Nobody can be released from their mind.  This is a sentence from which there is no remission.  True, people speak of ‘losing their minds’, but in fact they don’t ever lose them. They only get lost in them.  I reckon we get lost in our thoughts most days. But your thoughts are yours, and whilst you can share them with your friends and neigbours, and even publish them like this, they are your thoughts, and they are therefore most at home in you.

This is not as hopeless as you might think.  In truth, we are locked in an endless, cruel slow circularity.  Foucault talked of the prison as a “carceral system” – process-orientated project-managed persecution that weeded out dissident thoughts and dissenters.  For Foucault, prison is a term for one part of a vast network of ‘boxes’ inside which people ‘think’.  These boxes include, but are not limited to, schools, military institutions, hospitals, and factories, which build a panoptic society for its members. Foucault reckoned this system creates “disciplinary careers”for those locked within its corridors. If you dare to dissent, you can be punished.

Edward Said’s work as a cultural critic deconstructs and critiques coercive and corrosive Western ideas about the East, or the ‘Orient,’ which the West considers as ‘Other’, or as the ‘uncivilized’ counterpart to the ‘civilization’ of the West. His most famous work Orientalism (which coined the eponymous term) takes apart the false assumptions made by Western cultural production about countries in Asia, North Africa and the Middle East in particular, and explains how they function to perpetuate imperialist and colonialist ideas, to the ultimate benefit of the West and at the expense of the East in a pattern of imposing essentializing and reductive binaries that strive to separate these imagined territories.

His work traces a line through initial studies of the ‘Orient’ by westerners as a way to gain understanding and familiarity with culture, to how this was and continues to be used to subjugate the objects of their study, and how Western culture strives to intellectually justify this. By ‘othering’ and finding alterity in the East, Orientalist study reductively looked to erode the nuances and diversity of regions, homogenizing them purely as the opposite of the West: and characterising this as irrational and unenlightened. In his words:

‘… the limitations of Orientalism are… the limitations that follow upon disregarding, essentializing, denuding the humanity of another culture, people, or geographical region.’ Said, E. Orientalism (London,Penguin: 1973 p.108).

His work focuses on how these harmful ideas affects individuals excluded from and undermined by the power of Orientalism, and looks to ‘widen the field of discussion, not to set limits in accord with the prevailing authority.’ He argues that the imperialist mind-set gains its power through the disenfranchisement, degradation and alienation of non-Western subjects – the figure of the ‘subaltern.’ As such, Said is a figure that holds authority to account, in responsibly shaping discourse, and to avoid the production of ideas that frame the East inaccurately. Part of this is his insistence that we examine the temperamental and easily influenced conditions of this framing:

‘To build a conceptual framework around a notion of Us-versus-Them is, in effect, to pretend that the principal consideration is epistemological and natural—our civilization is known and accepted, theirs is different and strange—whereas, in fact, the framework separating us from them is belligerent, constructed, and situational.’ Said, E. The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine and Iraq (Philadelphia, WB Publishing: 2004), p. 24

This is intriguing, because when we are to the territory of ‘temperament’, we are in swampy terrain, and not terra firma.  We as human beings are individual and collective spaghettis of impressions, rules, codes, stories, facts, myths and feelings. And much of what survives in us as adults, whether in groups or alone, are shared memories.  They shape our beliefs.  Most of us will react with flight, fight and fright faced with trauma, danger or tragedy. What soothes us will invariably enable us to be more empathetic, and certainly to function better morally and socially.  Few of us cherish our traumas, unless they serve our vigilance in flight-fright-fight mode.  Much of this is rooted in experience; but some of develops deep roots in our felt-senses – our feelings.  As the writer and poet Maya Angelou says, ‘I have learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.’  I think she is right.

But it isn’t true, either, to say we are ‘feelings, nothing more than feelings…’ (as Morris Albert’s 1975 lyrics have it), and it is actually quite difficult ‘trying to forget my feelings of love’ What one is tackling here would be recognised by Foucault:

Truth isn’t outside power, or lacking in power …  Each society has its regime of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish ‘true’ and ‘false’ statements; the means by which each is sanctioned; and the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true.  M. Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977 (New York: Pantheon, 1980), p. 131. 

As Steven Lukes perceptively says,

…conceptions of power may be divided into two very broad categories. On the one hand, there are those which are asymmetrical and tend to involve (actual or potential) conflict and resistance. Such conceptions appear to presuppose a view of social or political relations as competitive and inherently conflictual…On the other hand, there are those conceptions which do not imply that some gain at others’ expense but rather that all may gain: power is a collective capacity or achievement. Such conceptions appear to rest on a view of social or political relations as at least potentially harmonious and communal. S. Lukes, ‘Power and Authority’, in T. Bottomore and R. Nisbet (eds), A History of Sociological Analysis, (New York: Basic Books, 1978), p. 636.

This is not as hopeless as you might think.  In truth, we are locked in an endless, cruel slow circularity.  Foucault talked of the prison as a “carceral system” – process-orientated project-managed persecution that weeded out dissident thoughts and dissenters.  For Foucault, prison is a term for one part of a vast network of ‘boxes’ inside which people ‘think’.  These boxes include, but are not limited to, schools, military institutions, hospitals, and factories, which build a panoptic society for its members. Foucault reckoned this system creates “disciplinary careers”for those locked within its corridors. If you dare to dissent, you can be punished.

Edward Said’s work as a cultural critic deconstructs and critiques coercive and corrosive Western ideas about the East, or the ‘Orient,’ which the West considers as ‘Other’, or as the ‘uncivilized’ counterpart to the ‘civilization’ of the West. His most famous work Orientalism (which coined the eponymous term) takes apart the false assumptions made by Western cultural production about countries in Asia, North Africa and the Middle East in particular, and explains how they function to perpetuate imperialist and colonialist ideas, to the ultimate benefit of the West and at the expense of the East in a pattern of imposing essentializing and reductive binaries that strive to separate these imagined territories.

His work traces a line through initial studies of the ‘Orient’ by westerners as a way to gain understanding and familiarity with culture, to how this was and continues to be used to subjugate the objects of their study, and how Western culture strives to intellectually justify this. By ‘othering’ and finding alterity in the East, Orientalist study reductively looked to erode the nuances and diversity of regions, homogenizing them purely as the opposite of the West: and characterising this as irrational and unenlightened. In his words:

‘… the limitations of Orientalism are… the limitations that follow upon disregarding, essentializing, denuding the humanity of another culture, people, or geographical region.’ Said, E. Orientalism (London,Penguin: 1973 p.108).

His work focuses on how these harmful ideas affects individuals excluded from and undermined by the power of Orientalism, and looks to ‘widen the field of discussion, not to set limits in accord with the prevailing authority.’ He argues that the imperialist mind-set gains its power through the disenfranchisement, degradation and alienation of non-Western subjects – the figure of the ‘subaltern.’ As such, Said is a figure that holds authority to account, in responsibly shaping discourse, and to avoid the production of ideas that frame the East inaccurately. Part of this is his insistence that we examine the temperamental and easily influenced conditions of this framing:

‘To build a conceptual framework around a notion of Us-versus-Them is, in effect, to pretend that the principal consideration is epistemological and natural—our civilization is known and accepted, theirs is different and strange—whereas, in fact, the framework separating us from them is belligerent, constructed, and situational.’ Said, E. The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine and Iraq (Philadelphia, WB Publishing: 2004), p. 24

This is intriguing, because when we are to the territory of ‘temperament’, we are in swampy terrain, and not terra firma.  We as human beings are individual and collective spaghettis of impressions, rules, codes, stories, facts, myths and feelings. And much of what survives in us as adults, whether in groups or alone, are shared memories.  They shape our beliefs.  Most of us will react with flight, fight and fright faced with trauma, danger or tragedy. What soothes us will invariably enable us to be more empathetic, and certainly to function better morally and socially.  Few of us cherish our traumas, unless they serve our vigilance in flight-fright-fight mode.  Much of this is rooted in experience; but some of develops deep roots in our felt-senses – our feelings.  As the writer and poet Maya Angelou says, ‘I have learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.’  I think she is right.

But it isn’t true, either, to say we are ‘feelings, nothing more than feelings…’ (as Morris Albert’s 1975 lyrics have it), and it is actually quite difficult ‘trying to forget my feelings of love’ What one is tackling here would be recognised by Foucault:

Truth isn’t outside power, or lacking in power …  Each society has its regime of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish ‘true’ and ‘false’ statements; the means by which each is sanctioned; and the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true.  M. Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977 (New York: Pantheon, 1980), p. 131. 

As Steven Lukes perceptively says,

…conceptions of power may be divided into two very broad categories. On the one hand, there are those which are asymmetrical and tend to involve (actual or potential) conflict and resistance. Such conceptions appear to presuppose a view of social or political relations as competitive and inherently conflictual…On the other hand, there are those conceptions which do not imply that some gain at others’ expense but rather that all may gain: power is a collective capacity or achievement. Such conceptions appear to rest on a view of social or political relations as at least potentially harmonious and communal. S. Lukes, ‘Power and Authority’, in T. Bottomore and R. Nisbet (eds), A History of Sociological Analysis, (New York: Basic Books, 1978), p. 636.

Lukes suggests the possibility of power-relations that are ‘harmonious’.  Foucault, however, encourages a hermeneutic of suspicion.  So at the heart of these issues of abuse, power and polity, there are some key questions.  How does truth speak to ecclesial structures of power and polity? What would constitute a good ‘theory of reception’ for the churches in relation to the pain of those who have been disempowered by abuse?  How should the churches initially receive the raw, un-pasteurized anger of victims, when it is directed back towards the manifest abuses of power, practice, trust, role and identity, perpetrated by the churches?