Per Caritatem

In chapter four, “Power/Knowledge/Discipline: Foucault and the Possibilities of a Postmodern Church,” of his book, Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism? Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church, James K.A. Smith engages what has become a Foucaultian slogan, “power is knowledge”—again de-mythologizing many of the popular (evangelical) mis-understandings leveled against Foucault. As Smith explains, “for Foucault, at the root of our most cherished and central institutions—hospitals, schools, businesses, and, yes, prisons—is a network of power relations. The same is true of our most celebrated ideals; at root, Foucault claims, knowledge and justice reduce to power” (85). Foucault’s claim that “power is knowledge,” is not meant to suggest that power and knowledge are identical. Rather, as Smith observes, Foucault is pointing to an inextricable relationship between the two. “What counts as knowledge, is not neutrally determined. Instead, […] it is constituted within networks of power—social, political, and economic” (85). In other words, what Foucault sees fueling our institutions and ideas are “power-knowledge” relations—a conclusion to which arrives not in a priori fashion, but by way of his genealogical method of analyzing concrete instances. As Smith engages various passages from Foucault’s writings, what comes to the surface is that Foucault’s understanding of the nature of power seems to involve power as a form of control. Moreover, for Foucault, institutions such as the modern penitentiary are in effect microcosms or mirrors reflecting society as a whole with both sharing the same goal—“disciplinary power aimed at normalization” (94). As is the case with his analysis of Derrida and Lyotard, Smith is not uncritical of Foucault. For example, Smith states that at bottom Foucault is deeply modern in his commitment to an Enlightenment conception of autonomous freedom, and that this (in part) drives his suspicion of institutions of discipline. Yet, in spite of these criticisms, Smith finds Foucault’s analysis of the “role of discipline in formation” quite convincing (99). Appropriating the “gold” in Foucault’s findings, while leaving his presuppositions regarding “negative freedom” by the wayside, Smith points us to biblical conceptions of power and discipline that instead of leading to a nonconformist stance directs us to “an alternative conformity through a counterformation in Christ, a transformation and renewal directed toward conformity to his image” (101). Moreover, Foucault has helped us to see that structural or formal mechanisms of discipline are at work in all our institutions—whether designated “secular” or “sacred.” However, instead of casting all discipline in a negative light, we should consider the telos to which these disciplines are directed. The Christian telos is directed toward “glorifying God and enjoying him forever”—in other words, the beatific vision. On the other hand, disciplinary forms that direct us away from being renewed image bearers of God and toward, e.g., production and consumption as our final telos, are in fact mis-directed (102). [The distinction between “structure” and (mis)direction strikes me as a Dooyeweerdian influence]. Here Smith makes a nice connection with the previous chapter on Lyotard and the role of narrative. That in which we consider the telos of human beings to consist is dependent upon the “ultimate story we tell of what human beings are and what humans are called to be” (103). Thus, what constitutes proper human formation is in the end inseparable from and even determined by the particular founding narrative that we confess as true (103).