Truth and Power, Revisted.

Although it has been long since Foucault first articulated his analysis of power, it seems as though no theory has fully risen up to supersede it. Indeed, more recent frameworks such as actor-network theory only further realize the basic argument of Foucault’s understanding of power on an institutional level -- that it is constituted only through the aggregate of numerous heterogeneous, localized power relations.

Network theory allows for the possibility of forging connections between what Foucault calls the “archipelago of different powers” that makes up a society. Instead of needing to imagine that society is made up of discrete, individual power relations (or, even less productively, that power structures in society are organized around one central dominating force), we can begin to think of the way that power is forged through the way relations work and through the way that they converse with each other.

I started off this quarter asking questions about truth: what is it? How do we know if it exists? In a long ago post, I concluded that no, there is not a thing called Truth but only plurality. Instead, Foucault and Latour have allowed me to access a different matrix within which meaning can reside and emerge: that of systems bound together by relation. Maybe truth is not the archipelago, but the distance you swim to get from one island to another.

But of course all of this is supposed to tie back to Their Eyes Were Watching God, and I think that it does. One of the questions that I’ve been trying to get at in the novel is a question of power and its diffusion: who holds power over whom, and how is that accomplished? Are there institutional powers at play here? Where is the State, wherefore so little of modernity? If Their Eyes Were Watching God is popularly imagined to be a story of self-liberation, from who or what is Janie being liberated?

I’m not going to be able to wrap up the answers to all these questions in a blog post, but I do think that we can start to think about them by attending to the ways that power seems to function in a very localized manner.

Two examples of this complexity are Janie’s childhood ostracization and the relationship between her second husband Joe and the small town that he comes to lead. As a child, Janie is teased and abused by the other black children in the area because of her home (shared with white people), her clothing (hand-me-downs that “still wuz better’n whut de rest uh de colored chillun had”), and light skin (they’d tell me ... ‘bout de blood dawgs huntin’ mah papa ... for whut he done tuh mah mama”) (11-12). All the marks of privilege that Janie carries (a relatively good home, nicer clothes, light skin) become that which is most hated (fraternizing with white people, thinking she is better than others, being a child of rape) in the microcosm of the playground.

Years later, Janie witnesses a curious sort of relationship develop between Joe and the other black town residents:

The town had a basketful of feelings good and bad about Joe’s positions and possessions, but none had the temerity to challenge him. They bowed down to him rather because he was all of these things, and then again he was all of these things because the town bowed down. (59)

There is no need for Hurston to directly invoke racist institutions and practices at play in the novel, because she is sketching something smaller and perhaps richer: the interplay among class, race, gender, and curious local forces, and how their relation creates that which is always different, but yet familiar.

(wc: 617)