FoucaultFoucaultFoucault -or- The most important thing I've written in a while

We still have no idea what liberation looks like. There’s no way to know you’ve reached something that can be called ‘freedom’ – people all too often desire their own oppression. Freedom is only a faculty of the mind. All too often our definitions of liberation and freedom affirm a very narrow and particular sense of the word. The liberation of women’s movement’s second wave was a white/western/capitalist one, with power jobs and access to power that structures the reality of biopolitical systems. The power to control, whether it’s yourself or others: this power coincides neatly with the demands of political systems that leach and exploit us in terms of capital and other means. Freedom must involve an analysis of systems of power – not merely the overcoming of a privileged/underprivileged divide. Oppression/control does not have a scale, a vertical set of boundaries, it exists as a set of relationships between people who come to be defined and privileged in particular ways that relates to a system of power. systems of power that allow us to ‘know’ what freedom is. Is privilege freedom?

Similarly, we seem to remain tied to the hegemony of ‘reality.’ We surely don’t know what reality is, or have the means to access it. The claim to do so serves as a mask of the real power, which is to define what is even possible for you to achieve or know. the process of line drawing, demarcating forms of knowledge into authoritative and non-authoritative forms constitutes the basis of any political system. Real freedom, real power, real reality: each claim affirms an interpretive schema that serves a particular end. The claim to truth/reality both masks the positive, creation that comes with any process of describing the world, but certainly also masks a great deal of power. The less we understand (or choose to think) about how the world is understood, the less it becomes possible to understand what liberation is.

Freedom itself, defined in the liberal/sovereign mode has a strong association with whiteness. A racist society privileges whites, allowing them to accumulate capital, through the means of property ownership norms, a relationship to capital and the state that is demarcated by notions of freedom in a liberal/modern sense. A person is free if they can own and not have their shit stolen. The relationship to basic means to live – the blackmail of artificial scarcity at the root of capitalism – forces underprivileged groups to adopt alternative modes of relation to capital – perhaps theft, perhaps communal forms of sharing (pirating – bootlegging). The structure of class and race divisions means that the protection of a liberal, bourgeois sense of freedom can only affirm the freedom of people already with the means to survive in the world of absolute property and personal sovereignty, ie white people. Why not a freedom to steal, to share, to graffiti, to drop out?

Similarly, what faculties are required to become equal with someone? Is it merely access to the same amount of wealth, the same jobs, the same colleges? This is a narrow form of equality that measures with gauges set in the context of power relationships that require exploitation through other means such as capital. It privileges a notion of the free subject because it implies a teleology, whereby inequality comes through a comparison of wealth, or access to a particular form of power. Another form of equality may come as equal psychic comfort, equal access to food, equal democratic control over the means of production. Equality comes as a process of line drawing, and scale weighting, specific political conditions define our choices in what to call equality.

The most important part of any image, any world, any knowledge are the invisible parts that demarcate what we cannot see. To be effective, power must hide itself: otherwise, it becomes an object of contention, avoidance, movement. To be known means to be know limits, leaving marginal space for escape.


Duncan