Knowledge and Power

A classical historian would characterized its ‘discipline’ as one in which knowledge is presumed to be diachronic, as a succession of different states of distribution of the means of production, following certain inner logic. However with the uprising of the Structuralism, the entire concept of history was put into question. Michel Foucault takes the synchronic analysis, suggested by linguistics, and applies it on history.

He proposes a perception of history as a succession of discursive formations, as constituted by system of signs, discursive realms that work to construct a version of the real. In order to find a form of unity that combines all possible different formations he develops the term episteme. Epistemes are conceptual frameworks (deeply rooted, unconscious structures for organizing knowledge) that are used in different epochs to understand the world. These epistemes are built as sign-maps to assign order into society. Once this organizing phenomena is reached we will be able to explain “historical events” in relation to particular discoursive formation which allowed  (or did not allow) some event to happen.

One of the most prominent theoreticians of our time, the creator of “Orientalism”, Edward Said combines the concept of epistemes and the concept of hegemony (Gramsci) to show how the Orient evolved as a mirror image of the “idea of the European identity”. The Orient signifies a system of ‘representations’ formed by political forces that brought Orient into Western learning (disciplines!). The first “Orientalists” were 19^th ct. scholars who translated the writing of the Orient into English. Based on the assumption that a truly effective colonial conquest requires knowledge of the conquered peoples, by knowing the Orient West became to own it. This idea of knowledge as power (again Foucauldian influence) is very much present in Said’s critique. Beside Foucauldian influence (in first place the concept of episteme and the method of archival research) another important “poststructuralist” influence is Derrida’s concept of “the center and margins” and of “the Self and the Other”.

Some of Foucauldian concepts were major influence for another school of critique in the US: the New Historicism. Heavily influenced by new linguistic concepts, they start to perceive the historical as textual. History is not any more seen as stable, unchangeable context that literary texts reflect upon. It is rather, like the literary text itself, a discourse.  It is perceived simply as ‘representation’ – term very important to the new historians – enabling to study relations between texts (both literary and historical) and to discover how they trace, or negotiate, certain patterns of meaning.

The New Historians are focused on issues of power, mainly influenced by Marxist theory and Foucauldian theories on knowledge and power. They are mainly dealing with the processes of the circulation of discourses and how they succeed to gain and maintain their “social energy” (term created by Stephen Greenblat).

What is the big impact that Foucault made to change the perspectives of how observations upon history (or literature, or cultural artifacts) should be made?

Foucault noted that the world we live in is shaped as much as by language as by knowledge. Knowledge and perception always occur through the media of language. In certain ways, we will not be able to know anything if we are not able to order the reality linguistically. But language is a matter which is very much alive, perpetrates in time, changes its essence constantly. Therefore, what counts as knowledge also changes in time, and with each change, the place of language in knowledge also changes.

Foucault goes further on in his “historical” analysis, showing that the two realms of knowledge and power are intrinsically interconnected. Modern power can enter every artery of our daily lives (Big Brother is watching you!) subjecting every aspect of human existence to strategies of knowing. The Panopticon is the metaphor he uses to describe the state superior surveillance, which is not any more connected directly to a particular institution or a person. Thus, the form of “gouvernementalite” is formed in which, through subtle techniques of control, compliance is ensured.