The Power of Scientific Discourse

Introduction

Science communication is an academic discipline and professional practice that has been rapidly growing in popularity since the late 20th century. At its core, science communication is “the communication of scientific knowledge and ideas to people who are not scientists” (Gregory, 2014). This implies the existence of a particular type of knowledge - scientific knowledge - which is unequally distributed between two distinct groups - scientists and non-scientists. Modern science generally asserts the epistemic supremacy of scientific knowledge over all other forms of knowledge which it works to demarcate itself from and which it labels as non-science, anti-science, pseudo-science, superstition, and so on. It also asserts that its knowledge performs particular functions in modern society that are generally beneficial for the prosperity, health, and happiness of nations and their citizens, mostly through technological innovation, providing new technological products and more efficient resilient systems that benefit the nation and each of its citizens (Gregory, 2014).

What differentiates science communication from the broader institution of science, is its explicit normative stance that scientific knowledge should be passed directly from scientists to the public on the belief that a public with an enhanced understanding of science will render an array of benefits. 'Imagine how empowered the non-scientist will be if blessed with superior scientific knowledge!' they say. This stance can formally be traced to the Bodmer Report, an English document from 1985 which proposes that scientific knowledge should be shared with the general public because:

“... better public understanding of science can be a major element in promoting national prosperity, in raising the quality of public and private decision-making and in enriching the life of the individual”. (The Public Understanding of Science, 1985)

The document provides specific recommendations to educational institutions, the mass media, museums, industry leaders, and the scientific community, to improve the public understanding of science.

Prior to this report, however, science communication was more so interested in the boundary work that could delineate science from non-science, while also demonstrating its essential function in society and the need for public funds (Gregory, 2014). Yet, following the Bodmer Report, science communication efforts were directed at wining back the support of the public through enhanced public scientific literacy after a rise in fear of and opposition to nuclear technologies. Here we see the establishment of the roots of the now infamous “deficit model” which claims that the public is deficient in their scientific knowledge; a deficiency which scientists need to fill. This was to be accomplished through the one-way communication of scientific facts. Facts which move from the scientists (the keepers of knowledge), through the communicators (the media and educational system), to fill the empty vessel (a wanting public).

Currently, there is a concerted attempt among science communication scholars to reject the “deficit model” and to move towards a new model in which communication channels are lateral and dispersed, where the public are not merely passive consumers of scientific knowledge. A simply pedagogical approach is no longer called upon as studies continue to show that public understanding is not necessarily increasing, nor is public support for science (Gregory, 2014). Instead, there is an attempt to adopt a participatory approach - like citizen science - by involving the public in the doing of science. However, the outcomes of this are still to be seen.

Science communication still acts on behalf of the interests of science, assuming the universal superiority of scientific knowledge and its emancipatory function on the individual across cultures. While contemporary science communication scholarship seems unanimous in the desire to move away from the “deficit model” towards a more democratic, networked, and participatory model, science communication practice still largely depends on it (Gregory, 2014). This, I believe, raises many important questions. Why has it proven so difficult to move away from the “deficit model” in practice? Is science communication an agent of science or the public and whose interests does it really represent? Does science communication too confidently assume the supremacy of scientific knowledge? Does scientific knowledge dismiss and threaten other forms of knowledge? If climate skeptics/deniers or others who are resistant to certain scientific knowledge were to acknowledge its supremacy, how might it alter their sense of self? To me, it seems that we science communication scholars and practitioners do not often enough examine how scientific knowledge functions within the public sphere in subjugating other forms of knowledge, ways of living, values, and individuals. We are often too quick to overlook how the non-scientist might subjectively experience and interpret our communicative efforts as oppressive threatening acts.

Foucault

Michel Foucault’s work spans many disciplinary fields, philosophical questions, and methodological approaches, but his thoughts on knowledge and power are especially evocative. Given that science and technology are directly embroiled with knowledge and power they marked a central focus for Foucault.

Modern western science is explicitly concerned with building - or discovering - knowledge and establishing its dominance via claims to truth - or at least in its claims of superiority. It seems in many ways to be successfully asserting its dominance. Foucault has much to say about knowledge, how it is produced, how it circulates, and how it is intricately linked with power, uncovering these linkages primarily through approaches he dubbed archaeology and genealogy (Schirato et al., 2012). These two approaches, though characteristic of different chapters in his life, were largely complementary; archeology helps to uncover local discourses whereby genealogy may then uncover the subjugated knowledges buried within, revealing the forgotten casualties and the stories of their struggles (Schirato et al., 2012).

During his interview Truth and Power captured in Power/Knowledge (1972), Foucault’s explanation of the goal of genealogy brings to light many of the concepts and task with which we will concern ourselves throughout this text

“[F]or it is really against the effects of the power of a discourse that is considered to be scientific that the genealogy must wage its struggle.” (Foucault, 1972)

Within this we see the mandate for struggle. A struggle which must be waged against the effects of the power of scientific discourse. From this we must of course ask what he means by power, effects of power, discourse, and science. But more importantly, we must ask what kinds of effects this power generates, how it does so, and why this struggle must be waged against it?

Power

Foucault’s conception of power had multiple applications and his perception of its meaning and operation fluxed greatly throughout his career. So, attempting to isolate his definitions or thoughts are a frustrating task, however, there are some key elements. Most importantly, he sees power as all pervasive and the dominant force or phenomenon through which we can understand social relations. One might call it the ‘will to power’. Foucault’s focus on power, and specifically this ‘will to power’, comes partially from Fredrich Nietzsche who himself latched onto Arthur Schopenhauer’s concept of ‘will’ and a ‘will to life’ (Dolson, 1901). Nietzsche takes this concept of ‘will’, a type of ‘force’ which forms the dynamics of the world and adds to it a power that is within all individuals and is channeled towards a variety of ends.

“All ends and all utilities are only signs that a Will to Power has mastered a less powerful force, has impressed thereon out of its own self the meaning of a function.” (Nietzsche, 1918)

At risk of oversimplification, this ‘will to power’ might best be understood as the desire within all living things to dominate oneself, others, and the environment. Foucault saw this force or power as all-pervasive and the central ‘essence’, if there is such a thing, of reality. During Foucault’s early academic years, a focus on power was pervasive throughout academia and politics with the massive influence of Marxist thought. Foucault was no doubt also influenced in this way by Marxist thinkers like Louis Althusser, one of his metors. However, his focus on power can be understood not just as a result of but also in spite of Marxist thought, since much of his attention was spent on uncovering a far different conception of power. There are four main characteristics of power which Foucault revealed.

First, power is not a thing which is possessed. In the times of the absolute monarchs, power appeared to be possessed by a king or queen, however, this was only symbolic. In the Classical and Modern ages, governments cannot possess power, nor do they even possess it symbolically. For Foucault, power is not possessed, nor does it emanate from someone, but is the result of relations.

“Power is never something that someone possesses, any more than it is something that emanates from someone. Power does not belong to someone or even to a group; there is only power because there is dispersion, relays, networks, reciprocal supports, differences, etc. It is in this system of differences, which have to be analysed, that power can begin to function.” (Foucault, 1974)

Power exists only in the relations and the system of differences “between heterogeneous elements in such a way as to realize a ‘dominant strategic function’” (Schirato et al., 2012).

Second, power is not merely repressive, it is also productive. This is a position that is especially in opposition to classical Marxist thought which tends to see power as something which the Bourgeois wields and imposes upon the Proletariat against their interests.

“What makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it doesn't only weigh on us as a force that says no, but that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse.” (Foucault, 1972)

This productive power works especially on the subject, turning a person into an ‘individualised’ member of a society who performs, on their own accord and with little need to enforce, a role, and executes the tasks that society asks of them. I find this particularly interesting in the instance of, say, the voluntary soldier. When asked to march into the battlefield towards violent and real danger in the interests of the state, does he march forward only with guns pointed at his back? Generally, no. The soldier moves forward because something within him, something about him, about who he believes he really is, which beckons him to the fight. Really, if power “never did anything but to say no, do you really think one would be brought to obey it?” (Foucault, 1972)

Third, power only makes sense through its connection with forms of knowledge and discursive practices. In the aforementioned quote, Foucault highlights this link in saying that power “forms knowledge [and] produces discourse”, however, there is not a simple linearity to it with power necessarily being the set point of departure (Foucault, 1972). Indeed, as Foucault highlights

“Power produces knowledge… power and knowledge directly imply one another… there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations.” (Foucault, 1977a)

Power is as dependent on knowledge as knowledge is dependent on power. But the way in which these two are joined together, the “point of articulation between” them, is found in discourse (Schirato et al., 2012). For “it is in discourse that power and knowledge are joined together” (Foucault, 1978).

Finally, power necessitates resistance. In fact, “there are no relations of power without resistances” (Foucault, 1972). Analogies to Newton’s Third Law of Motion - where F_A on F_B = - F_B on F_A, or for every force there is an equal but opposite force - seem to me to be especially helpful here. Though not a perfect comparison - since the nature and magnitude of resistance do not necessarily need to be equal to that of the initial power - it still demonstrates the concept that force, or power, cannot be exerted upon something if it does not have its own inertia which resists an outside force. There are two main reasons for this.

The first is the fact that “knowledge, categories and discourses aren’t natural - they are part of the ‘effects of power’” (Schirato et al., 2012). To establish legitimacy, knowledge, categories, and discourses must assert their naturalness, as if they represent an objective reality. While a biologist might adamantly assert a foundation of scientific realism on which they claim true access to nature, the natural taxonomic hierarchy of biologic classes, genera, or species on which she relies are indeed human constructs. While animals in the class Mammalia, to which we belong, share many observable physiological similarities, why are mammary glands the characteristic that best unites us? Why isn’t our shared characteristic hair - or fur - that best defines us and our taxonomic class? While we might use the natural world as our source material, men from over a century ago made such decisions, and only by the historically inherited authority of the institution of science do we accept these as “natural” forms. Yet, through merely a brief inquiry into the “naturalness” of these forms, we find very little naturalness to them, and so we resist their totalizing assertions.

The second reason for this resistance is due to the productive nature of power. Power produces categories of people and ways of behavior that are also determined to be natural or normal. Yet for there to be a natural or a normal there also must be an unnatural and an abnormal. To keep these as separate and opposed, there must be a resistance between them.

Yet, if power, as Foucault claims, is not possessed, but manifests in the relations between people, institutions, etc. why is that some people ‘win’ and some ‘lose’? How could we account for an asymmetrical distribution or enactment of power in conflict where there clearly appears to be victor and a victim? For example, the scientific, engineering, and economic developments that led to nuclear weaponry clearly gave the United States an unequal balance of power that induced a Japanese surrender almost immediately. And they did indeed possess the weapon, so did they not possess its power? Maybe this is not the type of power Foucault is talking about. However, even in the clinic or the prison, there obviously is an unequal distribution of power that is possessed and maintained by a singular group and exerted on another through physical items, like walls and guns. And isn’t power, when exercised to say ‘no, you may not leave these prison walls!’, a type of repression? These are some important questions which Foucault’s conception of power say little about. Charles Taylor raises the point that Foucault’s insistence that power is not possessed and is not exerted by an oppressor upon an oppressed, in a truly Marxist sense, disregards the fact that for power to exist, some sort or desire or will must have been subverted.

“True, [power or domination] do not require that we have one agent who is imposing his will on another. There are all sorts of ways in which power can be inscribed in a situation in which both dominators and dominated are caught up... Nevertheless, the notion of power or domination requires some notion of constraint imposed on someone by a process in some way related to human agency. Otherwise the term loses all meaning. 'Power' in the way Foucault sees it, closely linked to 'domination', does not require a clearly demarcated perpetrator, but it requires a victim. It cannot be a 'victimless crime', so to speak... power needs targets.” (Taylor, 2017)

There must be a victim whose interests were subverted. And Foucault’s implicit denial of an immutable human nature - or at least its subservience to the épistémè, ‘regime of truth’, and imposition of power - makes it extremely difficult to explain where resistance originates. In order to resist, doesn’t one need desires, or an inherent nature? As Taylor puts it

“But now something is only an imposition on me against a background of desires, interests, purposes, that I have… Because it is linked with the notion of the imposition on our significant desires/purposes, it cannot be separated from the notion of some relative lifting of this restraint, from an unimpeded fulfilment of these desires/purposes.” (Taylor, 2017)

By asserting that power is not possessed and is not only exerted by an oppressor to oppress a victim’s inherent desires Foucault makes it difficult for one to identify a victim and to label them as such. Further still, Jean Baudrillard, one of Foucault’s most infamous critics, questions the true existence of power, suggesting in the book Forget Foucault (1977) instead that Foucault mythologizes power into a truth.

“Foucault’s is not… a discourse of truth but a mythic discourse in the strong sense of the word, and I secretly believe that it has no illusions about the effect of truth it produces.” (Baudrillard, 1977)

Foucault’s conceptions of power seem “too beautiful to be true”, and his “discourse is a mirror of the powers it describes" (Baudrillard, 1977). However, Baudrillard reasons that this mythic aspect of Foucault’s discourse might not be a problem so long as one treats it as it is; not a real thing but a simulation or a “simulacrum of power itself” (Baudrillard, 1977).

For Foucault, power is everywhere and nowhere. It is hard to identify. Yet it works on us and forms us in nearly every possible way. It tells us not only who we should not be, but also who we should be. It constitutes and circulates through a heterogeneity of apparatuses, discourses, knowledge, and sites. And since it is not possessed, it is mobile and contingent. Flowing from one place to another. However, as we discussed, power cannot be understood in isolation. And of central importance to power is knowledge.

Knowledge

Knowledge, for Foucault, is composed of the multiplicity of ideas, terms, perspectives, laws, etc. Which are all produced and authorized through disciplines, fields, and institutions according to certain principles (Schirato et al., 2012). Knowledge is formed out of the relations of power and is grounded in an underlying épistémè, which is the a priori which determines that which can be known (knowledge) and said (discourse) during a certain period of time. A period of time which is identifiable through the organization of its specific worldviews and discourses. Foucault describes it as

“The strategic apparatus which permits of separating out from among all the statements which are possible those that will be acceptable within, I won’t say a scientific theory, but a field of scientificity, and which it is possible to say are true or false. The épistémè is the ‘apparatus’ which makes possible the separation, not of the true from the false, but of what may from what may not be characterised as scientific.” (Foucault, 1972)

It is “maintained by institutions, disciplines, forms of knowledge, rules, and activities consistent with those world-views” which we are often unconscious of and pay no attention to (Schirato et al., 2012). Épistémès change over time and across cultures. The disciplines, knowledge, rules, and activities that make sense within one épistémè may not make sense in another. The progress of civilization, morality, and indeed science can be understood through the historical changes in épistémès. However, there is nothing “progressive” about this. Much like Thomas Kuhn’s paradigms, épistémès are incommensurable and impossible to judge as better or worse from one another (Kuhn, 1962). However, unlike the paradigm, the épistémè is far larger in scope - it does not just apply to a specific scientific field but the whole of a society - and is even more deeply rooted in the unconscious.

It is important not to overstep in describing Foucault’s prognosis of the connection between power and knowledge. To say the ‘knowledge is power’ is to assert a similitude that he himself did not claim to believe.

“You have to understand that when I read – and I know it has been attributed to me – the thesis ‘Knowledge is power’, or ‘Power is knowledge’, I begin to laugh, since studying their relation is precisely my problem. If they were identical, I would not have to study them and I would be spared a lot of fatigue as a result. The very fact that I pose the question of their relation proves clearly that I do not identify them.” (Foucault, 1988)

Knowledge and power are fundamentally different things; however, they cannot exist without the other. Through methods and mechanisms of power one forces things together, pulls them apart, orders them, and studies them. This may render useful information - knowledge - that may equip one to more easily force things together, pull them apart, order them, study them, and define them. Thus, more power.

For Foucault, what we consider as modern scientific knowledge is a systematic knowledge that differs from that of the knowledge of the preceding Classical period, seeing for the first time the emergence of man. Man is now considered “an object of knowledge and as a subject that knows” (Foucault, 1966). Foucault demarcates this ‘chronologic threshold’ in The Birth of the Clinic with the emergence of the human sciences. Now man was to be studied by man, but the methods which manifested power of modern medical knowledge as we know it today occurred through a level of control and manipulation not seen before.

“The differentiation of madness from reason, the emergence of the concepts of madness/unreason and reason during the Enlightenment, constituted for Foucault a significant historical event, the watershed from which modern reason and its correlate modern science emerged to exercise dominion over human experience.” (Smart, 1985)

The importance of the emergence of the order of experience known as reason and its antithesis, madness, cannot be overstated. It was now possible for a subject - a doctor - through the experience of reason, to study a human object - the patient - in a controlled and ordered clinic, and to then diagnose their object of study as reasonable or mad. Similar processes occurred in the prison to survey people, determine characteristics of deviant and non-deviant behavior, assign these labels to individuals, and then cause them to act in ways that are in service to the epistemic order. Here we see Nietzschean conceptions of the concept of reason as, not inherent to human nature, but the result of the exercise of power upon the body to control actions. Nietzsche relates

“It was by the help of such images and precedents [of torture] that man eventually kept in his memory five or six ‘I will nots’ with regard to which he had already given his promises, so as to enjoy the advantages of society -- and verily with the help of this kind of memory man eventually attained “reason”!” (Nietzsche, 1918)

The reasonable man only emerged through much ‘torture’ forcing one to remember and behave according to the rules imposed upon him. While Foucault was very cautious to extend his ideas to disciplines outside of what he dubbed the “dubious disciplines” or the human sciences, I do believe that similar processes occur in the biological sciences and the whole of natural sciences. Objects - even if they are not humans - are ordered, classified, addressed, and policed spatially and visually. Think for example of the visual power of a microscope. mechanisms of power - like the clinic, laboratory, or microscope - help to regiment the study of the object, generating knowledge, which further legitimates the power exercised through these mechanisms. Power generates knowledge and knowledge is dependent on the effects of power, however, knowledge also helps to regenerate and legitimize this power.

“The exercise of power perpetually creates knowledge and, conversely, knowledge constantly induces effects of power […] Knowledge and power are each an integral part of the other, and there is no point in dreaming of a time when knowledge will cease to be dependent on power […]. It is not possible for power to be exercised without knowledge, it is impossible for knowledge not to engender power” (Foucault, 1972)

This feedback mechanism and the industrialized, general, and totalizing nature of this scientific power and knowledge, has made it much easier to circulate, subjugating and displacing other smaller, artisanal forms of knowledge. Yet this suggests that scientific knowledge subjugates and displaces other forms of knowledge only on the basis of its ability to generate immense power. Where can one find a strong normative footing? Nancy Fraser submits doubts about Foucault’s success in rejecting a progressive historical narrative, claiming that he has not “succeeded in demonstrating the superiority of rejectionist over dialectical criticism of modern societies” (Fraser, 1985).

“Without a nonhumanist ethical paradigm, Foucault cannot make good his normative case against humanism. He cannot answer the question, Why should we oppose a fully panopticized, autonomous society?” (Fraser, 1985)

Foucault seems to fall short in providing the ethical grounding required to judge modern society. Without such a foundation, on what grounds can one claim that modern power structures must be uncovered? How can one judge them? Why must the dominance of scientific knowledge and subjugation of other knowledges be studied, other than to understand how they have come to occupy these positions? Foucault makes it difficult to take a normative stance. Scientists and indeed science communicators, however, would likely argue that displacement of other knowledge forms is legitimate on the basis of the ‘truthfulness’ of processes and outcomes of the dominant scientific knowledge. The notion of truth plays an essential role in the legitimization of forms of knowledge.

Truth

Foucault talks about truth in a multiplicity of ways. However, at its core he believes that truth is not intrinsic to an utterance in the epistemological sense of, say, scientific realism. Rather, truth is something that is hard won by and for a culture through extensive boundary work and legitimization.

“Truth is of the world; it is produced there by virtue of multiple constraints. And it induces regular effects of power. Each society has its regime of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth: that is the types of discourse it harbours and causes to function as true: the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true from false statements, the way in which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures which are valorised for obtaining truth: the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true.” (Foucault, 1977b)

There are three important things to unpack in the statement. First, truth is relative to each society and its “regime of truth”. However, I’m cautious to identify this as relativism. While it may be so, it also misses the point. Foucault, like Nietzsche, is not really interested in the ‘truthfulness’ of a proclaimed truth. Instead, he’s interested in how something comes to be deemed by society as ‘true’, how it achieves its ‘truth’ status, how it continues to maintain this status, and how that ‘truth’ functions in society.

“[I]t's not a matter of a battle 'on behalf' of the truth, but of a battle about the status of truth and the economic and political role it plays”. (Foucault, 1972)

Whether god exists or not. Whether viruses exist or not. Whether reason or madness are natural distinctions or not. What is most important is what effects the ‘truth’ status will generate in society and what someone is trying to accomplish by attempting to establish something as true or untrue. One might even say that “truth is nothing but a tool for the interest-driven execution of power" (Stehr & Adolf, 2018).

Second, achieving and maintaining truth is difficult and requires the coordinated efforts of many actors, institutions, and discourses. Foucault describes these in terms of “regimes of truth” - which he used in his earlier work - and “games of truth” - which he preferred later on. By regime he means all of the things necessary to be able to produce and maintain truth in a society. This includes:

“the types of discourse [society] harbours and causes to function as true… the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true from false statements… the way in which each is sanctioned… the techniques and procedures which are valorised for obtaining truth… [and] the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true.” (Foucault & Ewald, 2003)

The modern university plays a central role in this process by selecting the knowledge it deems to be relevant, if not what is true (Foucault & Ewald, 2003). It also institutionalizes the mechanisms for determining and obtaining truth and helps to legitimize the authority of those who decide what is true. Foucault's notion of “games of truth” differ slightly in that they refer to

“a set of procedures that lead to a certain result, which, on the basis of its principles and rules of procedure, may be considered valid or invalid” (Foucault, 1997)

There are a few distinctions between games and regimes, but of key importance is the notion of a game. Games generally have voluntary participants with equal opportunity who work together or in conflict to further their own interests. Stirling and Percy propose that this suggests

“a dynamic rather than static subjectivity and accounts for how we as agents constitute and reconstitute identity and subjectivity according to the games of truth that we choose to participate in.” (Stirling & Percy, 2005)

This distinction is important because we witness again that Foucault is cautious not to paint the struggles for truth as the result of some sort of all-dominating oppression of a single institution, group, or individual upon others.

Finally, truth is a status that forms of knowledge fight hard to achieve, doing so by displacing and delegitimizing other forms of knowledge. It thus serves a political function. All forms of knowledge engage in this struggle, including that of modern science. However, the term ‘science’ seems to fulfill a discursive function that is synonymous to ‘true’. When I see a news headline starting with “Science confirms...”, I instead hear, “The statements in this article are true and thus legitimize the following political action”. I’ll elaborate on the discursive function of this in the next section. But Foucault brings to light the political force that one is attempting to assert when using the term ‘science’.

“What types of knowledge do you want to disqualify in the very instant of your demand: 'Is it a science'? Which speaking, discoursing subjects - which subjects of experience and knowledge - do you then want to 'diminish' when you say: 'I who conduct this discourse am conducting a scientific discourse, and I am a scientist'? Which theoretical-political avant-garde do you want to enthrone in order to isolate it from all the discontinuous forms of knowledge that circulate about it?” (Foucault, 1972)

What I find particularly interesting here is that when one tries to identify themselves as a scientist, they are not simply attempting to establish the credibility of their credentials and knowledge, they are also attempting to marginalize others. This attempt, intentional or not, is a direct threat to the credibility of the credentials and knowledge of others. For those who identify strongly with other forms of knowledge - Indigenous knowledge or New Age knowledge for example - how could this not be perceived as a threat? Modern science, in its attempt to establish itself as the ‘science’ - or ‘truth’ - has subjugated other forms of knowledge. While all forms of knowledge attempt to subjugate others, modern science has been especially successful. Foucault calls for an “insurrection of subjugated knowledge” through the practice of genealogy (Foucault, 1972). Subjugated knowledge is knowledge that has either been incorporated into current knowledge but whose origins have been forgotten, or knowledge that has been deemed as lesser, useless, or naive. By uncovering these subjugated knowledges, one does not really care to resurrect them, instead what one really looks to uncover is

“a historical knowledge of struggles. In the specialised areas of erudition as in the disqualified, popular knowledge there lay the memory of hostile encounters which even up to this day have been confined to the margins.” (Foucault, 1972)

While genealogy is concerned with uncovering knowledge that has already been subjugated, the fact that they have been subjugated, and that knowledges are always in a struggle against one another, means these subjugating practices are likely happening each and every day. Even today. Foucault provides us with the mandate and methods to uncover knowledges already subjugated. But in doing so he also provides us at least with the incentive to examine the struggle for dominance between the subjugating processes exerted by science and the resistance “a particular, local, regional knowledge” puts up against it each and every day in our society. But if truth is simply relative to a regime, and the result of an exercise of power, then how can one question it? How can one legitimately doubt the right of the society which props it up and which it props up? Even more concerning, if truth is subservient to power and relative to a regime, how can any of Foucault’s claims have merit? To me it seems that Foucault is too silent on these challenges. As Taylor again argues

“This regime-relativity of truth means that we cannot raise the banner of truth against our own regime. There can be no such thing as a truth independent of its regime, unless it be that of another. So that liberation in the name of 'truth' could only be the substitution of another system of power for this one… Because of relativity, transformation from one regime to another cannot be a gain in truth or freedom, because each is redefined in the new context.” (Taylor, 2017)

And since, as with Kuhn’s paradigms, truth is situated within an épistémè or regime, how can one ask for a systemic change on an ethical or epistemic basis, since they are incommensurable? How can one ask for a better society and know what that society looks like? Taylor would suggest that this is indeed problematic, and so some limits need to be drawn.

“Just because some claims to truth are unacceptable, we don't need to blow the whole conception to pieces.” (Taylor, 2017)

While these criticisms against Foucault’s implied relativism are indeed problematic, it still seems that his notions of power, knowledge, and truth are extremely useful in guiding us to an examination of struggles. But where and how can this examination take place? Where should one focus their attention? It is largely through discourse that power and knowledge interact, and it is within discourse that one can recognize the struggle for truth. So, discourse is where I shall finally turn.

Discourse

The links between power, knowledge, and truth and the extent of the dependence of each one on the other, make it difficult to productively consider either in isolation. It’s only through the relations between them that we can understand how each of them functions. Where all of these concepts can now come together is through the mechanism of discourse.

“These relations of power cannot themselves be established, consolidated nor implemented without the production, accumulation, circulation and functioning of a discourse. There can be no possible exercise of power without a certain economy of discourses of truth which operates through and on the basis of this association. We are subjected to the production of truth through power and we cannot exercise power except through the production of truth.” (Foucault, 1972)

According to Foucault power cannot function without a discourse that is rooted in and describes knowledge with a certain quality of truth.

As with most concepts and terms with which he grappled, Foucault plays throughout his career with the meaning of ‘discourse’. He speaks of discourse in generally 3 different ways.

“Instead of gradually reducing the rather fluctuating meaning of the word ‘discourse’, I believe I have in fact added to its meanings: treating it sometimes as the general domain of all statements, sometimes as an individualizable group of statements, and sometimes as a regulated practice that accounts for a number of statements.” (Foucault, 1972)

His first definition is the broadest and essentially describes discourse as language in action. His second definition highlights the structures within discourses that help to identify, delineate, and group utterances together to form ‘individualizable’ discourses. In this way, one can identify and distinguish one discourse from another. His third definition focuses less on the content produced through discourse and more on the rules and structures that govern and regulate the allowable utterances and texts. All of these definitions will be assumed and considered here, however, the structural and regulatory aspect will be of primary focus. All of these definitions hint at the concept of some sort of structural linguistics. This brings up the uncomfortable but necessary discussion of structuralism vs poststructuralism. Was Foucault a structuralist or poststructuralist? I’ll steer clear of such concrete labels. However, some key elements must be highlighted through historical retelling of the developments.

Structuralism was preoccupied with a certain ‘scientific vocation’ aimed at reinfusing an objectivity into the social sciences (Lundy, 2005). One could synchronically uncover social structures that were universal across culture and time. Linguistics, especially the phenology of Ferdinand de Saussure, inspired the famous structuralist Claude Lévi-Strauss, for example, to apply the same structural elements in structural linguistics to structural anthropology (Lundy, 2005). The characteristics he was most interested in adopting were that

“First, structural linguistics shifts from the study of conscious linguistic phenomena to study of their unconscious infrastructure; second, it does not treat terms as independent entities, taking instead as its basis of analysis the relations between terms; third, it introduces the concept of system …; finally, structural linguistics aims at discovering general laws…” (Strauss, 1974)

Here we see an assumption of the existence of and desire to uncover an unconscious infrastructure. Lévi-Strauss also looks towards the relations between terms to uncover the meaning associated with a term. There is also the endorsement of the idea of an underlying system and the desire to uncover universal laws. Foucault’s early work, particularly History of Madness followed many of these aspirations and was for all attempts and purposes structuralist, in that he was concerned in exploring the “structure of the experience of madness” (Foucault, 2013). However, his historical approach, uncovering the emergence of certain discourses, undermines the synchronic elements of structuralism. While Foucault continues to accept some level of structure found within and outside of discourse which construct it, these discourses constantly change through their interaction and struggle with other discourses. Foucault traced the conception of the concept of the human subject to the emergence of the human sciences and it is through the frame of discourses that the subject emerges. If discourses are continually changing, then the subjects that are shaped by them must also change. Hence, the universal and timeless objectivity of the subject - like a scientist - comes into serious question. While Foucault does not necessarily deny the existence of material reality that pre-exists humans and that works on them, he does assert that the only way for the subject to apprehend or relate to this reality, is through discourse and discursive structures (Mills, 2004). Since discourses change through a continual struggle for dominance against other discourses, and are rooted in the knowledge of the time which themselves are bound within the limitations of the corresponding épistémè, which then produce the ways in which the subject may interpret reality, then the rationalism purported by scientific realists is merely an illusion. Here we see Foucault depart further from structuralism.

The extent to which Foucault asserted the existence of the structural elements of discourse is difficult to specify. His notion of discourse “as a regulated practice” does however, suggest a level of structure. Sara Mills claims that Foucault was

“interested not only in the structures which could be found in cultural artefacts, such as texts, but also in the larger-scale structures which could be traced in discourse itself.” (Mills, 2004)

Though he would eventually try to move away from this premise, Foucault at one point believed in the existence of large-scale structures that, if not shaping discourse, could at least be identified and traced through an examination of discourses. Mills goes on to identify the nature of these rules and structures.

“Discursive rules and structures do not originate from socioeconomic or cultural factors as such, although they may be shaped by these factors; rather, they are a feature of discourse itself and are shaped by the internal mechanisms of discourse and the relations between discourses.” (Mills, 2004)

Through archeology, Foucault hopes to uncover the mechanisms that allow a statement to be sayable (Mills, 2004). Some of the structures intrinsic to discourse that Foucault identifies are the épistémè, as well as the statement which, among other things, provide the ‘stuff’ that discourses can pull from.

As discussed earlier, an épistémè draws, for a culture, the boundaries within which methods, ideas, and practices are allowed. According to Mills,

“an épistémè consists of the sum total of the discursive structures which come about as a result of the interaction of the range of discourses circulating and authorized at a particular time… and the range of methodologies which a culture draws on as self-evident in order to be able to think about certain subjects.” (Mills, 2004)

The “range” of methods, knowledge, and discourses available to and allowable within a culture inform the ways to categorize, describe, and thus construct objects. For example, the scientific names for various organisms have changed throughout the history of western culture as new methods or ideas became available. With the proliferation of the concept of evolutionary biology, organisms required a reordering and categorization. With the proliferation in knowledge of genetics, a further reordering and categorization, and thus ways of discussing and describing these organisms occurred (Mills, 2004).

If there were anything within discourse that one could place a finger on and analyse, it might be a statement. A statement is like an utterance or speech act, however, for Foucault what really makes an utterance a statement, is that it must be grounded on some sort of truth. Bound by “the rules of some discursive ‘police’” who or which ratifies the statement as knowledge (Foucault, 1970a). For this reason, a statement might be a productive place on which to focus an analysis, since behind that statement are systems - épistémès, institutions, ideas, values, authoritative figures, etc. - which conspired to produce it as an instance of true knowledge and exclude other utterances deemed to be false.

But how are discourses produced and circulated? As we mentioned earlier, to activate a statement - which requires a certification of truth - other utterances must be excluded as meaningless. While this act of legitimizing and delegitimizing is difficult to identify since the site of this act occurs both nowhere - diffused throughout every aspect of society - and somewhere - bound in the authority of an expert - there is a site on which one might focus. This is the institution and particularly the university (Foucault, 1970b). Modern science is in the business of discovering/producing scientific facts - statements stamped as certified truth - in the laboratory and circulating them outside its walls. In the Order of Discourse Foucault explains how discourse is constrained and distributed.

“[I]n every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organized and redistributed by a certain number of procedures whose role is to ward off its powers and dangers, to gain mastery over its chance events, to evade its ponderous, formidable materiality. In a society like ours, the procedures of exclusion are well known.” (Foucault, 1970b)

The three main institutional processes that regulate discourse in our society are best described as: the forbidden speech, the division of madness, and the will to truth. By labelling that which is forbidden to say - taboo - a topic is avoided, and an appropriate discourse is thus lacking. In the Order of Discourse (1970) Foucault does not describe the mechanisms of power that continue to prohibit a discourse; however, he does remind us that where there is power there is resistance. Those most common of taboos, like sex, do not represent an extinguished topic, but instead, a site of struggle and resistance for the seizing of the power of discourse. Keep your eyes on a taboo! It might be the site of an emerging discourse!

Foucault also highlights the critical distinction between a madman and a sane man (Foucault, 1970b). The currency of the madman’s speech has appreciated and depreciated throughout history and cultures. Indeed, some cultures may not even make such a distinction. However, western society has. For Foucault, the clinic is a central site of study of the exclusion of the discourses of the madman. Discourse is where insanity is recognized.

“It was through his words that his madness was recognized; they were the place where the division between reason and madness was exercised, but they were never recorded or listened to.” (Foucault, 1970b)

Through the speech acts and words uttered in the clinic, the authoritative listener - the doctor - would all at once recognize the discourse of a madman, label that man as such, and discount the legitimacy of their words. This phenomenon plays out in films like The Changeling or series like Ozark where the words - and the actions - of a character are used to label them as insane, thus legitimizing the act of banishing them from society and condemning them to a mental institution. These diagnoses, however, were in service to other characters whose interests were served by the silencing of the “insane”. While the natural sciences - like geology - may not be in the business of studying patients and determining their sanity, it is in the business of determining who has the ability to legitimize scientific statements. At the surface it appears that credibility of an individual is established through their associations with other credible institutions - their degrees and positions they hold. But I would argue that it is established through their words within which one can recognize the rationality of their thoughts and actions. It is only through rational, logical, systematic, and predictable thought and practice that a scientist may uncover scientific truths, and this rationality is recognized through the words in the papers they write and the lectures they lead. If they are deemed irrational in their words, then surely their science is not science and should be dismissed.

The final process maps out what can count as a statement by dividing true knowledge from false knowledge. With the invention of the printing press and the proceeding creation of ‘the news’, a new exclusionary system arose which prioritized verification, supplanting moral, symbolic, and religious meaning found in commentary (Mills, 2004). What mattered was not the conditions under which a statement was uttered but the content of the statement itself. He calls this system the ‘will to truth’. The will to truth is bound up and supported by institutions, like the university which teaches in classes, publishes in libraries, and produces in laboratories.

“This will to truth, like the other systems of exclusion, rests on institutional support: it is both reinforced and renewed by whole strata practices, such as pedagogy, of course; and the system of books, publishing, libraries; learned societies in the past and laboratories now. But it is also renewed, no doubt more profoundly, by the way in which knowledge is put to work, valorised, distributed, and in a sense attributed, in a society.” (Foucault, 1970b)

This will to truth is even more profoundly renewed when knowledge is put to work, valorised, and distributed in a society. Outside of the walls of the institution; the explicit roll of science communication. But in so doing, it is also exerting a power of constraint on other discourses.

“I believe that this will to truth - leaning in this way on a support and an institutional distribution - tends to exert a sort of pressure and something like a power of constraint on other discourses.” (Foucault, 1970b)

This pressure and power of constraint is not apolitical. There is a desire attached to it.

“what is at stake in the will to truth, in the will to utter this 'true' discourse, if not desire and power?” (Foucault, 1970b)

Though this will to truth, production of true discourses, and exclusion of false discourses does not appear as exclusionary, it is indeed so.

“Thus, all that appears to our eyes is a truth conceived as a richness, fecundity, a gentle and insidiously universal force, and in contrast we are unaware of the will to truth, that prodigious machinery designed to exclude.” (Foucault, 1974)

The effects of exclusion on the basis of truth, madness, or taboo must be identified and understood, since these effects are real, and do work on the individual. More than that, I believe that these effects should be qualified and judged, asking questions about who stands to benefit most from the effects of these exclusions and who stands to suffer most. Since science communication is primarily tasked with distributing scientific knowledge, and thus subjugating other forms of knowledge, discourses, and individuals, it should ask these questions of itself, its will to truth, its push for rationality, and its desire to distribute and mobilize scientific discourse. Foucault, it seems, provides the foundation with which one could begin to analyse such questions.

Applications to science communication

Current usage

Currently, there appears to be little usage of Foucault in science communication scholarship and even less in its practice. There are probably two main reasons for this. The first is simply accessibility, Foucault is not easy to understand. The second is Foucault's implied relativism mentioned earlier and his anti-Whig historical narrative. Kuhn’s book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions faced much criticism from scientists on these very same accusations. However, Foucault takes it even further. Making those disposed to scientific realism and visions of progress very uncomfortable. But Foucault should not be dismissed, at least not for these reasons alone.

Usage of Foucault in science communication is extremely limited. Josephine Wiis, for example, used Foucault’s ideas of power, knowledge, and discourse, but also considered concepts not discussed in this paper, of governmentality and the panopticon (Wiis, 2013). In it, Wiis argues Foucault can be used to understand how, through power, scientific knowledge is constructed and communicated to the public via “enforced” discourses, and that mediators can embed their own agendas into the discourses they use to communicate science. This paper does, however, focus on the human sciences. Other papers examine subjugated knowledge and how science communication engages in that subjugating process. Other papers discuss his concept of intensification (Pellizzoni, 2017). However, science communication literature on discourse, outside of Foucault, abounds.

Potential Usages

Foucault might provide me with a productive platform for my own research, specifically in providing a framework for tracing how scientific discourses are created through relations of power, a will to knowledge, and a will to truth. He might also provide insights into how these discourses are circulated, legitimized, and maintained within institutions like the university. Where he would need to be particularly helpful, however, is in understanding the role that science communication plays in carrying scientific knowledge outside of the walls of the institution and into the public and the resulting consequences. Foucault might provide at least two compelling reasons as to why a one-way-communication method and the “deficit model” still seem to plague science communication practice, why it is so hard to move away from this model, and why the public doesn’t just gleefully lap up scientific information.

First, discourse is a site of struggle. A discourse attempts to impose itself upon others and in doing so threatens the legitimacy of other discourses and forms of knowledge. So, resistance is only natural. And the exclusionary processes that form discourse are political. The processes of forbidden speech, the division of madness, and the will to truth generate scientific discourses. These processes legitimize scientific discourses with a right to be said, a guiding rationality, and an objective truth. Thus, when the science communicator carries this discourse out into the public arena, aren’t they suggesting that discourses that resist it are incidentally irrational, patently false, and should be forbidden? How are they then to react to such a threatening action? Maybe climate deniers feel that they must either: choose to resist the subjugating power of scientific discourse to maintain the legitimacy of their own; or accept that their discourses untrue and by using them and believing their claims to truth, they must be mad. An admission of madness seems unlikely, and so they resist.

Second scientific knowledge and discourses are not reality; they are simplified and imperfect representations of reality. In fact, according to Joseph Rouse, they’re not even representations of reality of the ‘real’ world but are representations of the reality of the laboratory world (Rouse, 1993). Since scientific facts are produced in the laboratory - or the field, or the model - they are representations only of that environment. The laboratory is a “controlled ‘microworld’”, characterized by “surveillance”, “documentation”, “retrieval”, and “dividing practices” of the objects of study (Rouse, 1993). As soon as these facts leave the lab and enter the ‘real’ world, they’re likely to break down. So, scientific facts need to be “predicated upon the achieved or promised extension (in the spatiotemporal sense) of experimental capabilities beyond the laboratory” (Rouse, 1993). The only way then, to have these facts hold true outside the lab, is to impose a type of laboratory control over the society in which the facts must function (Rouse, 1993). Immunologists study the SARS-CoV-2 virus - which causes the COVID-19 disease - in a laboratory. They regiment its surveillance, its division, and its isolation all to understand how it behaves. However, they are clearly not doing this out of simple curiosity. The knowledge they produce is to be immediately applied in society, and for their finds to carry any weight, the same regimentation of surveillance, division, and isolation must apply. And so, the science communicator explaining that science says the public must isolate themselves, quickly becomes political. Where there is an expression of power, there must be resistance.

Foucault’s conception of discourse as the “point of articulation” between power and knowledge provide compelling insights into how science functions in society (Schirato et al., 2012). This directly implicates science communication as the point of articulation, through discourse, between science and the public. While Foucault focused on the “human sciences” and, as far as I can tell, said nothing of the earth sciences, his core ideas could still provide essential insights, since the earth sciences are still a social activity and have a social function concerned especially with knowledge and truth. My next project must explore his utility within science communication related to the physical sciences and expand into other conceptions of discourse. Specifically, approaches like Critical Discourse Analysis which help not just to map out the ways in which science communication might subjugate other forms of knowledge, but to take a moral stance on such subjugation, and resolve to do something about it. To ensure that science communication is not just doing the bidding of science but is also an ‘elected’ representative of the public, working on their behalf.

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Foucault, M. (1966). The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. 1966. In New York: Vintage.

Foucault, M. (1970a). The archaeology of knowledge. Social Science Information, 9(1), 175–185. https://doi.org/10.1177/053901847000900108

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