"I've got the Power!"...or do I? by Briana, Sally, and Rebecca

When we first began brainstorming for our collaborative post, we were interested in combining a look at Foucault’s theories about power and an attempt at a small digital humanities project of the type Liu describes.  Not having a powerful program to analyze the words of our texts, we were interested in finding digital copies, searching for the word “power,” and analyzing how often and in what contexts it was used.  That idea fell through with the recognition that Rebecca’s text was not readily available in digital form, so we reverted to looking at our texts by hand.  We decided we would each choose one obvious way that “power” is exerted in our texts, write briefly about it, then come together to see what conclusions, if any, would could draw about how power works across the texts.  We conclude with some general questions about the text and its implications.  

Briana:

In Silas Marner, the efficiency of officially recognized forms of power is put deliberately into question, as they comically fail to fulfill their stated goals, then gradually stop even trying.  After Silas returns home one day to find that a bag of gold, his life savings and the thing he literally lived for, has been stolen, he rushes to the local tavern to report it missing.  The action that follows is ridiculous as the entire town scrambles to determine who could have robbed him.  Officially, the constables are in charge of the case, but in reality, “the whole village…was occupied in gathering and discussing news about it” (59).  After a few false leads and wild speculation, the general consensus is that a passing peddler (whom, after some suggestive prompting, many characters can “definitely” remember as being suspicious and wearing wild earrings) is the culprit.  But with no proof, and no peddler, the constables have to drop the case.

It is not until many chapters later that the truth (which the readers have known all along) is revealed in an apparently random occurrence.  Godfrey Cass drains the local Stone Pits and the body of his brother, who had disappeared mysteriously sixteen years ago, is found among the rocks, clutching a bag of gold.  Silas, having symbolically replaced the gold with the golden-haired Eppie he’d raised as his daughter, is finally “free” to reclaim the money.  The recovery is to be understood by the characters and the readers as an act of God.  The characters in the story have no real power—either the officially appointed constables or the others who attempt to usurp their jobs.  Instead, only God has power.  Notably, it is not the prohibitive “Thou shalt not” power of the Ten Commandments, the type of juridicial rules that Foucault would argue is too often associated with a definition of “power,” (4) but rather a productive power that seeks Silas’s moral good as its goal.

Sally:

“Powers,” as Michel Foucault describes in “The Mesh of Power,” are present in Pale Horse, Pale Rider in many guises, although the word ‘power’ itself never appears in the text (and this I know from a failed attempt at channeling this week’s digital humanities geniuses.) Foucault says:

A society is not a unitary body, in which one and only one power is exercised. Society is in reality the juxtaposition, the link, the coordination and also the hierarchy of different powers that nevertheless remain in their specificity. Marx places great emphasis, for example, on the simultaneously specific and relatively autonomous—in some sense impervious—character of the de facto power the boss exercises in a workshop, compared to the juridical kind of power that exists in the rest of society. Thus, the existence of regions of power. Society is an archipelago of different powers (4?).

The concept of an “archipelago of different powers” intrigues me. I examined Pale Horse, Pale Rider to see where different powers are portrayed. Two seem noteworthy. First, of course, is governmental power. One of the themes of this novel concerns subversive activity, an activity that the US government incessantly attempts to control and/or quash. Overtly, subversion hovers over the country in 1918, because the US was still entrenched in the last stages of WWI. The Espionage Act of 1917 put the country on high alert for any enemies–real or imagined—in their midst. Patriotism was expected and both cajoled and conscripted as proof of non-subversive behavior. Protagonist Miranda and her beau Adam attend a ‘long and dreary play’, prolonged by a different kind of intermission:

When the curtain rose for the third act, the third act did not take place at once. There was instead disclosed a backdrop almost covered with an American flag […] Before it posed a local dollar-a-year man, now doing his bit as a Liberty Bond salesman. […] Miranda tried not to listen, but she heard. These vile Huns—glorious Belleau Wood—our keyword is Sacrifice—Martyred Belgium—give till it hurts […] The audience rose and sang, “There’s a Long, Long Trail A-Winding” (Porter 175).

Liberty Bonds and their promise of “war with a happy ending” were a sign of the overt institutional power at work during the war. Covertly, however, the country was being terrorized by a subversive element more dangerous than any traitor and saboteur. This ‘element’ rode in under the guise of “just the flu” and viciously silenced almost 700,000 Americans before finally riding off. Influenza proved to be a power that wielded total control over society. People sought to dissipate this power by halting its spread--this included socially isolating, shunning, and quarantining anyone with flu symptoms. But there was no ‘silver bullet’ to stop this disease; with impunity, it overpowered individuals, robbing them of control over their bodies and, in many cases, their minds.

I would characterize influenza as one of Marx’s de facto powers: in 1918, it was specific, autonomous, and definitely impervious to any other power. US society had a lot to deal with during the end months of the Great War; the unique power of influenza did not make life any easier.

Rebecca:

From the moment protagonist Dr. Norton Perina arrives on Ivu’ivu, he finds himself immersed in Foucault’s ethnology of prohibition from the seemingly benign to the ultimately devastating:  he must eat spam though he doesn’t want to; he must leave the opa’ivu’eke (the magical turtles) alone, but he destroys them.  After later publishing his discovery that consuming the opa’ivu’eke’s flesh possesses the power to extend life to potential immortality, pharmaceutical companies from the West devours the island for its riches, leaving the turtles extinct and the landscape decimated.  While extracting its resources, the Westerners supplant the environment with modern infrastructure and other mechanisms of power.  Starting with building a runway, the gradual introduction and integration of Western culture on the island engenders increasingly destructive effects--language acquisition, religious conversion, disease, alcoholism, pollution, extinction of indigenous plants and animals, and the near extinction of the indigenous people.  When much of the adult population had perished or become otherwise incapacitated, Norton begins adopting dozens of children from the island over a period of over 15 years.  As it is Norton’s discovery that undoubtedly catalyzes the island’s decline, he never expresses guilt over its desecration but instead accepts to take the children back to the US and raise them.  These remainders of a near extinct civilization become material representations of its former existence. Perina’s choices mimic Foucault’s conclusions in “The Mesh of Power” through materiality:

“Life now becomes [...] an object of power. Life and the body.  Previously, there had only been subjects, juridical subjects from whom we could collect goods, and life too, moreover.  Now, there are bodies and populations.  Power becomes materialist” (11).  

Dr. Perina reinforces his power over the life of the island and its people through his choice to adopt these children, as they would likely have not survived otherwise. Nevertheless, since Foucault’s society is “an archipelago of different powers,” Norton’s power does not remain uncontested.  In the scene in which Norton adopts the child that will evitably upend his life, he enters into a materialist exchange that embodies Foucault’s ethnology of prohibition.  Many years after Ivu’ivu’s decline, a man approaches Norton just as he is about to get on a plane to leave the island and begs him to take his son. When Norton refuses, he implores, “you take him!”  After realizing this man bears a striking resemblance to young man he had met in his initial visit years earlier, Norton finds himself incapable of saying no, and accepts.  As he is trying to leave, the man then demands, “You must give me something for him! [...] I must have something for him!”  Norton gives him the only items he has on him, a penknife and some pistachios; the man happily accepts and triumphantly runs away. Norton concludes, “he had not wanted the boy, but the boy was also his only possession, his only thing to sell or trade” (382).   This commodification of bodies is further complicated later in the text when Dr. Perina is convicted of sexually abusing this boy.  Although Norton’s reputation is tarnished from the accusations and his imprisonment, he serves his time and moves to an undisclosed location to live the rest of his life peacefully.  Despite momentarily experiencing punishment by power’s societal mechanisms, Dr. Perina ultimately slips through its mesh.

Conclusions:

It is probably impossible to find a novel that does not contain at least some power issues, whether overt or covert, institutional or de facto, benevolent or hostile. All three of our novels wound power in and out of the narrative, allowing it to both influence and direct the protagonists. Silas Marner, Miranda, and Dr. Perina each absorb and react to the power structure in which they find themselves in ways unique to both the novels’ settings and the authors’ whims. Foucault says:

I believe that we must now free ourselves from this juridical conception of power—this conception of power derived from the law and sovereign, from the rule and prohibition—if we wish to proceed towards an analysis of the real functioning of power, rather than its mere representation (4?)

Juridical power is present, but in the background, of all our protagonists’ situations. Rather, it is the de facto power—that power wielded by unexpected players--that takes front and center in these novels: Silas is at the mercy of incompetent fellow citizens; Miranda endures the trauma of disease that rules, and devastates, her world; Dr. Perina experiences the overwhelming disaster that Nature can invoke when someone messes with the ecosystem.

Questions:

Foucault talks about the technology of power and how the procedures can be perfected (6?), but all our novels seem to showcase people whose own power is ineffective or gets out of their control.  Does this mean they did not actually have power, or that their power was not far enough along in its “development?”

We are also interested in Foucault’s admission that productive power in some ways incorporates prohibition (so, in the army example, armies strives to create powerful fighting forces, but this also results in a system where the army tells soldiers what they can and cannot do).  So how is Foucault’s vision of power really different from a prohibitive one?  In that it has a goal and is not just enforcing rules for the sake of it?

Also, and perhaps unrelated, what are the limitations of Foucault’s seemingly heteronormative view of sex as a machine of [re]production?  

And finally, when one thinks about power and sex, one naturally then, of course, thinks of English department graduate students :).  So:  what de facto powers are at work in our lives as students? And, how does that affect how we experience our education at UC Davis?