L26: Power

Michel Foucault, more rightfully than most of us would like to admit, claimed that no real truth really exists and people simply believe what they choose to believe because they subconciously believe it gives them more cultural currency to do what they please with their lives. This, in turn, sets up systems where the social deviants are able to operate on the margins; giving up certain things in order to accomplish goals in a sort of short-circuited rendering of reality. Everyone, Foucault claimed, works under an idea of a discourse that they hold to be true.

For the most part, this makes Foucalt both one of the least popular and most important 20th century theorists. He was kind of like Nietzsche for the common man with less memorable statements (although still very potent). I think though, for the most part, Foucalt was probably right, and I think that because I've seen things work how he set them up to work. I believe in truth a little more than he did, but I can't blame him for looking at people and surmising that they are doing what they're doing for reasons of cultural power. Indeed, it's a thin line we all walk, at best, and it explains how two contradictory viewpoints could be as compelling as we often see them- because the truthfulness isn't as important as the cultural power one gains by adhering to a certain perspective. It's a trap I see people fall into all of the time. How many people, afterall, are strong Christians throughout High School because it makes them popular with the cute members of the opposite sex in youth group, but abandon their faith when those cute members of the opposite sex are suddenly members of the party crowd? In the mind of anyone below 25, sexuality is probably our strongest discourse, even though I hate to admit that. Here at Hillsdale, things are a bit different, but I see it, everyday, where people subscribe to a certain morality and a certain sort of ethos because it lends them a sort of cultural currency...and it happened at Wooster too, although it was usually amorality that drove them. In short, that means I run into a lot of cultural Christians who espouse some wonderful and correct things, but they do it for all of the wrong reasons, and I don't know that they realize it.

I'm not quite sure there's a real way out of the cultural conundrum Foucault points out, but he does leave the special room for the cultural margin, the people that work in the opposite direction of the system, but within it, and ultimately, that's what Christ did too. Call it a theology of sedition if you will. I do know Christ never called us to our faith in him out of what we gain from it within this world. Indeed, he calls us to give it all up for him, and that's the opposite of what Foucault says happens with cultural power and discourse theory. Just because something really is true, truer than Foucault says anything can be, doesn't mean our fallenness can't use it as just another discourse.

-Zack

"Bodies die, souls will rise"
-David Crowder