Day 100! Crazy. Things were more or less normal. I helped Sherrill set up her new phone, which wasn’t too bad, but I swear she managed to buy the slowest model they had. I also completed my homework for my Data Analysis in the Humanities course; I think there are only two weeks left.
On Saturday I finished Power/Knowledge by Michel Foucault. Foucault was a French philosopher and historian who wrote a series of books about the relationship between power and particular knowledge-producing institutions, including the psychiatric clinic, the hospital, and the prison. As a whole, his work attempts to define a shift that occurred in the 18th and 19th centuries, whereby the surveillance and hierarchical discipline gradually replaced direct violence as the primary means of administering power. In June, I read his most famous book, Discipline and Punish, which charts the progression of the criminal justice system from public executions to invisible condiment.
Power/Knowledge is a collection of lectures and interviews, which provided an illuminating look into Foucault’s thought-processes and methodology. The writings in the book primarily concern what Foucault calls “regimes of truth” or “epistemes”, ie the cultural and political rules which govern what can be considered true or false. This goes beyond just political correctness; the rules of the episteme determine what thoughts are even possible. For example, microorganisms (ie germs) were not discovered until the mid 1600’s when microscope technology progressed far enough to make them visible. Prior to this discovery, it was logical enough to blame one’s illness on demons or bad spirits. The discovery of germs, then, marks not just a change in technology, but in subjectivity. A person who lives in a world of demons must think and act differently than a person who lives in a world of germs. Thus, in proving the existence of germs, we fundamentally alter the way we view ourselves and the world in order to open new doors of thought and gain greater power over life. There are also political consequences to this shift. Replacing the concept of sickness-by-demon with the concept of sickness-by-germ strengthens the ideological regime of the medical profession at the expense of the Church. These sorts of epistemological shifts are what Nietzsche is talking about when he refers to the “death of God”.
The lectures and interviews that make up Power/Knowledge describe the emergence of concepts such as madness, criminality, and sexuality, and examine the ways in which these conceptual frameworks have been used and developed for political ends. The book posits that the production of truths is both historically contingent and politically motivated; the complex concepts in our head are not the products of objective reality but of institutional powers, and those institutional powers have economic interests. That doesn’t necessarily make the truths less true, but it does mean that some truths are promoted while other truths are suppressed, and that we are so caught up in this economy of knowledge production that there is no such thing as an objective or non-ideological position from which we can observe the world free from bias. Science is said to be objective because it merely describing things as without making claims as to how they ought to be, but any description of a phenomena involves a normative judgement (sometimes not even conscious) about which phenomena are important enough to be included in the description, and thus there always remains room for ideology to obscure truth.
On an unrelated note, I’m going to take some time away from the daily blog for a bit. I’d like to try writing some short stories instead. I’ll still write updates when something noteworthy happens, but in the meantime, I have a lot of bubbling anxieties about the future that can only be explored via science fiction.
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