Power and Knowledge
The following is a critique of the central epistemological tenet of all leftist, that power equals knowledge. It begins as a question of rather or not panopticism poses a serious threat to privacy. It is extracted from a post on toolshed.down.net
Now, I presumed when Greg mentions "panopticism", he is referring to
variety spoken of by Michel Foucault, in his tome,
Discipline and
Punish/The Birth of the Penal System. My understanding of panopticism
(in paraphrase) as espoused by Foucault is as follows.
Panopticism is a method of organizing that places several parties under
the eye of one or more supervisors. This is apparent in the roots of
the word, with its prefix of
pan, meaning all or whole and
optic, meaning sight. The parties being observed are however
isolated/restricted to some degree or another from each other. They are
not aware of if and when the supervising party/parties is observing
them. Thus, they are spurned on into self-regulation by the paranoia
being caught not behaving properly or performing adequately. This
phenomenon of panopticism is a result of the advent of
industrialization and empirical/utilitarian thinking. It is found in
the institutions arising during its era of its inception and is still
with us today. It can be seen everywhere. Examples of it can be found
in places ranging from prisons, to factories, to classrooms.
The secret to why panopticism works in theory is because power and
knowledge are entwined in Foucault's reckoning. To him, knowledge of
something is power over it and power over something gives you knowledge
of it. These two increase symmetrically in Foucault's theory. Thus no
amount of power achieved over something is without the intellectual
devices necessary to control and direct it in relation to amount of
control you have over it. It's all a simple matter of what one wants
to get out of the object of your control. This was discernible by using
techniques he called "discourse", "Archeology of knowledge", and
such. I'm too tired to go into the intricate details of these things.
If you??re curious about them, I suggest you get either the
Foucault:
For Beginners or
Introducing: Foucault graphic novels. (Or, God
forbid, read the real fucking books he first articulated the concepts
in) However, returning to
Discipline and Punish, he saw the brutal
means by which criminals were dispatched as a direct example of
knowledge of the sovereign's power being demonstrated to the masses,
as a means of keeping them in check and reverent of the sovereign.
Later, this secret of the dynamic of knowledge and power was used when
the emerging bourgeois of the West began to subsume control of society
in their ranks. They incorporated the panoptic as a means of exercising
power/knowledge over the society for their own purposes of fomenting an
industrial age that was efficient and stable. Both feudal and
capitalist economies and societies used this same device to achieve
their respective means in Foucault's eyes.
Thus for further applications, if this realization of the
power/knowledge dynamic was passed on to the proletariat, they would be
able to achieve maximal freedom and benefit for the society as a whole.
Power would just simply have to be passed on to a central figure whose
purposes were ideal and noble; a cult of personality, if you will, like
Stalin or Mao. Thus you can understand why Foucault considered himself
an avowed Maoist in theory, although he didn't really like the way Mao
did things. Marx also espoused this concept that power and knowledge
were inherently entwined, although more inferentially and not as
explicitly. It is the axiological foundation for all theories of
central planning.
If this seems confusing, that's because it is. It is illogical and not
a reflection of reality. I can begin demonstrating this by returning to
our example of the panoptic. All of us remember being in class and
despite having a teacher breathing down our necks, still managed to do
the things that got us into trouble. Yes, the illusion of her/his all
seeing gaze hung over our head and kept us in check to a point. But
there came the time when we/you realized it was just that: an illusion.
In time, the necessity to act out and exert control over your own
existence spurned you to figure out how to get around the limited
amount of time the professor could actually devote to watching you. You
learned when to behave and when you could engage in illicit activity,
be it talking, passing notes, or cheating. You probably later learned
to use the same technique in gauging your parents in order to sneak out
of the house or prey on their lack of suspicion. I know I did. If you
have a job, you probably realize none of us is the ideal of what our
supervisors would like us to be, despite whatever chiding issued by
them. You probably figured out how to fuck off and scrape by. And even
if you were a good employee, you probably saw others who did fuck off
and got away with it. No workplace is without this despot. And look at
the most rigid and supposedly sternest use of the panoptic: prison.
Prisons are awash with crimes being committed by people already
convicted of a crime and are now put there supposedly to stop them from
committing further crime until their debt to society is paid. Drug
distribution, sexual assault, bribery: you name it, it goes on. You
have but to watch the TV show
OZ or read the book
In the Belly of
the Beast to see examples of this. Now, take these individual
examples of knowledge not being power's shadow and quantify them
across entire societies and indeed the entire world. You start to get a
more accurate reflection of reality then.
The phenomenon of power and knowledge growing together is called
economy of scale and the point at which they begin to grow apart is
called diseconomy of scale. The parts of the trajectory of power and
knowledge governed by the economy of scale is inherently limited, while
the parts of trajectory of power and knowledge governed by the
diseconomy of scale are literally unlimited and govern a infinitesimal
degree of their respective trajectories.
In anthropological terms, this is why band level societies (the
smallest variety, less than a dozen, I believe) can be egalitarian and
function. Because all are aware what the other does and all can share
their time and energy equally amongst each other and benefit maximally.
However when you begin work with larger and larger numbers of people,
things get more complicated, you can't know or be responsible to what
everyone else is doing nor can they know or be responsible for what you
are doing. This is why power over one another loses its egalitarian
distribution in societies functioning under normal circumstances and
begins to ultimately recede to power only over oneself.
Economically speaking, this is why Israeli farming communes work and
command economies don't. Even in private enterprise, there comes a
point at which a business grows too big to know what all is going on
within the organization and begins to suffer in its efficiency. An
example of this is looking at the cost of productions for an similar
Ford and Chrysler automobile models. Ford is larger than Chrysler, has
more resources and factories available, thus in theory should be able
to produce cars cheaper by spreading the costs across board more
broadly. Yet despite being smaller and engaging in generally all the
same functions as Ford does, Chrysler still manages to produce vehicles that
are an average of 60 dollars cheaper on the whole than like models
produced by Ford. The reason for this is that Ford has exceeded its
economy of scale. Despite having the incentive of profit, which is
lacking in command economies, even Ford cannot manage optimize its
efficiency given the breadth of activity occurring within its
organization.
This is part of what spurns on the call of the left to "return to
nature" and cultivate smaller communities instead of large cities.
This was Tyler Durden's ultimate goal in
Fight Club. The wise
amongst their ilk have some notion of the limitations of power and
knowledge and realize if their egalitarian notions are ever to be
realized, they must reduce the numbers they are working with in a given
community.
Finally, addressing Gregory's argument that panopticism is in any way
a serious detriment to your freedom you exercise. I believe I have
soundly refuted that theory.
If my revised 1500 word answer to your question is still beyond the
pale of your ability to understand it, or beneath your requirements for
grammar and sentence structure, then you really need to get off the
internet, get laid, and lighten the fuck up.
