Discourses of power

Postmodernists claim that discourses are inevitably exercises of power. To theorize is to classify, and classification, well, puts things in classes, asserts authority over them. Butler offers this example: “You believe what the young surgeon tells you, and so you give him permission to anaesthetize you, cut you up, and help you recover. The language game of the discourse expresses and enacts the authority of those who are empowered to use it within a social group, which includes hospitals, law courts, boards of examiners, and professors . . . . It can also be used to subordinate or exclude or marginalize those who are outside it – witches, mesmerists, faith healers, homosexuals, Communist sympathizers, anarchist protesters.”

True enough. Discourse is an exercise of power. But what is the problem with that, unless one assumes that one has a right to be free from all exercises of power – unless one assumes, in short, something very like the modern view of the autonomous self.