The Discourse of Power & The Fabricated Self

(A short clip of a longer essay by Christina Issa)


Based on the ideas presented by Foucault in his book "Disciplinary Power," it can be argued that our identities are highly fabricated products of an invisible grid of power-relations, which constitutes the mechanism through which disciplinary power operates. In the greater sense, this is the basis for our inescapable arrest to which Kafka so subtly alludes in "The Trial." As our lives and identities are threaded through this lattice of power-relations, we perpetually reinforce ourselves as effects of power. We are systematically bound to a machine, which we ourselves fabricate and inadvertently attach ourselves to. We do this through, among many other things, awareness and ‘self-consciousness." Ergo, ‘The Self’ is a function of disciplinary power and we are just effects of this power. 


How do we break this? We cannot. It is impossible. For as long as the techniques of disciplinary power continue operating through our conscious and even unconscious awareness - through our struggle to assert and re-assert our identities, through our struggle to give meaning and definition to the world, through institutional operations and their assertion of power over the people pressed into the service and ‘improvement’ of the many - no one can avoid the grasp of power, and no one will ever be freed from the grasp of power. In this way ‘The Self’ will never cease being an endless subject of power perpetually being organized, examined, and observed. Moreover, as the individual reacts to these techniques of disciplinary power ‘The Self’ will never own itself and be its own justification; (To Nietzsche's disappointment...) it will only be owned, as a function of another operation. 


Among other things, this reality is why revolution is hopeless. This is why rebellion is just as absurd as the dictatorship in which it seeks to overthrow. As one attempts to reverse the dominant discourse they merely re-establishes another discourse under which he will be bound and existentially contingent. As one redefines, they merely re-subject. The most he can do is hope to have more power than others, so that he may enjoy the power of domination more and experience the effect of subjection less. 


Despite the transference of more power into the individual’s hands, we will always remain caught in the webbing of power-relations. Accordingly, our identity will always remain a figment of our imagination, evading us more and more, escaping us quicker as we tighten our grasp on it. Identity is hugely fabricated in this way, and exists as just an afterthought; in the present we remain to be effects of power.