Foucault’s challenge to Filipinos

The French philosopher gives us an idea of our society’s “real political task”

During a famous debate in November 1971 (you may find an excerpt of the discussion in my page), French philosopher Michel Foucault responds to American linguist and left libertarian bastard Noam Chomsky’s assertion that an ideal society is where human beings are able to exercise their “human nature” to create and express themselves. Therefore, in his model, the government is the enemy of the people due to the power and authority it exercises over us.

Foucault responded by saying “yeah, sure.”

But then he goes on to say that we are so used to seeing power as something that is centralized in the state and its institutions like the army, police, but in fact, it is not that simple.

For Foucault, power is “multiple, diffuse, and all-pervasive.”

In fact, he said, we have institutions that appear “independent”, “neutral”, or don’t have the features of our traditional notions of political power, but actually exercise an enormous amount of it. An example he provided are the universities (or the education system in general) which distribute (and generate) knowledge to “maintain power in the hands of a certain social class.”

Žižek has also echoed this before. For the Slovenian, there is a direct link between the liberal pretense of neutrality or value-free analysis of society and ideology in its purest form.

Just look at Ateneo de Manila which is the bastion of liberalism, elitism and moral righteousness in this country. If we do a rough profiling of its studentry, what percent of them do you think comes from the poor? What percent comes from the rich and political class of this country? How about its faculty? How many of them are Western educated and are, therefore, heavily slanted towards Western values?

How about my university, the University of the Philippines? Sure, a significant number of its students comes from the poor class. But what about its educators? Majority of them are also Western-educated and are biased towards Western ideas of freedom and “human rights”. No wonder a lot of communists come from UP. Their economic insecurities render them vulnerable to emotional manipulation and exploitation.

Many of the students from these universities will end up in positions of power. Whose interests do you think are they going to pursue? Exactly.

Furthermore, their decision-making will always be tainted by the values of post-industrial West which are excessively quixotic and utopian at this point, and pretty much ignore that practical needs of the Filipino.

Aside from the universities, another fine example of the institutions Foucault mentioned is the mainstream media which likes to brand itself as “neutral” or “independent”.

In the end, Foucault offers all of us, the people, a challenge:

The real political task in a society such as ours is to criticize the workings of institutions that appear to be both neutral and independent, to criticize and attack them in such a manner that the political violence that has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight against them.