Vulgar Displays of Power
I thought little of Michel Foucault when first assigned some readings my freshman year at Brown. We were clearly supposed to revere him, but his bio was terribly unappealing—especially the alleged child abuse—plus his obsessions with surveillance and punishment felt far from the whip-smart problem solvers I was bound to join.
Foucault and co. seemed like cultishly kinky sociopaths, a Rocky Horror Picture Show for tortured intellectuals, while I was focused on smarter social services for the people. Yet over the years I’ve become ever more grateful for early exposure to the pervy Frenchman and whole expanse of critical theorists, who proved stunningly prophetic about these modern times.
Most immediately for introduction to the panopticon, a centuries-old scheme for constant observation of the guilty—or at least making them feel watched, ostensibly for their own good. What once was reviled as Orwellian nightmare is now embraced by much of the establishment.
More fundamentally, for orientation to the central conceit of theory: that reality lies downstream from language, and social conditions are but constructs imposed by power that the right redefinitions might resolve. Some of the philosophical work is actually pretty interesting, but as bastardized into politics and policy becomes a cheap excuse for magical thinking.
It isn’t merely that the experts have brilliant plans for enlightened global technocracy, but that it is the very acts of objection and criticism that create the possibility of failure. The ideal is the default of things, any deviation due to naysayers and troublemakers, so silencing opposition equals solving the problem. Dirty tricks become moral imperatives; with just a little more money and militancy, we’re about to reach the promised land.
Not that abstruse points of theory come up much in polite company, but that the convenient assumptions have come to dominate the intellectual atmosphere. With our beautiful future just one last horde of assholes away, what means aren’t justified for beating the enemy?
During the Obama years professional progressives could afford a certain smug magnanimity, confident that demographic change had bequeathed a permanent lock on power. It was smarter to nudge the great unwashed toward what was decided than boil the frog too quickly.
So the populist reaction of 2016 struck many as profound betrayal: perpetrators had to be punished, examples made, and push brought to shove. What began as institutional resistance amid the Trump interregnum has become actively vengeful governance under the Biden regime—a policy agenda nonsensical as to most of its official objectives but coldly strategic as retribution against structural opposition, not just punishing saboteurs but putting subjects in their place.
Whether wrecking American energy to wreak far worse environmental damage elsewhere, printing enough funny money to substantially devalue the dollar, insisting on demonstrably harmful Covid mandates, or ushering in millions and millions of unvetted migrants, it amounts to a sort of shock treatment to corral and humiliate an unruly electorate that has been found wanting.
Yet the crass opportunism only guarantees greater backlash and further delegitimizes the actual progressive project, or whatever’s left of it. Generations of hard work and good faith have been squandered in just a few short years, trading credibility and potential for spiteful self-indulgence.
Perhaps electoral apocalypse over several cycles might chasten the powers that be, but I doubt it. Beyond all the money and inertia, too much of the establishment truly believes enough coercion can make their fantasies come true, with all manner of carrots and sticks to force others into line.
Nonetheless, stubborn reality burbles on beneath even the best-funded manipulation. The Emerging Democratic Majority might’ve really materialized had Dem apparatchiks any discipline to appear to give the slightest shit about what most voters think. But with society supposedly determined by fungible narratives from up top, the peasantry’s ignorant superstitions are irrelevant.
So while a swerve back toward representative government remains theoretically possible, all institutional trendlines point to ever more extreme enforcement of the day’s dominant ideology. The future of democracy thus teeters on a knife’s edge between true popular sentiment and whatever the global bureaucracy decrees—an increasingly technological contest of idiosyncratic humanity versus its elites’ machinations.
Next: Social Justice by Algorithm
Degenerate that he was, Foucault hit on something that’s actually got quite an ancient pedigree. For many of the early literate civilizations, there seemed to have been some idea that words and space/time were linked such that some formula involving the former could change the latter. Pharaoh would strike the name of a hated predecessor off of a temple and replace it with his own; this was taken to indicate that he had actually been the pharaoh the whole time and built the edifice himself. Such thinking was perhaps the origin of magic, with spells able to alter space and time using words. In our time, the media is the means through with such sorcery is effected. Vaccines are unnecessary, then bad, then good, then vital, then perhaps not without risks, then not actually vaccines. Nothing changed but the words, but we are clearly meant to accept each change as the reality that always was. Foucault understood that power, even as it damned him, like Faust.
Well said.