

What the sovereign and the people in power started to realize is that in this type of society that we’re talking about, brutal as it was, the will of the people often had influence over which people were in positions of power. And this could be extremely inconvenient for the sovereign at times. It made staying in a position of power for any extended period of time a pretty vulnerable enterprise. The people in positions of power knew that something drastic had to change if they wanted to make power more sustainable. And Foucault documents a fundamental shift that occurs in the way societies treat criminals that takes place between the years 1757 and 1837.

Now, real quick, I’m just anticipating a place that someone’s brain might go here. “Oh. Oh, so what you’re saying is that a bunch of evil people in positions of power realized that in this older type of society the will of the people actually mattered and could influence things. So they all got together, met in back rooms, formed a secret society, called it something like the Council of the Drifting Phoenix, came up with a creepy secret handshake, and they all sat around coming up with ways to control the population so they’d never have to relinquish power.” But what Foucault would probably want to point out is that there doesn’t need to be some evil secret society for people in government to want power to be more deeply embedded. Remember, the people in positions of power signed a social contract as well. Part of that social contract is maintaining the order of society so that they can continue to guarantee the natural rights of the citizens. And part of maintaining order historically, to Foucault, has been to preserve the existing power structure.

There doesn’t need to be a single evil person in any of these positions of power for them to be motivated to come up with new, better tactics to stay in power. And Foucault would say that these new tactics that are being implemented between the years 1757 and 1837 is a broader evolution of the way people in power keep prisoners under control. These changes occur gradually over the course of decades, sometimes just with subtle changes to the ceremony of the public execution itself. Whereas before prisoners used to be just paraded around in an open-top cart before their execution, slowly over the years that evolved into a closed-top cart with wooden planks on the sides so that you could hardly see the person. That eventually evolved into a bag being over the person’s head and their identity completely concealed. By the 1790s, most societies had moved away from these dramatic or creative public executions and favored a more standardized punishment of a guillotine in front of the courthouse. A few years later, the guillotine was moved behind the courthouse until eventually it was moved inside the prison, and all executions were done in private. Punishment and the reality of the way we treat criminals has slowly moved from before, when it was something that was at the forefront of public consciousness that it was impossible not to be aware of, to now, when it’s something abstract, silent, cordoned off, and even locked away in these distant, far away buildings that we never have to see. Much harder to locate who the people in power are that are inflicting this punishment.

To ask a couple more foreshadowing questions here, what sort of effects might this have on a society? And, more importantly, why might people who want to maintain their positions of power prefer a situation like this?

By the year 1837, 2 fundamental changes had occurred in the way that we punish criminals that Foucault says are extremely deliberate. Number one, putting somebody to death as a public spectacle that everybody gets to witness had all but disappeared. And, number two, we had changed tactics from punishing criminals by inflicting harm on their bodies to the emergence of a new era in our methods of punishing criminals where we now focus primarily on the disciplining and control of their minds. Let me say it again. There is a fundamental shift from the physical punishment of the person’s body, like we used to do, to the more modern disciplining and reformation of the person’s mind.

This is why Foucault titles the book Discipline and Punish. This is the emergence and infancy of what will eventually become the modern prison. This is the beginning of a long evolution where people in positions of power develop a much more efficient and effective way of wielding and sustaining power over people. Foucault in the book cites an actual strict time schedule that criminals in the 1830s that were serving time had to follow during their time in prison. You can imagine what something like this might look like, right? 7 am, wake up. 7:05, you are to be on your mark for roll call. 7:15, you are to be at the mess hall for breakfast. 7:25 you are to be at your assigned job post for the day. 9:15, water break. 9:20, back to work. In other words, when your entire day is scheduled and accounted for down to the second, there’s not much time for illicit criminal activity. There’s not much time for any thought outside of disciplining yourself and adhering to this schedule of stuff you’re required to do.

Well, couple this new, strict focus on the disciplining of the mind and reformation of behavior with more new tactics that were emerging over the years. More specifically, a new, improved, three-pronged approach towards controlling prisoners that Foucault thinks is one of the most effective methods that’s ever been devised. The three prongs of this three-pronged method that’s used to keep prisoners in line are what Foucault calls surveillance, normalization, and examination. That is, constant surveillance of the prisoners, which combines nicely with normalization, or a normalized standard of how a good prisoner should be thinking and behaving that’s been given to you by the people in power. And both of these work nicely with a constant process of examination and re-examination, where people in positions of power give you a score or a grade determining how well you’re corresponding with that way of behaving that we’ve decided a good prisoner should be a reflection of.

Foucault thinks this new, highly effective way of controlling prisoners may have sprung out the work of a philosopher named Jeremy Bentham. The same way Plato in the Republic spends a considerable amount of time trying to come up with the ideal structure of government, Jeremy Bentham spends a bunch of time in his work trying to come up with the ideal structure of a prison. And the model that he arrives at after thinking about it for so long is what he calls the panopticon. Simply put, the panopticon is a building designed and laid out in a very clever way where a single guard or warden or anyone in a position of power can stand in a specific spot in the center of the building, and they can see inside the cell of any prisoner they want, watch them at any time. But the prisoners can’t see them; they can’t know when they’re being watched. They can’t know the criteria that determines why they’re being watched.

In a sense, Bentham says, the reason this is an ideal design for a prison is because the only reasonable thing the prisoners can do in a prison that’s designed this way is to behave every second of every day as though they’re being watched because they can never know when or when it’s not happening. The life of the prisoner becomes, once again, constant surveillance through cameras or armed guards, strict adherence to a normalized way a good prisoner behaves given to them by people in power, and rigorous examination by experts or the court system or the parole board or whoever it is this week for the prisoner to answer to.

Now, some of you out there might be saying, “Why are we going on so much about the history of criminals? What does this have to do with philosophy? What relevance does this have to me whatsoever?” Well, if you’re someone that’s thought that all we’ve been talking about so far in this episode are methods that we’ve developed over the years for controlling only prisoners, Foucault would probably say, I hope you’ve been paying attention to the details of what’s been said so far because, when Jeremy Bentham sits down and creates the design of this panopticon of his, he’s not just talking about the ideal structure of a prison. And what follows from that is that Foucault is not just talking about the evolution of methods we’ve developed to control prisoners.

Jeremy Bentham describes the panopticon very generally in his work as a “new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind in a quantity hitherto without example.” And, knowing that he said that, it makes sense that he quickly goes on to say that, although this is the ideal structure of a prison if you wanted to control prisoners, there’s no reason this same design couldn’t be applied if you wanted to create anything: a mental institution that promotes a standard to the inmates of what a good patient is or in a military setting promoting what it is to be a good soldier or in a university setting promoting how you should think and behave if you want to be a good student. If Bentham lived in a modern economic society, he no doubt would see the utility of the panopticon if it was applied to a factory and producing good factory workers or even more generally how it could be used at a multi-national corporation trying to produce good employees.

See, that’s the thing. Let’s say you’re in a position of power in a corporation. To be able to use the fundamentals of these highly effective tactics that have been developed over the years to control your employees, you don’t need to treat them like they’re a prisoner that’s part of a chain gang forced to crush rocks all day. No, as long as you make sure that their chain is long enough that they don’t feel like a prisoner, you can set up some pretty narrow parameters for what it is to be a “good employee” that not only will they fall into, but they will actually police themselves to stay that way. They’ll feel intense pressure to adhere to that normalized standard of behavior at all times because their life at work is one of surveillance, normalization, and examination: surveillance by way of cameras, timeclocks, supervisors, deadlines, monitoring activity on your computer, I mean, even sometimes just the surveillance of other employees around that feel like they benefit from having dirt on someone in a highly competitive environment; the normalized standard of being a good employee -- speaking, acting, dressing in a professional way, however that’s defined by whoever decided in the company, putting on your work persona, always being politically correct, doing all the things to make sure you’re a good team player. Then it’s on to the examination phase with your monthly, quarterly, yearly evaluations where they give you a score out of 10 in all these different areas to determine how well you’re doing or, in other words, how well you correspond with exactly who I say you should be when you’re here. “Oh, well it seems your productivity is about the same level as last evaluation. That’s fine, I guess. Uh, you’re doing good in some areas, but, you know, there’s room for improvement in a couple other areas. And, don’t worry, I made an action plan so that we can see if we can get you back on track. How about that?”

This three-pronged method has become the dominant way of controlling human behavior. And, if you doubt that in any way, consider the similarities it has to the structure of some religions with the constant surveillance, normative behavior, and rigorous process of examination. This method is so effective and so capable of being applied to any circumstance imaginable that, in our modern world, it has so pervaded the way power is exercised that it extends beyond institutions like prisons or corporations, and it’s actually embedded itself into the very fabric of society. The very same process of surveillance, normalization, and examination could be said to exist in the way you present yourself online and the media you consume. It most likely is even being played out in various social circles that you’re a part of right now. Foucault would say that one of the truly insidious things about the way that power is wielded and people are controlled in modern times is that simultaneously you are both a subject that is being controlled while also being an active participant in the system, an active participant that in some way, most times unknowingly, supports the existing power structure.

Let’s slow down for a second and really talk about what’s being implied here, for Foucault. Remember the criminal justice system back in the 1750s? So, as we talked about, the goal of the whole situation back then was clearly not primarily justice or fairness, but instead the benefits the system provided to society when it came to maintaining order or keeping things moving forward. Well, Foucault is going to ask, is the penal system of the 1970s really so different when you take a closer look at it? Do we exist in a modern, enlightened era, where we’ve grown throughout history and learned the error of our ways and constructed a penal system that first and foremost has the aim of distributing justice and fairness? To Foucault, the goal of the modern penal system is not justice or fairness. The goal is, through surveillance, normalization, and examination, to produce harmless, non-rebellious, working, tax-paying, productive citizens who follow the rules and are satisfied with the life of conforming to the normalized standard of what it is to be a person handed down to them from above -- in other words, docile, useful subjects that carry out the vision for what the future should hold given to them by the people in power.

This is why there’s such a difference when it comes to the sentencing between white-collar and blue-collar crimes, between an executive that robs the IRS of $20,000 by evading taxes and some dude that robs a Taco Bell of 85 bucks and a Burrito Supreme. Short of the executive absolutely refusing to pay back any of the money, 9 times out of 10 they are not going to see the inside of a prison cell because their behavior really doesn’t need that much reformation in the eyes of the people in power. I mean, keep doing almost everything you’re doing. Keep working. Keep creating jobs. Keep starting new companies. Keep going to badminton on Sundays. Just pay your taxes. Whereas, the guy that robbed the taco bell -- I mean, it doesn’t matter if he marches back into that store, hands the 85 bucks directly to the manager, baby birds the Burrito Supreme back into his mouth, 9 times out of 10 that guy is going to jail because the goal of the penal system is reforming criminals to fit a pre-existing mold of what a normal person is, not direct retribution for a crime.

Now, also consider the fact that, once you’re sentenced, it isn’t about justice or fairness at that point either. In today’s day and age there’s the modern advent of getting out on good behavior. In other words, as long as you’re willing to reform yourself into the type of person that we’ve told you to be, it doesn’t really matter what your initial sentence was. We may knock a couple decades off your sentence if only you’re willing to play by our rules. Now, some people out there, no matter how many times they go to prison, are just the type of people that are never going to play by the rules. They’re never going to become this person the people in power want them to become. They’re never going to change. And those people are the people that will either be lifelong repeat offenders, in and out of jail, or they’ll eventually get life in prison.

And Foucault would say it’s these kinds of people that refuse to play by the rules that are absolutely fascinating to us as “normal people.” That’s another modern invention for Foucault, thinking of ourselves as normal and the labeling of criminals as abnormal or people that need to be reformed to a state of normalcy. But it’s the fact that they’re not like normal people that makes us so fascinated by criminals. Look at the thousands of true crime podcasts that have absolutely exploded onto the podcast scene in the last couple years, massively popular. Look on Netflix at all the crime-related shows you can find there. I mean, if you still have a TV subscription, look at all the TV shows on the air documenting some crime that was committed.

This fascination with criminals is not a modern phenomenon to Foucault. This has existed all throughout our history. In the American West there was Billy the Kid. In the Great Depression, Bonnie and Clyde. Criminals can even become folk heroes like D. B. Cooper. But this doesn’t just happen in the United States. This has happened all over the world. Part of the reason these older societies moved away from the direction of executing criminals as a public spectacle is because of the very real effects of what happens when you put a criminal beloved by the public at center stage.

Foucault thinks we love criminals so much because, when they vehemently refuse to play by the rules of society, they have an ability to show us exactly what we are, the law-abiding occupants and active participants in what is effectively a massive social prison. We live our lives trapped in a cell inside of a panopticon or a panopticon inside of another panopticon. In fact, the panopticon is a great metaphor for the entire project of modernity to Foucault. See, just like in the actual prison where the goal of the operation is not some higher virtue like justice but instead to reform prisoners into subjects that are useful for keeping society going, we, as occupants of our social prison, are constantly being disciplined and reformed into good employees, good consumers, good voters, good students, good friends -- all internalized expectations of ourselves given to us by someone in a position of power. We’re given standards to adhere to by TV shows, movies, books, all media, standards we internalize that tell us how our bodies should look, what beauty is, what you should care about, what you can and can’t say, what some people can do that you can’t do.

There is no prison or method of torture that has ever been devised that can do to people what they willingly do to themselves in our modern social prison. We live in a panopticon because we live our lives as though we are constantly being watched and held to these standards about how we should be that are given to us by media and the people around us. But the truly sick part about it is that we have constructed a world where we are simultaneously both the prisoner being reformed in the cell and the warden at the center of the panopticon that’s constantly watching us. We’ve created a world where we are under constant surveillance by ourselves: surveillance by looking in the mirror, wondering if you should starve yourself tonight to lose that two pounds that’ll make you beautiful; surveillance of your own irrational, toxic thoughts, but you suffer in silence rather than have to face the shame of going against societal expectations and asking for help and appearing temporarily weak to the people around you who need you to keep it together. There is no prison that can compare to the life of forcing yourself to adhere to a normalized standard of behavior that tells you the person you should be while constantly being surveyed and examined by yourself and others to make sure you stay that way.

This is what Foucault refers to as the genealogy of the modern soul. Consider the fact that the media you consume even gives you the very vocabulary you have at your disposal and with it the only categories you have to think about who you even are as a person. Think about that. Think about the power you could have if you were the person that came up with the only terms people had to think about who they even are. See, all throughout history people have asked the questions: Where does power ultimately lie? Who has the power and how is it exercised on people? And there’s been this classic idea that people have brought up over and over again that power lies in the hands of people that are in privileged political positions.

The thinking is, if you’re the president of a country, you can pass executive orders; you can go across the aisle and find bipartisan consensus if you want to. You can appoint judges that ultimately dictate the law. That’s where power lies. But then a Marxist tradition came along and said, no, that’s actually a naïve understanding of power. Because in advanced economic societies, if you can buy the interest of the president, if you can lobby politicians and get legislation influencing your behavior because of financial contributions, then it’s not people in privileged political positions that have the power but people in privileged economic positions. Well, many postmodernists would say, Foucault among them, that the Marxists are just as naïve as the people that came before them and just as hell-bent on trying to find some grand narrative to explain everything, like they always try to do with economics.

To Foucault, power doesn’t lie in either of these places. See, it would be great if power actually did lie in the hands of a relative few like that. To Foucault, it’d be great if something like the Illuminati really existed because then, just like the societies in the 1750s, we could point directly at the people in power and do away with them if things were going bad. But in our modern world power is much more difficult to identify. And part of the reason why is because it’s become much more widespread and diffuse. Power, in our modern world to Foucault, is always connected to knowledge. And, having recently talked about the structuralists and post-structuralists and their views on knowledge claims, we know that knowledge to them is not some objective, codified set of facts about the way the universe is that you learn in school. Knowledge to these thinkers is nothing more than the findings of the current dominant set of cultural discourses and the method that it uses to chop up and make sense of the world.

So, if power lies in the hands of people with knowledge and knowledge is given to us by people that use narrow, cultural biases to chop up reality, then where do we get our knowledge and who are these people that are arriving at knowledge for us? Well, in our modern world, science is where we get our knowledge. And thought leaders within the sciences in their respective fields of study are the people that arrive at knowledge for us to use. This is where power ultimately lies. You know, Foucault has a famous idea. It’s that man is a recent invention that’s reaching its expiration date, that the concept of man is something that wasn’t even talked about until around the 1600s. And part of what he means when he says that is that it wasn’t until the 1600s that people really focused on the human sciences as a prescriptive endeavor. It wasn’t until the 1600s that fields like psychology, biology, medicine, sociology were being used actively to try to arrive at a scientific, rational idea of “what it is to be a human being.”

Foucault would ask, well, who have conducted these experiments that are determining what it is to be a human being? Have we maybe limited ourselves by only looking at what it is to be a human being from the extremely narrow cultural perspective of almost entirely men from a Western-European cultural background, from a similar educational background, from a similar socio-economic situation where they were able to go to school, get funding for their experiments; they were able to think about stuff like this for their entire lives. Foucault would ask, when it comes to our understanding of what it is to be a human being, has the data we gathered over the years come from such a limited point of view that much of our understanding of what it is to be a human being is approaching some sort of expiration date?

Regardless of your answer to this question, Foucault’s point about power is that it doesn’t matter how much money you have or how high of a political office you hold. Those people may seem to be powerful but, if you can dictate the parameters that those people use to understand the most foundational things about their existence, if you can dictate their views on what a human being is, how they fit into the world, the vocabulary they use to think about who they are -- how about being able to dictate what things even matter to them that they then go on with their economic or political resources to pursue in this world? That’s where true power lies to Foucault. We’ll talk more about this next episode.

Thank you for listening. I’ll talk to you next time.