Throughout the past week, Mitchell’s description of Orientalism as reflective of “a method of order and truth essential to the peculiar nature of the modern world” has really stuck with me (Mitchel, p 314). As I briefly mentioned in class, I believe this line underscores an important point: power isn’t just exerted when one when an army invades a neighboring territory, or a disgruntled faction executes a successful coup d’état.  Rather, in many ways, true power lies in the ability to control a population through the limitation of their conceptual pathways, the restriction of their imagined possibilities. As Foucault once explained, “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” (Discipline and Punish, p 27). It is this entrenched power-knowledge matrix that pits working class people against each other, forcing us to compete for a select number of roles and resources while the elites that exploit us hoard their wealth like dragons lying on a pile of gold. From eugenics to climate change, there are countless other examples of how knowledge and “truth” have been used to justify, legitimize and perpetuate harmful dynamics of power. Thus, those with the status, privilege and resources to structure knowledge, and transitively the subsequent systems that derive from it, to their benefit are the ones that enjoy true power. 

        So how do we break this cycle? It’s a tough question, and honestly not one I have a good answer to. I’ve wrestled with this intellectual dilemma for the past few weeks, and extreme transparency is only solution I’ve been able to identify. To disrupt this reiterative process, I think we will have to expose the interests and biases of the man standing behind the camera like Mitchell did in his essay. Obviously, the practicality and feasibility of accomplishing this on a widespread scale is questionable at best. 

       Using this power-knowledge matrix as an analytical lens, it becomes clear that we live in an unprecedented and transformative era where the relationship between knowledge and power is being simultaneously cemented and re-defined. In the past, low literacy rates and high poverty rates acted as gatekeepers, restricting access to formal mediums of knowledge such as literature. As a result, most knowledge was controlled and dictated by a selective group, or nobles, industrialists or clergymen. While in many ways these elites have simply been replaced by a tech oligarchy, the advent of the Internet and social media has also decentralized this process to a certain extent and removed many of these barriers, allowing many marginalized communities to contribute to public discourse. 

       Who knows, maybe social media truly has broken society, perhaps we really are trapped in an inescapable cycle of knowledge and power that makes equitable progress forward close to impossible. However, I’m not sure I see it that way. I think there’s something to be said for the democraticization of knowledge. Of course, there is a dark side (fake news, increased polarization, etc), but there is also potential for enormous good, as evidenced by the Black Lives Matter movement or the Arab Spring. At the very least, the emergence of these new forms of media provide us with the opportunity to circumvent some of the “noise sources”, like network television, that would have mitigated the flow of information in the past, allowing us to reclaim some of our power as individuals. Thus, instead of the beginning of the end, maybe this is just the end of the beginning.