Page 146 - Cultural Theory and Popular Culture an Introduction

CULT_C06.qxd 10/24/08 17:20 Page 130

130 Chapter 6 Structuralism and post-structuralism

about sex’ (22–3). He argues that the different discourses on sexuality are not about sex-
uality, they actually constitute the reality of sexuality. In other words, the Victorians
did not repress sexuality, they actually invented it. This is not to say that sexuality did
not exist non-discursively, but to claim that our ‘knowledge’ of sexuality and the
‘power–knowledge’ relations of sexuality are discursive.
Discourses produce knowledge and knowledge is always a weapon of power: ‘it is in
discourse that power and knowledge are joined together’ (Foucault, 2009: 318). The
Victorian invention of sexuality did not just produce knowledge about sexuality, it
sought to produce power over sexuality; this was knowledge that could be deployed to
categorize and to organize behaviour; divide it into the ‘normal’ and the unacceptable.
In this way, then, ‘power produces knowledge . . . power and knowledge directly imply
one another . . . there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a
field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the
same time power relations’ (1979: 27). Power, however, should not be thought of as a
negative force, something which denies, represses, negates; power is productive.

We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms:
it ‘excludes’, it ‘represses’, it ‘censors’, it ‘abstracts’, it ‘masks’, it ‘conceals’. In fact,
power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of
truth (194).

Power produces reality; through discourses it produces the ‘truths’ we live by: ‘Each
society has its own regime of truth, its “general politics” of truth – that is, the types
of discourse it accepts and makes function as true’ (Foucault, 2002a: 131). One of his
central aims, therefore, is to discover ‘how men [and women] govern (themselves and
others) by the production of truth (. . . the establishment of domains in which the
practice of true and false can be made at once ordered and pertinent)’ (2002b: 230).
What Foucault calls ‘regimes of truth’ do not have to be ‘true’; they have only to be
thought of as ‘true’ and acting on as if ‘true’. If ideas are believed, they establish and
legitimate particular regimes of truth. For example, before it was discovered that the
earth is round, thinking the earth was flat was to be in the regime of truth of contem-
porary of science and theology; saying it was round could get you tortured or killed. In
Chapter 8 we will examine Orientalism as a powerful regime of truth.
Discourse is not just about the imposition of power. As Foucault (2009) points out,
‘Where there is power there is resistance’ (315).

Discourses are not once and for all subservient to power or raised up against it, any
more than silences are. We must make allowances for the complex and unstable
process whereby discourse can be both an instrument and an effect of power, but
also an hindrance, a stumbling block, a point of resistance and a starting point
for an opposing strategy. Discourse transmits and produces power; it reinforces it,
but also undermines it and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes it possible to
thwart it (318).