Fashioning the Body: Versions of the Citizen, the Self, and the Subject

Blythe
Professor Zay
October 3rd, 2007
Concept Rhyming Essay #1


Assuming I know nothing of the word ‘knowledge’, have never heard of it and have no sense of it in any context, and I were to gain awareness of this word based solely on the first seventy three pages of Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, Vol I: An Introduction, my initial observations would be something along the lines of the following:
Knowledge is a thing that can be gained from the act of sex, and is linked to both power and sexuality through ‘repression’. Knowledge contains an element of extreme intensity of emotion (fervor), or there is fervor present when one first gains knowledge, or fervor always surrounds knowledge. Knowledge was formed as a result of the linkage between discourse, the effects of power, and pleasures invested by them. Together with power and pleasure, knowledge forms a regime that sustains the discourse on human sexuality. There is something called a ‘will to knowledge’. This ‘will’ leads to ‘knowledge’. Knowledge may be the term for a human being’s desire to quantify and explain the world. Knowledge involves an accounting system. Knowledge is a very carefully controlled, important and valuable thing. Knowledge is practical. Knowledge is an institution with a history.
Foucault does not seem set on defining ‘knowledge’ as something specifically new. The word ‘knowledge’ itself in this particular text does not appear to be of huge concern except for in its relationship to other terms such as ‘power’ and ‘discourse’, and for its use in the de-bunking of Foucault’s ‘repressive hypothesis’.
The conception of knowledge as an institution is not present in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED)’s definition. The OED lists a sixteen-part definition of the word, but nowhere is knowledge defined specifically as an institution. The phrase in which Foucault thus refers to knowledge comes after the story of the farm hand from Lapcourt who obtained “a few caresses” (31) from a little girl: “One can be fairly certain that during this same period the Lapcourt schoolmaster was instructing the little villagers to mind their language and not talk about all these things aloud. But this was undoubtedly one of the conditions enabling the institutions of knowledge and power to overlay this everyday bit of theatre with their solemn discourse.” (32)
The reference to knowledge as an ‘institution’ gives us a lot of information about how Foucault defines the word. The word ‘institution’ is an elastic one because it can mean something singular (a school, a mental hospital) or plural (all of the buildings, people and ideas that make up the United States military), material (a brick building) or abstract (the beliefs and practices of the Catholic Church). There is no physical building called a ‘knowledge’, like a ‘hospital’ or a ‘school’, so Foucault’s definition must lie in the realm of the nonmaterial. Foucault refers to knowledge in the singular: “the knowledge to be gained from sex” (6) but he also refers to it in the plural: “We are dealing not nearly so much with a negative mechanism of exclusion as with the operation of a subtle network of discourses, special knowledges, pleasures, and powers.” (72) So his definition must allow for ‘knowledge’ to be a broad and general term as well as a specific and individual term. This is not inconsistent with the definition given by the OED, which defines it both as “In general sense: The fact or condition of being instructed, or of having information acquired by study or research; acquaintance with ascertained truths, facts, or principles; information acquired by study; learning; erudition.” And as “acquaintance with a [singular] branch of learning, a language, or the like: theoretical or practical understanding of an art, science, or industry, etc; skill in or to do something.” Based on our previous knowledge of what institutions are, defining knowledge as one gives us a sense that it involves many people, perhaps spread across a large geographical area. It also implies a large body of information/ideas/theories/beliefs with particular mechanisms for operating in the world. It implies material structures where human events occur. It implies order and deliberate composition.
It is important, also, to consider Foucault’s conception of ‘knowledge’ as outlined in Chapter 12, “The Political Investment of the Body”, from Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Here, he speaks of knowledge as being inescapably intertwined with power (a “power-knowledge relation” (101)), and seeks to debunk the popular myth that knowledge can develop only outside of the demands and pressures of power. Foucault instead argues that the two imply one another, that there can be no “activity of knowledge” (101) without a corresponding relationship of power. “Power produces knowledge”, and the act of acquiring or gathering knowledge (what I assume he means by “activity of knowledge”) does not itself produce more knowledge. The knowledge to be acquired from the acquisition of knowledge lies in the subtleties of the relationship between the subject, the objects to be learned, and the mechanism/being/institution/apparatus the objects are learned from. Foucault phrases this much more eloquently: “In short, it is not the activity of the subject of knowledge that produces a corpus of knowledge, useful or resistant to power, but power-knowledge, the processes and struggles that traverse it and of which it is made up, that determines the forms and possible domains of knowledge.” (101)
Why is this important, in terms of understanding how Foucault’s definition of ‘knowledge’ complicates our ordinary understanding of the word? The essential thing lies in our conception (and the OED’s conception) of ‘knowledge’ as a thing that can exist outside of anything else, especially outside of power relations. Foucault wants us to employ the term ‘knowledge’ with the awareness that we are also speaking (either consciously or not) about power.
One last use of the word ‘knowledge’ that merits further exploration is Foucault’s phrase “the will to knowledge”:
…that the techniques of power exercised over sex have not obeyed a principal of
rigorous selection, but rather one of dissemination and implantation of polymorphous sexualities; and that the will to knowledge has not come to a halt in the face of a taboo that must not be lifted, but has persisted in constituting – despite many mistakes, of course – a science of sexuality. (12-13)

Substituting synonyms for ‘knowledge’ (as defined by the OED) within this phrase lend some clarity to what Foucault means by ‘will to knowledge’: the will to information, the will to learning, the will to consciousness, the will to perception, the will to awareness, the will to intelligence. This ‘will to knowledge’ is Foucault’s phrase intended to replace the idea of repression (the repressive hypothesis); that we have been sexually repressed for ages and have no way out. ‘Will’ implies force and desire; the dynamic he is trying to account for is that we live in a culture that has the desire to know in every corner – to understand things, to quantify them, to explain them. The work of Darwin and Kinsey are good examples of this ‘will to knowledge’; the desire to seek things out and put them in an elaborate accounting system. (Darwin’s steady categorization of the progression of the species, and Kinsey’s 0-6 scale of human sexuality). Knowledge as an accounting system, a tool for ordering the world, is thus a unique complicating feature of Foucault’s definition of the word. Knowledge is a very carefully controlled, important and valuable thing, meant to be useful and purposeful. The ‘will’ behind it is the force that animates the mechanism, the institution, the system, the idea(s) and discourse(s) encompassed by the polymorphous word ‘knowledge’.