Agee 1
Alley Agee
PKP 2012
Foucault Paper
Poverty and Foucault
In his series of lectures Society Must Be Defended, Michael Foucault outlines his idea
of humanity’s perpetual warfare. Essentially, Foucault believes that humanity is stuck in
continuous warfare: two sides are pitted against each other, and even “peace itself is a coded
illusion.”1 Foucault says that “we are therefore at war with one another; a battlefront runs
through the whole of society, continuously and permanently, and it is this battlefront that puts
us at war with one another.”2 In this “battle,” politics and the State become the way in which
the war is waged, and the law is simply what makes war possible. According to Foucault, this
war is actually “the motor behind institutions and order,”3 i.e. the war both gives power to
States while also being the way those States maintain power. Power also plays a big part in
his theory—lurking in the shadows of every new idea is power and its role in continuing and
maintaining war.
In these lectures Foucault also mentions and adds to his theory of discourse. Though
many different meanings have been attached to it since Foucault, his version is what will
primarily be used throughout this paper. A discourse in this sense, then, is all the different
things that surround a word, idea, or concept and that help to define that word, idea, or
concept in the minds of those involved in and relating to the discourse. Included in these
somewhat vague and abstract “things” is a range from the literal denotation of a word to the
images that are evoked when one speaks it. The example Foucault gives in Society Must Be
Defended is that of sovereignty. There is a certain understanding attached to sovereignty that
1
Michael Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, Ed. Maruo Bertani and Alessandro Fontana (New York: Penguin
Group), 2003.
2
Ibid.
3
Ibid, 50.
Agee 2
includes its simple definition and perhaps some of the connotations attached to it. Those are
included in the discourse of sovereignty, but they are not the only things. Within the
discourse of sovereignty are the ways in which sovereignty is able to continue existing—the
power attached to those who are sovereign, and how those who want to rule draw upon the
idea of sovereignty to maintain their position. This includes things like the history of rulers,
the law that gives them power, and even images of old monarchies or ruling peoples. All
these things work together to place in the minds of all peoples involved in this discourse what
the idea of sovereignty is. Discourses often cannot be avoided, and for Foucault, they are just
part of what it means to held society’s perpetual war.
Added to the idea of discourse, specifically in these lectures, is the explanation of who
gets to control the discourse. In a discourse that involves power relations (such as with
sovereignty), Foucault asserts that those who are winning, i.e. those who have more power,
get to decide what “truth” means, particularly within the discourse.4 To be a little clearer,
what this means to the sovereignty discourse is that those who are the ruling and therefore
“winning” party will determine what sovereignty “means” or “is.” All members of a society
(including those who are doing to defining) then internalize this discourse and it becomes
“truth.”
Obviously, discourses can exist in many forms and can be applied to many different
ideas. In his book Orientalism, Edward Said takes this idea and applies it to Orientalism,
claiming that Orientalism became a series of discourses that defined the Orient and gave rise
to the otherizing of it.5 A combination of both Said’s and Foucault’s ideas (with heavy
leanings on Foucault) can be combined to understand the role of poverty throughout the
world today. This is might be a stretch of both ideas, but using this framework to look at
4
5
Ibid, 53.
Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1976), 94.
Agee 3
poverty allows for an exploration of some of the issues surrounding poverty today, as well as
a better understanding of modern conceptions of poverty.
In Foucault’s perpetual war, there are two sides, and one of those sides is always
winning. According to Foucault, “the war that is going on beneath order and peace, the war
that undermines out society and divides it in a binary mode is, basically, a race war”
(emphasis added).6 But this “race war” does not mean what the word “race” would
traditionally imply. Race “is not pinned down to a stable biological meaning.”7 Foucault does
not mean that there are two specific races, or even two specific race categories, that are
continually fighting. His use of the term race is derived from an idea of a historical race
struggle: peoples of different cultures, religions, or languages struggling against one another
and against assimilation. Now, however, the term takes on a much richer meaning: “we can
say that two races exist when there are two groups, which, although they coexist, have not
become mixed because of the differences, dissymmetries, and barriers created by privleges,
customs, and rights, the distribution of wealth, or the way in which power is exercised.”8
According to this line of reasoning, then, the two races at war in the present day could
certainly be the poor and the wealthy. It is no difficult task in deciding who is winning this
war.
If this holds true, then the poor are at a major disadvantage. What does it mean for
poverty if those who are wealthy are in fact fighting against and continually trying to
outsmart those who are poor? The implications could be devastating; and, in fact, they have
been at a State level. The gap between the rich and poor globally continues to grow.
Countries with more money and therefore more power exploit smaller and poorer countries to
gain more wealth. Even organizations like the United Nations continue to be influenced and
controlled by the wealthy, leaving nothing but bad policies and detrimental decisions. In her
6
Foucault, 59-60.
Ibid, 77.
8
Ibid.
7
Agee 4
book Integrating Ecofeminism, Globalization, and World Religions, Rosemary Radford
Ruether outlines some of the real impacts of the Bretton Woods institutions: the World Trade
Organization (WTO), the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).9 Around
the end of the Vietnam War, “the policy of the World Bank became the pushing of highvolume, low-interest development loans to the third world.”10 These loans were given to
literally “develop” third world countries through the building of infrastructures such as damns
and bridges, even though many of these countries did not have the economic capacity to carry
these loans. When countries inevitably could not pay back their loans, the World Bank, and
the wealthy countries controlling it, created a program called Structural Adjustment. To get
more money to pay off their debts, borrowing countries were forced to submit to the terms of
Structural Adjustment:
devaluation of local currency; the sharp rise in interest rates on loans; the
removal of trade barriers that protected local industries and agriculture; the
privatization of public sector enterprises, such as transportation, energy,
telephones, and electricity; and the deregulation of goods, services, and
labor, that is, the removal of minimum wage laws and state subsidies for
basic foods, education, and health services for the poor.11
All of this served the interests of wealthy countries and wealthy businesses involved in these
third world, borrowing countries. According to Ruether, “in 1988 $50 billion more was paid
by poor countries to banks than were actually loaned to them from banks.”12 The effects were
crippling. Almost overnight third-world citizens woke up to find that their currency was
worth half or less than what it had been worth, while local businesses and agriculture were
out-competed by multi-national businesses and corporations. For example, in Korea “rice
9
Rosemary Radford Ruether, Integrating Ecofeminism, Globalization, and World Religions (Lanham,
Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers), 2005.
10
Ibid, 4.
11
Ibid.
12
Ibid, 6.
Agee 5
farmers were put out of business by cheap rice imports from the United States and lost their
land.”13
Looked at through the perspective of perpetual warfare, all of this was simply a way
in which the rich (in this instance the rich State) asserted and continues to assert its power
over those without the wealth to stand up to these organizations and wealthy countries. The
battle was raged between nations, while the people, particularly those already poor by
standards of their country, became the casualties. In examples such as this one, it is easy to
imagine such a raging warfare taking place amongst the rich and the poor, but what about
when the war becomes individualized? Does Foucault’s theory still hold up when imagining
an individual rich person facing it off with an individual poor person? Not exactly—the war
is not that literal. It is strictly between groups of people. These groups don’t always have to
be nations or States—they could be political parties, governments and citizens, or even
corporations and small businesses—but they do have to be groups. This doesn’t imply,
however, that the war somehow only exists on the collective level. A key characteristic about
the war is that much of it is internalized by individuals; certain aspects of the war become
part of a discourse that may or may not be realized. The discourse serves to justify certain
actions by the rich or the poor, and can even act as a barrier between both groups.
Essentially, Foucault says that those who are winning the war create the discourse. In
this rich-poor scenario, the wealthy are winning, so they are therefore creating a discourse
about poverty. Poverty, then, becomes its own discourse, continually shaped by the war that
is being waged. What exactly does this mean? Firstly, it means that there are certain
internalizations about poverty that define it, and probably not in a good way. Secondly, it
means that poverty can never be understood on its own terms—it will always be stereotyped
and misunderstood, much like Said’s Orientalism.
13
Ibid, 5.
Agee 6
So what does define poverty, and what stereotypes make it up? It is important to
remember that the discourse of poverty is something that is hard to get around—parts of this
paper have participated in the discourse and have furthered the understanding the discourse
offers. However, certain aspects of it can still be discussed, though most will be postulations
that are hard to prove. Firstly, poverty has many stereotypes. Though they continually
change, the basic idea remains the same. The “poor” are usually characterized as being some
ethnicity other than white. For example, the poor black man in the American south continues
to be a stereotype today, even though many of the institutions that created such situations
(tenant farming, for example) have been abolished. In many parts of America peoples of
Hispanic or Latino/a are stereotyped as poor. This stereotyping creates the discourse of
poverty, and in turn feeds the actualization of it. Why is it that many Hispanic families do
struggle to stay above the poverty line? Is it because there is some quality about them that
drives them to be poor? Certainly not. Hispanic peoples have faced many challenges from the
American government: trade agreements make it impossible to survive in their home
countries, so they immigrate to the United States, where the path to citizenship is nearly
impossible. This keeps them from acquiring well-paying jobs, thus they find themselves
struggling to pay the bills. Within the American discourse of poverty, this is simplified to a
stereotype of the Hispanic poor, justifying the American government’s actions that created
the stereotype in the first place, and giving rise to a system of ideas which the Hispanic may
never be able to break out of. This is where is the work of Said becomes essential. He argues
that the stereotypes created about the Orient in books created
not only knowledge but also the very reality they appear to describe. In
time such knowledge and reality produce a tradition, or what Michel
Foucault calls a discourse, whose material presence or weight, not the
Agee 7
originality of a given author, is really responsible for the texts produced
out of it.14
Said is referring to books which were written about the Orient—they created knowledge that
other books drew upon so that no new knowledge was ever created—but the same idea can
be applied to the Hispanic, or really any stereotype of the poverty-stricken. The image of the
poor (Hispanic or otherwise) will never change—it will become so deeply rooted in the
poverty discourse that it will become “truth,” a truth which cannot be updated or recreated.
This “truth” then becomes the weapon for the wealthy; it is part of the power they gain
through force. Foucault argues precisely this:
if the relationship of force sets truth free, the truth in its turn will come
into play—and will, ultimately, be sought—only insofar as it can indeed
become a weapon within the relationship of force. Either the truth makes
you stronger, or the truth shifts the balance, accentuates the
dissymmertries, and finally gives victory to one side rather than the
other.15
The stereotypes that are created within the discourse of poverty, no matter how or why they
are created, play a huge role in defining poverty. Other characteristics of the poor can be
applied here. There are unwanted qualities—the poor are dirty, uneducated, burdened with
too many children, drug addicts, etc.—and there are also honorable qualities—the poor are
humble, strong willed, faithful to God, hard workers, etc. All of these ideas combine together
to form part of the discourse of poverty and therefore part of the unchanging “truth, or rather,
“truths,” that can be summoned up by the rich depending on which discourse is needed for
the moment. For example, when fighting against an increase in tax money for welfare, the
poor are certainly drug addicts and couch potatoes, but when campaigning to the “heart” of
14
15
Said, 94.
Foucault, 53.
Agee 8
America, the poor are the backbones of the economy and the humblest and most blessed of
society.
Another interesting question to consider within the discourse of poverty is that of
connections to other discourses. Is poverty ever connected to other discourses, such as
terrorism or socialism? And if so, what does that mean for the discourse? If poverty is tied to
the discourse of terrorism (which I would argue that it frequently is), how is this being used
to help win or lose the war? For those who are rich, casting the poor into the role of terrorist
is an easy battle tactic that isolates the “enemy” and gives them the role of “other.” The poor
terrorist is a threat, and therefore must not be aided in any way. This tactic also glorifies the
rich as a type of anti-terrorist, protecting whatever it is that the terrorist threatens (freedom,
for example). Otherization of the poor on a general level, whether through association with
the enemy or just by stereotyping them as different, ensures that they will remain poor and
will continue to be a source of exploitation for the rich.
There are many other aspects which play a role in the discourse of poverty, but which
are outside the bounds of this paper—the language of poverty, for example, or even the very
idea of poverty as a separate thing to begin with. While those are excellent discussions, they
require much more attention, and do not link so easily to the idea of poverty as one side in
humanity’s continuous warfare. Foucault allowed for much room within his definition of
“race war,” though he doesn’t seem to offer any solutions to the war. To Foucault, war is
inevitable, just as discourse is inevitable. But if these things must occur, what is to be done?
Should the rich be allowed to continue exploiting the poor as long as they are winning the
war? On Foucault’s theoretical level, the answer is yes, perhaps. This answer, however, isn’t
satisfying. Said offers us a better answer for the inevitability of discourse. Implicit within his
book is the idea that otherization within a discourse is what hurts and stagnates a group of
people. It follows, then, that if the otherizing element of the discourse of poverty could be
Agee 9
removed, or at least toned down, then perhaps the discourse won’t be as damaging. Is this
really possible? Maybe, but it will take an understanding of the poor other to being to lessen
the divide.
And what of the inevitability of war? Well, if Foucault is right, then there doesn’t
seem to be much we can do to solve for the issue; however, there is no reason why the poor
must stand alone on the battlefield. There may be two sides, but there is no specification
about which side one must fight with. The rich may be able to exploit the poor, but it doesn’t
have to be easy for them; in fact, it could be extremely difficult. Foucault would probably say
that any idea of choosing sides and trying to “help” another side is pointless, and maybe even
impossible, but one must hope that perhaps he is wrong. Perhaps the perpetual war and the
constant struggle for power could be evened out just a little bit, and perhaps the war could
even shift focus, so that it’s not about the rich and poor, but rather about those who strive for
equality and those who do not.