Monday Thoughts 2: The Faces of Postmodernism

17.3 The Faces of Postmodernism
In this section, we have chosen several figures from postmodernism to give you some sense of this recent trend in philosophy.

We start with Michel Foucault (pronounced foo-KOH). You will remember that Francis Bacon in the 1500's had the famous slogan that "Knowledge is power." The more truth you know, the more you are able to do in the world. Foucault turned this expression on its head, "Power is knowledge." For Foucault, the truth is whatever you have the power to convince others is true.

Foucault's writings apply this principle to subjects like the punishment of crime, insanity, and sexuality. In his historical studies, Foucault shows how society's paradigms have changed in the last few centuries.

For example, the punishment of crime was very public up until recent times. People were beheaded or hanged in public for all to see. Particularly heinous crimes were met with such grusome punishments as being drawn and quartered. The goal was to deter others from doing the same.

Foucault argues that changes in contemporary culture do not indicate that we are more civilized than previous generations. Rather, he argues, we have made punishment into a matter of revenge. The goal is no longer to show others what not to do. Now the goal is to make the criminal suffer for what they have done. In both cases, lines of power have created what is true.

With regard to sexuality, Foucault argues that the very category of sexuality as an aspect of a person is a recent invention. In previous days, people did not divide human sexuality into the categories of hetero- and homosexual with distinct "orientations." Homosexual activity was exactly that--sexual activity that some people engaged in.

However, such individuals would likely have been married and have children as well. To use our language, earlier generations would have assumed that everyone was a heterosexual but that some people engaged in homosexual behavior as well. But they did not have a category "heterosexual" in their mind.

A good deal of what Foucault had to say about such things seems to work when we apply them to history. For example, we saw in chapter 12 that the Bible only seems to address homosexual activity, not a homosexual orientation. All our knowing of the world involves the use of paradigms, ways we categorize the data of the world. Unlike God, we cannot hold in our minds all the data in its relationship to all the other data of the world. We have to "group" the data, to simplify it. Then once we have reduced the data of the world into smaller groups, we propose relationships between those bigger categories.

But these "structures" our minds and cultures give to reality almost always involve skew.<1> We almost always have to oversimplify reality in order for us to process it. Have you ever heard the saying, "The Devil is in the details"? This saying basically reflects the truth that our nice categories often break down when we get down to the nitty gritty of applying them.

Foucault himself recognized that he himself was imposing his own power on the data of history. Indeed, we should be on guard as we read him, for he would have been inconsistent if he actually claimed to be relating something true about history. Nevertheless, we can learn a good deal from his studies. We can believe that there are better and worse interpretations of history and yet recognize that power plays an enormous role in what people believe is true.

We often do not realize how differently groups outside our own understand history differently than we do. When we think of the recent war in Iraq, for example, we find competing versions of history in play. In the days following the events of September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush had the power to impose a particular paradigm on a good part of the Western world. Using the power of words, he used language of traditional warfare like "attack," "war on terror," and so forth in order to urge the launch of conventional troops against a nation he included within that war.

President Bush had the power to maintain that paradigm through the 2004 election. But we can see several points of potential skew in the paradigm. For example, to simplify the data, Bush included a number of different "terrorist" groups together as a singular opponent. Foucault would note that even the imposition of the label "terrorist" immediately results in a skew of the actual data. How similar were these individual groups? How accurate was it to include the regime of Saddam Hussein within the same group as Al Qaeda? It may very well be that the historical paradigms of the future in relation to these events will be much different from that used by the Bush administration in its time of crisis.

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<1> Foucault is sometimes called a "post-structuralist."