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).

Jean-François Lyotard was one of the first to attempt a “definition” of postmodernity as “incredulity toward metanarratives [grand reçits, big stories].” Of course Christianity claims to be the metanarrative par excellence. This being the case, it is often asked, “How can postmodernity and Christianity possibly be harmonized?” According to James K.A. Smith in his provocative book, Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism? Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church, a harmonization is possibile, but first we must understand what Lyotard means by “metanarrative.” The incredulity that postmoderns exhibit toward “big stories,” does not involve a rejection of narratives, myths, or grand totalizing claims about the nature of reality. Rather, the problem with distinctively modern “metanarratives” as explicated by Lyotard in his work, The Postmodern Condition, is that they fail to acknowledge their own narrative nature. “Lyotard very specifically defines metanarratives as universal discourses of legitimation that mask their own particularity; that is, metanarratives deny their narrative ground even as they proceed on it as a basis. […] The problem with [modern] metanarratives is that they do not own up to their own mythic ground” (Smith, p. 69). In other words, the postmodern critique involves the proclamation that all knowledge is a narrative or myth of some sort. Given this understanding of a distinctively modern metanarrative, Smith suggests that Christians ought to embrace Lyotard’s critique. As Smith explains, the reason that this harmonization is essentially consonant rather than dissonant is that the Christian faith (particularly the Dutch Reformed Tradition—but one might also cite Radical Orthodoxy here) does not claim to be legitimated by an appeal to “a universal, autonomous reason, but rather by an appeal to faith (or, to translate, myth or narrative),” postmodernism does not indicate a rejection of the Christian metanarrative but instead “represents a retrieval of a fundamentally Augustinian epistemology that is attentive to the structural necessity of faith preceding reason” (Smith, pp. 68, 72).

What do I have to add—Молодец! Я сосласна! I highly recommend Smith’s book—he does an excellent job of “demythologizing” the common (evangelical) misunderstandings of postmodernism and in more or less “conversational” language.

[The title of this post is dedicated to James G. : )].