An Anatomy of Power and Discourse

By Ajaya Kumar Khati Chhetri

It is for the power that entire agents of the periphery move towards its center, and it is the center that maintains and controls the entire agents through a mechanism of power. This is how the powerful, from its central position, dominates the powerless; most often it is the general conception to understand the structure of power concerning domination. Sara Mills argues power is, “. . . the capacity of powerful agents to realize their will over the will of powerless people, and the ability to force them to do things which they do not wish to do” (Michel 35).  So, power is a process to overpower the powerless through the networks that operate a system. It means power circulates the mechanism of a system throughout all the relations that actively support the institutions. However, the system is dismantled when resistance from the margin challenges the hegemony of the central position. In this context, Michel Foucault juxtaposes power and resistance to conclude “where there is power there is resistance” (qtd. in Mills, Michel 40). It means that the conflict is always there, between the center, which wants to maintain its position holding its control by power, and the periphery, which wants structural change by reversing its position. Thus, conflict results in frustration out of the challenge when posited by the opponent party against the direction one takes. Johan Galtung examines the nature of conflict that leads “. . . to frustration because of blocked goals, and a potential for aggression against parties perceived as standing in the way” (3). Moreover, the position of parties is always evaluated through a process of polarization to self and others, which is based on the justified self and the unjustified other. He writes, “Self and other, with positive interaction within and negative interaction between the groups. Under extreme polarization Other is dehumanized, satanized and self-exalted as supreme, sacred or secular” (3).

Self and other are two opposite poles, originating in different structures that keep their discourses that serve the interest of the system. So, discourse is determined by the discursive structure of society. It means what we think, and how we perceive are also influenced by the system of the society we live. Sara Mills quotes Michel Foucault to show the control of discursive structure upon our thought:

We can only think about and experience material objects and the world as a whole through discourse and the structures it imposes on our thinking. In the process of thinking about the world, we categorize and interpret experiences and events, according to the structures available to us, and in the process of interpreting, we lend these structures a solidity and a normality which it is often difficult to question. (Michel 56)

Foucault is aware of this phenomenon that situates discourse in the course of power practice. Discourse in every society frames truth to function in law and order. So, truth is as arbitrary as a discourse that is involved in the general politics of every regime to determine true and false statements. In “Truth and Power,” Foucault mentions:

Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power. Each society has its regimes of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanism and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements. (1144)  

Thus, the interpretation of truth cannot be accepted as universally justified since it is constructed within the discursive structure that hypothetically produces the poles such as true and false, justice and injustice, and good and evil.

            The politics of polarization is often enacted to debase the politics of others so that the politics of self can be justified. Likewise, Orientalism has conceptualized Western domination over the East. Although the East has never accepted the hegemony of the West, the East has been hegemonized on its being silent. Thus, the hypothetical images of Easterners’ backwardness are being reiterated to cover the East through a discourse. Edward Said’s quest for the answer to the exaggerated picture of the East uncovers the discourse about the Orient the Anglo-American academy had/has politically made to polarize the Orient and Occident. However, he understands, “The relationship between Occident and Orient is a relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony. . .” (5). He analyzes the Orientalized Orient to the domination and hegemony of Orientalists, the Westerners who attempted to debase the rationality of the East. So, he further writes that there is “. . . the hegemony of European ideas about the Orient, themselves reiterating European superiority and oriental backwardness. . .” (7). Orientalism was a discourse of the West to polarize the world into civilized Europeans’ and uncivilized non- Europeans, that they could justify the imperialist domination under the cover of missionary projects. This is why Said disagrees with the Marxist thesis on socioeconomic revolution that justified the spread of European capitalism in non-European society as the universal precondition for social revolution. Leela Gandhi critically argues, “Marx follows the insidious logic of the colonial civilizing mission in postulating Europe as the hyperreal master-narrative, which will pronounce the redemption of poor Asia” (72). Moreover, Orientalism framed a ground for justifying colonial and imperialist projects in the non-European world as it hinted to the Orientalists about the land of both opportunity and adventure. In Gandhi’s understanding, Westerners’ Orientalism elaborated the ideology of imperialism and colonialism that aspired to dominate distant territories. In her words:

. . . Said relentlessly unmasks the ideological disguises of imperialism. In this regard, its particular contribution to the field of anti-colonial scholarship inheres in its painstaking, if somewhat overstated, exposition of the reciprocal relationship between colonial knowledge and colonial power. It proposes that ‘Orientalism’—or the project of teaching, writing about, and researching the Orient- has always been an essential cognitive accompaniment and inducement to Europe’s imperial adventures in the hypothetical ‘East.’ (67)     

Colonial knowledge structured a hypothetical land to colonial power that hegemonized the East through an imperialist inducement, an initial step towards colonization. So, it clearly shows how power creates truth based on assumption and how politics functions on the epistemological ground of truth.

Works Cited:

Foucault, Michel. “Truth and Power.” Critical Theory Since Plato. Ed. Adams Hazzard. Orlando:

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich College Publishers, 1992: 1134-1145.

Galtung, Johan, Carl G. Jacobsen and Kai Frithjof Brand-Jacobsen. Eds. Searching

for Peace: The Road to Transcend. London: Pluto Press, 2002. 

Gandhi, Leela. Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction. New Delhi: Oxford

            University Press, 2006.

Mills, Sara. Discourse. Noida: Routledge Taylor and Francis Group, 2007.

Said, Edward. Orientalism. 5th ed. New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2001.