SUBVERTING BIOPOWER: THE POWER OF ART ACCORDING TO FOUCUALT: French theorist Michel Foucault’s (1926-84) writings examine the relationship between power and knowledge in the modern political state and how the discourses produced by this relationship effect the subjects of the society in which they occur. He proposed that institutions which hold power in a modern culture-governments being the most prominent- control what can constitute knowledge- what may be studied, how it may be studied, how this study may establish results etc. In turn, the knowledge thus generated-discourses- functions to re-establish the power of the institutions by validating them with the ‘truths’ it constructs. Thus knowledge and truth are not universal, but historically and socially specific (Rawlinson n.d.). The effects of these discourses on members of the population are immense. Knowledge enables the construction of a normal/abnormal dichotomy, and when this occurs within the human sciences-medicine, psychiatry, criminology etc- such discursive ideas are able to be inscribed, ostensibly through self-regulation, upon the living bodies and minds of subjects (Rawlinson n.d.). Foucault termed this biopower. This concept of power acknowledges it as fundamentally productive, not repressive- citizens participate within power relationships and their productions, rather than being simply subjected to these systems (Rawlinson n.d.). The power of the modern state is thus dependent on discourses producing self-regulating behaviour in citizens, with the aim of ensuring them to be healthy enough to contribute to the society. It was Foucault’s project to subvert these discursive normalizing forces by critically questioning them (Rawlinson n.d.). Although art, like all aspects of society, operates within its society’s power-knowledge systems, Foucault perceived artists as having the potential to operate outside constructions of normalcy, and to give voice to madness and other experiences which were effectively discounted and silenced by institutional discourses. Thus art could subvert the power of these discourses by forcing them to “justify” themselves:“[A] work of art opens a void, a moment of silence, a question without answer, provokes a breach without reconciliation where the world is forced to question itself.” (Foucault, cited in Rawlinson n.d.). This understanding of the power imagery may have is evident in the way that each of his major texts begins with an image that is emblematic of the power-knowledge system and resulting discourses that he is exploring in the text- the ‘ship of fools’ for Madness and Civilization, dissection in Birth of the Clinic and the panopticon in Discipline and Punish (Rawlinson n.d.). These images are products of their society, but function to question fundamental concepts governing that society. Francisco Goya, who I have researched and quoted in my paintings, is one of Foucault’s examples of the transgressive freedom art may have (Rawlinson n.d.). Foucault’s understanding, then, is that while art operates within power-knowledge systems as much as all other aspects of a society, it has the power to be a transgressive force, subverting sanctioned discourses and giving voice to that which is silenced and discouraged. This concept of art has been deeply influential on my own work for some time, but perhaps never moreso than as I make my Diagnostic Criteria body of work, in which I am visually giving voice to mental illness as it is experienced by the patient, a perspective which is not often allowed to be heard
Posted on: Tue, 08 Apr 2014 22:21:15 +0000
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