Miles Ogborn: Knowledge is Power

(notes from current studies)

Power...
Understanding culture in terms of relationships of power is what lies behind the argument that questions of meaning, interpretation and identity are political issues, and that we can talk about ‘cultural politics’ or ‘the politics of identity’. Power is often defined in terms of one set of people exerting power over another set of people, or over space, or nature, or the landscape in order to control them and their meanings in various ways. This ‘negative’ definition of power is useful in that it makes it clear that there are different interests and that they come into conflict (often over cultural issues). It also raises the questions of the forms of resistance (again often cultural) which contest the exercise of power. However, we might also understand power as being ‘positive’. This means that power is not just about preventing things from happening, it is also the capacity to make things happen. Here power is part of all sorts of forms of social and cultural construction. Power is involved in constructing identities (including those of the individuals or social groups who are understood to ‘hold’ power), social relations (such as the relationships between men and women), and cultural geographies (such as the definition of national identities, or of ‘East’ and ‘West’ in Orientalism). (Ogborn, 9-10)

First, it is clear that “States… state (Corrigan and Sayer, 1985: 3).” Part of the operation of state apparatuses is the production of statements—in reports, policy documents, speeches, press releases and parliamentary debates—about the situations they are dealing with and about what they are doing. We can use the idea of discourse to interpret what is being said in terms of the construction and contestation of state power. Indeed, we need to be aware that the meanings that the state produces are not always written or spoken but can take the form of rituals (like the rules of dress in British law court), ceremonies (like the displays of Soviet military might on May day), or monuments (like the Vietnam war memorial in Washington D.C.). One important way of interpreting these statements is the state’s need for legitimation, for processes of state formation to be acceptable to people outside the state apparatus. Who is appealed to will depend on the context—for example, taxation increases in medieval France only needed to be legitimated to a relatively small group of powerful nobles, in contemporary France they need the support of a much wider public—but it always means that one part of state formation must be the making and negotiation of meanings about the world and about itself with other social groups. Second, states act. Processes of state formation are about attempts to shape and regulate ways of life and identities. Not only do states attempt to define things discursively, but these statements are a crucial part of policies and programmes which seek to alter people’s ways of life and their identities. … As a result, it is important to understand processes of state formation in terms of the meanings and identities that are being put into place both for those making the rules and those subject to them. It is also important to understand that resistance to state formation is also often conducted in terms of challenging the meanings that the state is trying to make and the identities and ways of life that it is trying to construct. (Ogborn, 10-11)

Discourse
Discourse is a way of thinking about the relationship between power, knowledge and language. It is a concept most associated with the work of the French theorist Michel Foucault, who understood discourses as the frameworks that define the possibilities of knowledge. As such, a discourse exists as a set of ‘rules’ (formal or informal, acknowledged or unacknowledged) which determine the sorts of statements that can be made. These ‘rules’ determine what the criteria for truth are, what sorts of things can be talked about, and what sorts of things can be said about them. One of the most carefully worked through and explicitly geographical examples is Edward Said’s (1978) Orientalism where he sets out the discourse (which he calls ‘Orientalism’) through which ‘the West’ has made statements about ‘the East’, defining the sorts of things that get said about ‘the oriental mind’, ‘the oriental landscape’, or ‘oriental despotism’, and defining itself as the opposite in process. This raises two important points. First, that the aim of the idea of discourse is to suggest that there are many discourses, none of which simply tells the truth about the world. All of these discourses are ways in which our knowledge and language create the world as well as reflecting it (so you can only find a ‘typical oriental landscape’ or a ‘classical oriental city’ if you already have some idea of what you are looking for). The second point is that the discourse that prevails is a matter of power not simply truth. Since discourses define the way things are understood, even whether things can be understood to exist or not, then part of any struggle for power is a struggle over language and knowledge, over discourse. So Said directly connects the discourse of Orientalism to the power relations of colonialism and imperialism which it justified and which forged the relationships between the entities created in the discourse of Orientalism as either ‘West’ (the colonizers) or ‘East’ (the colonized). (Ogborn, 11)

There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory. Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion—the participation in and access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation. (Jacques Derrida, quoted in Kurtz, 2001: 27)

Corrigan, Philip and Derek Sayer. The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1985.

Kurtz, Matthew. “Situating Practices: The Archive and the File Cabinet.” Historical Geography 29.1 (2001): 26-37.

Ogborn, Miles. “Knowledge is Power: Using Archival Research to Interpret State Formation.” Cultural Geography in Practice. Eds. Alison Blunt, et al. NY: Oxford University Press, 2003: 9-20.