(Page 19 of 23) - Ideology Critique after the Death of Man: Explaining the Persistence of a Discredited Practice authored by Neidleman, Jason.

answer is yes, we will have to face the countervailing post-structuralist challenge which
asserts than knowledge is so closely tied to power that the two cannot be meaningfully
distinguished.

Michel Foucault’s argument for the mutual constitution of power and knowledge is so

familiar that there is no need to recapitulate it here. Because Foucault believed that
power and ideas to be so closely commingled, indeed mutually determined, that it
becomes unlikely that one would be able to drive a wedge between the two of the kind
that would be required to undertake a critique of ideology.

The notion of ideology appears to me to be difficult to make use of, for three
reasons. The first is that, like it or not, it always stands in virtual opposition to
something else which is supposed to count as truth…. The second drawback is that
the concept of ideology refers, I think necessarily, to something of the order of a
subject. Third, ideology stands in a secondary position relative to something which
functions as its infrastructure, as its material, economic determinant, etc. For these
three reasons, I think that this is a notion that cannot be used without
circumspection.

I do not disagree any of these arguments, all of which were addressed in section I of this
paper. I will, however, take exception to Foucault’s understanding of the implication of
these arguments. Foucault is no doubt right that IC must be circumspect in the claims
that it makes, but Foucault’s own critical studies illustrate its indispensability. Although
he did not view his critical histories as such, they can be read as examples of a revised IC
that has accounted for the very concerns he raises in the passage above, while
illuminating the role ideas play in the maintenance of relations of domination.

Foucault jettisoned IC because he believed that it implied agents could constitute

themselves autonomously (i.e. independent of power relations) if only they could realize
the mystifying effects of the dominant discourse. For Foucault, power is constitutive of
subjectivity and knowledge. There is no way of getting outside of power in the way that
he believed IC requires. IC would indeed be unviable were there no epistemic space
between power and ideas, a claim that Foucault occasionally seems to endorse but never
explicitly defends. By now, it should be clear that IC requires no such standpoint. The
new ideology critic follows Foucault in the view that power and knowledge are mutually
constitutive. She does not, however, subscribe to the extrapolation that power uniquely
constitutes knowledge (nor does she believe that Foucault’s dismissal of IC is justified by
his critical histories.) That claim is as dogmatic and totalizing as those that it ostensibly
reacts against. It too must be seen as compensation for a lack, as desire or jouissance, the
enjoyment we experience in the sustaining of a desire.

It is crucial to the viability of IC that the ubiquity of power not be interpreted to mean

that all thought is equally or uniquely ideological. The new ideology critic remains
agnostic as to whether there exists a non-ideological dimension to our ideas, which
means, of course, that she does not presume the non-existence of this dimension. She
abandons the certainty that marked the old ideology critic and now must explain, on a
case by case basis, how, and how much, ideology affects and effects ideas. Power

Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings, 1972-1977 (New York:

Pantheon Books, 1980) p. 118.