The Interdependence Of Discourse, Power And Knowledge
According to Foucault, discourse is the process where we define, generate certain ideas about anything around us and makes sense of the reality through verbal communication such as writing or discussing with others. It sets the borderline for members of the community to think or act in a fixed way by producing and passing on the ‘knowledge’ to sustain ‘power’ now and then. It also creates social norms. Different discourse can give different meanings to things depending on what time or what era it is. Back to the middle-age, people related madness to God. Shouting on the street had been seen a sacred act of delivering God’s message. As a consequence, they perceived madmen as special, but still normal. Later on in Renaissance era, madmen were separated and deported from the city. It slowly made people felt that they were slightly different from them. However, in the modern era, scientific studies had generated truth or knowledge about madness. Madness had been organised in categories, and people in medical discourse offered treatment to those men. In accordance with their principles, to have freedom and agency, a person needed to be genuine human. People in the field assigned the meaning of ‘genuine human being’ as a rational person. Therefore, madmen were disqualified of human being because they were not rational. As a result, their rights to be free had been ripped, madmen were detained into government running institution such as hospital and concentration camp.
It implies that the more you have knowledge, the more you have power over others. When you have power, you have authority to say that what is the truth and which one is not. Powerful people have the ability to convince us to craft a particular view about reality. Others will believe you regards to the amount of knowledge which can be determined by your career. In short, the more you have power, the more you’ll be able to create the truth and set standard for society. In this case, we know that person who made these studies must have a lot of knowledge since they have particularly learned about human in a deep level. Scientific or medical discourse gave those people power to say that madmen is not normal and they needed to be isolated from normal ones. When new knowledge is produced, many institutions are constructed to support ideas and emphasise the understanding of what is true or what is false in this world. From the following illustration, if the mental hospital weren’t built, the gap between people and madmen wouldn’t have been this much large. The construction of mental hospital underlines the fact that madmen can’t live with normal citizens anymore. This modern discourse is asserting that madmen is dangerous and insane is the truth. So it is shaping our mind to think that the fact we take in is real, as a consequence, what is true is determined by the one who has power.
What is power? Foucault mentions two types of power which are sovereign and disciplinary. In the past, sovereign power was usually exercised by kings and maximised it by making it spectacular such as organising ceremony and executing prisoners in public. It can be observed by anyone on the streets. Later, because humans are more compassionate and cultured, it becomes less violence. Foucault also tells that power is everywhere, even there is no direct force on individuals. In modern era, the power has changed to disciplinary which makes a person into object of being watched. What they do is get knowledge from them through observation and investigation. This power has been in our daily life since we started building school and prisons. Students and prisoners are being watched by a person holding power which is a teacher and a guard. It makes them disciplined and aware of what they are doing so that they won’t create problems. Foucault points out that knowledge and power are related to each other. For example, relationship of discourse between doctors and patients, if he or she tells us that we are sick, we tend to believe immediately because of their position. We go back home and take care of ourselves not to be more ill. That’s how it makes us do some actions. As a Thai, most of us believe in a horoscopes and fortune. From my own experiences, I often see the fortune telling passing my facebook feeds or posts on Thai popular web-board such as Pantip. It’s so mass here even there’s a TV show called ‘War of the 12 Zodiacs. ’ It’s where Thai celebrities gather together and match the destiny of the day to the Zodiac. For instance, if the question of the day is ‘Which zodiac will win the lottery?’, they need to guess who will win and why. The person with the flag is the famous fortune teller we often called ‘Mor Luk. ’ I check his predictions a lot of times for fun. It’s mostly true, for me and probably for others. Considering that Mor Luk confirms people’s fate correctly a lot of times, we perceive him as an expert with a lot of knowledge, so in this discourse, he is the one who has power to create truth. Despite the fact that somehow science can’t really prove about horoscopes yet, people manage to believe the fate he gives to them, and they change their way of life depends on the prediction. To illustrate, if Mor Luk tells me that Libra people, which is my Zodiac, have chance to get prisoned. He obliquely uses disciplinary power on me, because after that I will tell myself to be careful not to get involved in illegal activities.
To be more clear about how discourse shapes people’s life. When I was a child, my mom told me ‘Don’t cut nails during night, the spirit will come and take you away’ or ‘If you are bad, the gecko will come eat your liver. ’ But, is that really the truth that spirit is going to come take me? Or the possibility that gecko will come eat my liver? The answer is no. Then why did I believe it back then? Because I saw her as the powerful person. She is the one who held disciplinary power, therefore she used her power to create those artificial truth. In reality, what’s the reason behind those statement to terrify children like that? Starting with the first statement about no cutting nails at night, adults are, in fact, scared of their child cutting their flesh because in the past, the electricity was not yet accessible. Moving on to the next belief, adults try to shape us to grow up as a good person by bringing something we are scared of so we won’t do that. That is what discourse does to carve our life and make what we are in the present. Also, studying about discourse makes us reconsider about statements whether they are truth or facts that are made to control us under the rules just like in my case. However, sometimes, discourse defines only one side of the truth and not the other.
To clarify, discourse can prevent people from perceiving other side of an idea. For instance, looking at some words on the dictionary. The dictionary defines the word ‘improve’ as to make or become better, but to ‘improve’ something, we don’t exactly know if it’s going to be better or is it going to have a negative side effects. So it seems like it covers another part of the truth that the situation has a chance to get worse after improving something. Moreover, discourse can spread negativity. Recently, this is a controversial picture of a page of 10th grade Thai Health and Physical education. More Large number of online users comment on this tweet that this book, which is a part of Thai education system, is educating the wrong sexual value to kids in school. For the first picture, under the image in the book which has a little girl washing the dish with the caption “Doing household chores is what make females valuable. ” The authority, in this case, the writer of this book, holds power to create that truth. He tries to say that women needs to be domestic and do chores to have value. It can be translated that women don’t have value if they don’t do chore. Nevertheless, people find that sexist so this shows that he tries to use discourse to brainwash and degrade value of women in this modern society.
Looking at the second picture, it gives the meaning of females and males by giving qualities of physical appearance, emotion and personality. The writer stereotypes the ideal attribute of men and women. On one hand, one of them says that “Boys like playing thrilling rides and use their strengths. ” On the other hand, it says “Girls like playing with something soft and delicate. ” As a matter of fact, not all boys like playing thrilling rides and not all girls like playing with dolls. This notion sets the model of each gender that what is normal thing or how to behave, if you are different then you might not get accepted by community. It also highlights the fact that we can only have two genders in this world. Respectively, it prevents opportunity for LGBT to stand in the society without being received hatred and discriminated, because this idea shapes public’s thoughts that they are insane and psychopath, which is similar to madmen.
In my opinion, it is not wrong for LGBT to express their identity and speak their voices. We are all human. We are all equal. It’s okay as long as they do not harm others. In conclusion, discourse really plays an important role to the humanity. It gives humans power to generates or defines truth to be in charge of controlling the others. With that power, it controls us as an individual to be in boundary which we all take part in drawing it. Discourse, power and knowledge are associated to give meaning of why our culture is the way it is in today’s world. In the future, the process will continue through discursive practices. Establishing new meanings of thing will also affect people just as before, but with people being more considered about effects because that’s what we live in. That’s our society.
