Power vs. Knowledge

12/24/2019

One of my favorite scenes from Game of Thrones is a conversation between Lord Petyr of House Baelish a.k.a. Littlefinger & Queen Cersei of House Lannister-Baratheon. Here we see a clash between two individuals of different classes. Cersei represents the monarchy the top of the social order during the medieval period, while Littlefinger represents the capitalist merchant. In medieval societies, merchants were far below the monarch in social rank, below the aristocracy, the knights, and only slightly higher than the peasantry. And, while Littlefinger is nominally a member of the aristocracy with his own sigil & banner, his house lacks the foundation of centuries of generations which give the great houses a sense of necessity¹—the idea they are essential to the functioning of society which in turn guarantees their power. Lord Baelish has gained the status & power he has not from his house, but from the sale of flesh and his ability to manage money.

They’re both right. Littlefinger’s problem is he not only forgets his place but also his time. He speaks too soon envisioning a time beyond the medieval bounds of the world where the merchant becomes the capitalist and stands atop the social structure.

According to philosopher Michel Foucault, during the medieval period, the sovereign deployed power over life and death, or “the right to take life and let live”.² In the feudal system, life was given and taken away by the sovereign. The subjects of a kingdom could trace their descent from the king and from others by how much protection from death was permitted by the sovereign. Death was an imminent and uncertain reality during this period (whether by famines, epidemics, or wars), and the sovereign provided a point of alliance between bodies.

This point of alliance, or the emergence of juridical law, was centered around a symbolics of blood. Blood was inherent in the protection of life (the sovereign’s life) against the very real threats of death; the shedding of blood, the descent through blood, the precariousness of blood was all connected symbolically in the emergence of a life/death struggle.³ Wars were fought over the king’s blood; treason was an action against the king’s blood. Treason against a lord was treason against the blood descended to the lord from the king. Nothing was more on the side of the law, death, transgression, the symbolic, and sovereignty than blood.⁴ All aspects of medieval juridical life focus around the symbolics of blood. It was through the power of juridical law that transgressions (or threats of death) against the symbol of the sovereign (the sword: that which had the power over life and death) was defended. Juridical power is an act against threats to the sovereign.

Therefore, laws were built, judged, and executed based upon the proximity to the sovereign. Juridical power acts in the negative. Juridical power functions in the forms of signs and levies.⁵ Signs of loyalty to the sovereign’s blood was a negation of the subject’s life in favor of the sovereign’s (the obsession with banners, the tournaments for honor). Through taxes on wealth, goods, services, labor, blood, there was a subtraction mechanism levied against the sovereign’s subjects. “Power in this instance was essentially a right of seizure: of things, time, bodies, and ultimately life itself; it culminated in the privilege to seize hold of life in order to suppress it”.⁶ When Cersei says power is power, she speaks of the negative juridical power descended from the monarchy.

But what about Littlefinger? He speaks too soon, but he speaks true nevertheless. Rather than power being heavily restricted and controlled around the fear of death, power is extended & invested through as much of society as possible with the primary focus concerned with the regulation, propagation, & self-perpetuity of life. Littlefinger speaks of a new kind of power; a power that functioned positively on individuals until they themselves became self-regulating. The discourses about the struggle of death outgrew the limitations of the sovereign. Your distance from the sovereign still effects you, but so do discourses on your physical & mental health, your gender, race, ethnicity: all shape your identity in a positive way that extends and propagate life and ways of existing. These various forms of knowledge about ourselves discipline us into behaving in certain ways. With the rise of capitalism, we see the birth of biopower. In and through this increased knowledge concerning life, various mechanisms, discourses, and functions were inscribed on bodies turning them into subjects for increased examination and dissemination.

The end of feudalism, led to an epistemological thaw through the refinement of power relations & a multiplicity of the effects of power through the formative and accumulation of new forms of knowledge. During the enlightenment (especially in the 19^th century) there is an explosion of different fields of study. New and more complex rules and methods of ordering different discourses created enough space for almost any object to be examined and disseminated. Take the example of a criminal trial. During the medieval times, what was important was determining whether an individual actually committed the offense against the sovereign. In our times this is still important, but the court may seek the advise of psychologists & criminologists to determine what motivated the individual to commit the crime. The court may ask the individual’s friends & teachers about the person’s early life. There is an examination of all possible causes of the crime along with whether the crime was actually committed.

Through the rapid formations of multiple discourses on knowledge, and the power invested in these discourses, a power-knowledge relation is formed with power and knowledge reinforcing each other. In our times, power functions automatically. Individuals become the principle of their own subjection.⁷ Ultimately, “the panoptic mechanism arranges spatial unities that make it possible” for bodies to be self-regulating.⁸

Foucault describes the disciplinary-mechanism of today as panopticism. He develops this theory after reading Jeremy Bentham’s The Panopticon. The panopticon is a type of architecture for a prison. The panoptic prison is a circular prison with a guard tower in the center. The prison cells are constructed along the 360 degree structure, all within the field of vision of the guard tower. Furthermore, the guard in the tower was hidden, by using mirrors, so that the prisoners would never know for sure if they were being watched or not. Bentham expected that if the prisoners could never be sure of whether he was being watched or not, the prisoners themselves would make the conscious choice to follow the rules because of the all-pervasive gaze of the tower.

Think about you entering a store. As you shop, you notice the security cameras about, often hidden behind spherical black glass. You don’t know if the camera is looking at you or if anyone is even monitoring the footage. But, the mere possibility that someone might watching is enough to dissuade any desire you might have in stealing anything. We see the camera, and instantly without even really thinking about it, we push thoughts of breaking the law out of our head. We internalize the norm of not stealing because we know we are constantly being watched. We grab a product and pay for it at the register like we should. We discipline ourselves.

The Panopticon perfects the exercise of power and is polyvalent in its applications. Since it is polyvalent, the Panopticon is an ideal figure of political technology, i.e., discipline.⁹ Panopticism perfects the exercise of power in four ways: 1) it reduces those exercising power, but increases those exercised with power (the security footage does not have to be viewed in order for it to have its effect); 2) it can intervene at any point by constantly applying pressure to bodies (laws, codes, rules, regulations, ritual); 3) because of the constant pressure, power-knowledge’s strength lies in that it is spontaneous, silent, and continuous (the knowledge-power given to codes, laws, norms requires immediate obedience); and 4) its only instruments are geography and architecture (the roads which direct traffic; the sequestered areas of the hospital).¹⁰ What differentiates the discipline under capitalism from the negative power of the sovereign is that the former is arranged in such a way so that power is ever present and ever manifest.

Disciplinary power-knowledge disperses coagulations of bodies, and gives each body its own space from which power is exercised. This deployment of power-knowledge works through architecture and geography. The police camera on every street, the ICU and psych-ward of the hospital, the red-lining of housing, all these are representations of the modern state, or disciplinary power-knowledge. Since the 18th century, disciplines have focused on the productive management of the lives of individuals: biopower.

It’s not that positive forms of power didn’t exist during the medieval period. The knowledge that Princes Joffrey & Tommen, and Princess Myrcella are not the progeny of King Robert Baratheon but are the product of an incestuous relationship between Queen Cersei and her twin brother Jaime of House Lannister starts off the wars in Westeros. But, though knowledge behaves in a positive manner, it is always in service to the power of the sovereign (any sovereign) and merely reinforces the social structures. Littlefinger, despite his tactical use of knowledge to attain power, despite accumulating power by marrying Lady Lysa of House Arryn and becoming Lord Protector of the Vale, and even leading an army to successfully win the Battle of the Bastards, ultimately meets his end when he betrays the blood of the sovereign of the North.

Yet, how did we in the real world arrive at a period where juridical power is only one of many forms of power. What would need to occur in the land of Westeros for bio-power to take hold? Well, death. Instead of the white death of whitewalkers & wights, our world was haunted by the black death of the bubonic plague.

The plague begins around the 15th century and ends in the 17th century. The black death killed over 60% of Europeans alone and for two centuries was the primary existential threat of the world. The plague presented the sovereign with a problem in that it threatened to take away the power over life & death. In reaction, sovereigns greatly extended their power through a number of measures. First, a strict partitioning and regulation of space was enforced. The plague was known to spread through contact with other bodies. Therefore, “each individual is fixed in place. And, if he moves, he does so at the risk of his life, contagion or punishment”.¹¹ Second, a permanent registration of each individual is created. “The relation of each individual to his disease and to his death passes through the representatives of power, the registration they make of it, the decisions they take on it”.¹² Through various investigative programmes, individuals are invested with power based on the knowledge inscribed on bodies which is descended not from the sovereign, but from the plague itself, from an external threat to the politics of the sovereign. The enclosure of space through the strict regulation of movements and the discourse created by registration “constitutes a compact model of the disciplinary mechanism”.¹³ The political reality of the plague created strict divisions, the penetration of discipline to the most mundane forms of living, and the labeling of truth functions on bodies.¹⁴

Yet, this political reality lead to the sovereign being undermined. By investing as many bodies as possible with power, knowledge of individuals rapidly increased and multiplied; doctors, police, philosophers, theologians, etc, used their power to create a multiplicity of discourses, not on the power of death, but on the right to life of each individual, which had previously been the sole domain of the sovereign.¹⁵ These new discourses incorporated the power of the sovereign and Christian investigative practices, but focused on the individual subject’s right to life, plus the need to order, understand, and utilize subjects. This led to the invention of disciplinary practices.

1. All the great Houses like Lannister, Borathean, & Stark date back thousands of years in Song of Ice & Fire mythos.
2. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: an Introduction. Translated by Robert J. Hurley, Vintage, 1990. 136
3. Foucault. The History of Sexuality. 147
4. Ibid 148
5. Foucault, Michel. “Truth and Power.” Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, edited by Colin Gordon, by Michel Foucault, Longman, 1980, pp. 109–133. 125.
6. Foucault. The History of Sexuality. 136
7. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan, Vintage Books, 1995. 202-203
8. Ibid. 200
9. Ibid. 205
10. Ibid. 206
11. Ibid. 195
12. Ibid. 196-197
13. Ibid. 197
14. Ibid. 198
15. bid. 207