The power of Scripture II

II Suspicious Minds
i. Suspicion of power
Suspicion of power itself is a given of our times. [1] ‘Power’, we imagine, has the tendency to transgress the boundary of the individual, impinging on his or her freedoms and rights. It is the means by which control of one by another is exerted. Of course, this may be by violent physical coercion or by the threat of force, what Michel Foucault called ‘domination’; but power may also be exerted by shaping the realities in which people live: by the bureaucratic apparatus of government, by the shape of the physical environment, or by the instruments of commerce. These words are held to be in their own way ‘wizard-words’: words that may claim for themselves a power inappropriate to their humanity, a power that compromises the freedom of individuals to self-determine.

Postmodernity, showing itself to be the bastard child of modernity, offers a critique of (and a protest against) power in all its forms. However, the power of language to mould thought and behaviour has been the particular concern of postmodern thinkers. In particular they have sought to free us from the oppressive power of rhetoric. They have sought to unmask the work of wizard-words as a conjuring trick. Like the tin-man, the lion, the scarecrow and Dorothy, we will find when we actually meet the wizard that he isn’t what he seems: the power of words is merely illusion, a conjuring trick brought off using smoke and mirrors.

The acknowledged patron saint of postmodern power-criticism is Michel Foucault (d.1984).[2] In the 1970s Foucault became fascinated with power: though his interest was, he insisted, limited to asking how power is exercised in various contexts. Rather than seeing power as a thing held by various groups or institutions, he preferred to see power as a ubiquitous network of social relations and interactions. ‘Power is everywhere’, he wrote, ‘not because it embraces everything but because it comes from everywhere’.[3] Power circulates within a system of relationships rather being the possession of a particular person or group. As Foucault put it: ‘Power relations are rooted in the whole network of the social’.[4]

Crucially for our study of powerful words, power operates through discourse. Therefore, Foucault argues that the scientific knowledge so beloved of the Enlightenment does not free human subjects from the shackles of power relations but in fact enmeshes them in what he termed ‘power/knowledge’ (pavoir/savoir). There was not a liberation so much as an exchange of discourses. We can see this today in the discourse of scientific knowledge, with its appeal to ‘facts’ and ‘logic’ and the supremacy of a particular type of reasoning.

Foucault did not indicate that he felt all power was essentially bad. In fact, by describing the hidden fingers of power in human relationships he highlighted the increased possibilities within the mechanisms of (what he called) governmentality for genuine resistance to occur.[5] By describing the operations of power he hoped to enable people to be less docile in response to it – exposure of the hidden mechanisms of control is the route to freedom from them.


[1] It is noteworthy that ‘power’ in the discourse of the mass media almost always has a negative, even sinister, connotation: if an individual or an institution is ‘powerful’ it is almost never held to be a good thing.
[2] For an example of one author who takes the canonisation of Foucault very seriously indeed, see: David M. Halperin, Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995) He writes at one point: ' as far as I am concerned, the guy is an f---ing saint.'
[3] M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality - an Introduction (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 92-3
[4] M. Foucault, "Governmentality," in Power, ed. J.D. Faubion (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), p. 345
[5] Foucault’s neologism ‘governmentality’ indicates ‘the ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses, and reflections, the calculation and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific albeit complex form of power, which has as its target population, as its principal form of knowledge political economy, and as its essential technical means apparatuses of society’ in Ibid., p. 219-20