the evolution of power

. . and back to Foucault. I've got about 80 pages left on this book. I just got up to the chapter which most of the overview books I'd read claimed to be the most ground-breaking conceptually. Here goes:

I was once informed by a friend not to start out blogs with fancy words, but I'm going to anyway; just stick with it, i'll explain.

Concept 1: Reification leads to economics.

Reification, loosely defined, is taking an abstract concept and acting as though it were concrete. The easiest example I can think of is Time. Time is not a tangible thing. We can't see or touch time. Yet, listening to the way we speak of time, it would seem like the opposite was the case. Western society is utterly encompassed by the idea of time as a measurable commodity. We devide up days into hours, into minutes, into seconds, and for engineers micro/nanoseconds. We speak of time as though it were something scarce, and with scarcity comes economics. We commonly leave activities undone for "lack of time". Still, where is this "treasury" of time? A band I like has a lyric that points out,
"Time exists just on your wrists so don't panic. Moments last, and lifetimes are lost in a day. So wind your watches down please, cause there is no time to lose."
Ultimately, time is really imaginary, it is an expression of the way humans experience existence, but there are other ways to express it. Eastern thought imagines time as a cyclical, seasonal pattern. There is no time line so to speak, instead there is a circle, or a track where existence goes around and around in circles for eternity. Consider that the next time you read Ecclesiastes 3: the mythic Solomon, the epidemy of wisdom, did not adhere to the concept of linear time.

Moving on, another example we can look to is the reification of value. This is the most obvious idea, and it's the first one that comes to mind when speaking of economics. Yet, what is value? This is question that is rarely answered because it is always anonymously under debate. Example: the concept of minimum wage is actually a debate over value. Time being a divisible commodity, and human life being a estimated amount of time, the question is really, how much is human life worth? How much is a person worth apart from their particular skills and talents? Or in other words, with no speicalized assets, what is the value of a person's commodified time?? This is essentially what is being debated with the concept of minimum wage. Obviously in the case of sweatshops overseas, or across our boarder with Mexico, human life is worth extremely little. Yet it becomes very hard to debate, since currency is a very inaccurate way to judge worth. How is it that a family in Latin America can live quite well on less than 2,000 American dollars a year, but an American with 15,000 can barely get by. But, at least this time, I'm not really intent on discussing currency; only on showing how we take abstract concepts and treat them as though they were tangible realities. Instead, I want to do a feeble job of introducing whoever the heck may read this to some of the ideas of Foucault.

Foucault's basic point is that Power is also a reified concept, which has it's own economy. Generally this is the economy we refer to as "Politics". The book (Discipline and Punish), focuses its attention on the evolution of disciplinary institutions and acts, primarily prisons and also educational schools. The evolution goes something like this:

Towards the end of the Middle Ages, and even into the Renaissance, social punishment for crime or abnormality was amazingly different than what we are now accustomed to. Keep in mind that punishment is essentially the use of power. And, viewing power economically, it is thus the spending of power for desired results. In other words 'you have to spend money to make money. Power in the Middle Ages was located in the person of the monarch. The King or Queen, or Lord, was the "all-powerful", almighty ruler. In other words they possessed all the power: they in themselves represented the sole bank where power was invested. This followed out, meant that the mass of society was therefore 'powerless'. The monarch was therefore responsible for the protection of the helpless multitudes he ruled over. So apply this thinking to the realm of crime. The criminal represents a person using power that is not his own, it is the monarch's. Since the victim is merely a sheep that the Shepherd King owns and is responsible for, the crime not considered to be against the victim, but instead against the King himself. Since the Monarch owns all things, there is no crime that is not an indirect assault on the him/her. Therefore, punishment plays out as the all-powerful King, displaying his almighty power over the criminal whose menial power was actually stolen from the King. So, there comes a form of theater where the true economic standings are shown to society as a whole. Take for instance the punishment displayed at the end of Braveheart. William Wallace who has offended the King is placed on stage before the crowd, the crowd participates in the theatrical display of torture: they throw rotten food at him and spit at him. They take part in the display of Wallace's impotence at the power of the King, who is the only one with true power. Wallace is tortured in a wide variety of ways, all to display that the King's men, and more importantly the King himself can do whatever they want, because they hold all the power, and Wallace, or more importantly every individual in the crowd, held none. The thing to keep in mind is that the torture of William Wallace was extremely commonplace in those times. It was the norm.

Yet, let's give this some economic consideration to this. If power, being a commodity, is scarce then what could we say for such torturous displays except that they were extremely wasteful. The idea was that the King had to periodically pick criminals who posed him a legitimate threat to his monopoly of power and spend a good deal of it, to assure that none of the masses got any ideas of resisting his will. Spend power in dramatic fashion, and through the fear of the masses, receive greater quantities of power. In poker terms, bully the table since your pot is vast and theirs is miniscule. Throw out a big bluff whenever you want to since you can afford it and they can't. This is an economic strategy of power that is effective, but often wasteful, and always held the potential to backfire. Afterall, the criminal could call the king's bluff, and the hostile crowd at the gallows could quickly change sides and demand the king's head rather than the criminal's. Not to mention the idea that it is economically absurd to think there is justified value in giving the whole nation a day off to see a king display the extent of his power over against the pathetic criminal.

How different things are today. As children of the Enlightenment we have been raised to believe that people as individuals have inalienable rights, which no king can justifiably subvert. We are in the 'land of the free' afterall. We are now horrified at the atrocious torture that was so commonly employed to display the monarch's wealth of power. Yet, this is more than a revaluation of human worth, it is a shift to a new economy of power. On the one hand there is the concept of the equality of the value of human life, but more subtly on the other hand there is an appraisal that points out that, though equal, human worth is appraised mainly by its position in the 'social machine'. We have achieved freedom from human tyranny at the price of enslavement to great inhuman social constructions. No longer are we sheep for the great shephard kings with their impulsive behavior. Instead we opt for "democratic" society, where we suppose that power (being a divisible commodity) is distributed among the population, instead of horded by the monarchy. We assume that all individuals hold an equal share of power, and lend it towards the ends they think would be best. We would call this voting. Yet this is a notion of equality that most of realize is an ideal far from being realized. In fact, it is not the case at all.

In modern society, with the deposition of the monarchy, we note that the bank of power was not divided equally among all humanity who are of "equal vaule". Instead, power was distributed mostly among the 'upper classes'. Or perhaps we should say, since the upper classes were mostly responsible for the disposition of the king, they conveniently worked out new political systems that assured that wealth and power would naturally rest with them. Today we would most easily recognize these political forces as corporate America. It's the reason that Enron executives are paying for their crimes by playing golf while lower class people guilty of much lesser crimes are spending years in jail. Our society has decentralized from sovereign power, but simultaneously allowed power to float up. Power in this way is protected by anonymous entities, like corporate facades, trust funds, etc. It is thus distributed in various pools which the upper classes have secured access to. The upper classes in this situation have no need of playing any sort of tyrannical role, since the entire economy of power is set up to protect them from accusations 'from below'.

Foucault gets really detailed in describing the methods used to cause this, but I'll spare you the technical explanations for now. His book has been quite revealing to me. I believe it has massive implicaitons for Christian thought, but i'll save all that for another time.