Foucault and Frost/Nixon

Beth DeVolder was one of the founding members of Unleashed Heart Productions. She wrote this a couple of weeks before she was diagnosed with liver cancer. Many of you may not realize that, besides being an award winning actor, musician and composer, Beth was an academic. She had four university degrees including a PhD in Disability Studies. We were preparing for a production of Peter Morgan’s great play, Frost/Nixon, which is inspired by David Frost’s important interviews with disgraced US president, Richard Nixon. The play deals in part with the struggle between the two for control of the “truth,” manifested in the play through the medium of a televised debate (discourse). Beth was always fascinated with critical theory and Foucault in particular and was inspired to write the following to help the cast and crew understand the relationship between power, truth and discourse as explored in the play.

So, this week we have a little academic discourse from Dr. Elizabeth DeVolder. Beth's discussion of how gender is defined is pertinent here because, in our production, we had cast Frost and their people as women.

Intelligence can be so sexy, don’t you think so?

Foucault and Frost/Nixon

Foucault was a philosophical historian who saw truth and power as something of a tightly-bound knot.

As an historian, Foucault was interested in the events and processes that could explain how certain things came to be accepted as “truth.” He understood that people produce “truth” for certain reasons and, and that the production of this “truth” always has very real effects. “Truth” is created by power and exerts a certain power.

He writes, “There can be no possible exercise of power without a certain economy of discourses of truth . . . We are subjected to the production of truth through power and we cannot exercise power except through the production of truth” (Foucault, 1980, p. 93).

Here is an example that might be helpful.

Donald Trump decreed by executive order that there are only two genders. He re-stated this (what he believes is self-evident) “truth.” By doing this, he put processes into motion that have direct effects on those persons who are gender-fluid, are intersexed or trans and more indirect effects on all of us.

Foucault would ask: What are the conditions that allowed for this truth to be produced? He might look to religious influences (like the book of Genesis; “male and female he created them”). Or he might give examples from biology or common knowledge. “Everyone knows” that there are girl-parts and boy-parts. He might explain that this understanding of gender is reinforced culturally every time a baby is born and we say, “It’s a boy!” That it is strengthened by blue blankets, or girl toys, or girl clothes, or men’s sports and so on. Our very language (he/she) supports this understanding.

But, Foucault would also ask: Was anything suppressed in order to make this an obvious “truth?” He might look to ancient texts (often legal) that describe hermaphroditism. He might look to historical examples of persons who were intersexed. He might look at hospital records to get statistics on the number of intersexed infants who were surgically assigned a gender at birth. [Depending on who is defining “intersex” (who is given the authority/power to define it) current estimates range from .018% to 1.7%.] Most people don’t know that there have always been this many intersexed people. This knowledge was suppressed. He might look to other cultures. For instance, First Nations peoples have always had an understanding of three-spirit individuals, those that are neither male nor female, but a blend of both.

Why does this matter? Although Foucault is difficult to get your head around, Donald Trump’s pronouncement clearly shows that there ARE power relations undergirding this “truth.” It’s not just academic.

Foucault writes, “As history constantly teaches us, discourse is not simply that which translates struggles or systems of domination, but is the thing for which and by which there is struggle, discourse is the power which is to be seized.”

Discourse transmits and produces power; it reinforces it, but also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes it possible to thwart it. It is both an instrument and an effect of power AND an instrument and an effect of resistance.

The Frost/Nixon interviews are sites of this struggle. A fight for the “truth.” A fight for status. A fight for the “truth” of how Frost and Nixon want to be seen and remembered by history. A fight for redemption. A fight for some kind of healing for the American people. A fight for justice and accountability. Perhaps for each character in the play it is a fight for something unique to them personally.

It is interesting that the governing bodies imbued with power by the constitution (such as congress and the courts) struggled for some of these ends but were unsuccessful. It is the media, television, that brings a new dynamic to the “facts.” It is that close-up of a tortured and broken Nixon that carried the day. Yet, remember the interviews were edited. Everything was chosen, was selected, to tell a particular story, to reveal a certain “truth.” This “truth” was also man-made and had real effects.

Media moguls on the right determined not to ever let this happen to them again. And from that the Murdock empire and Fox News was born. To produce their “truth.”

The production of truth, its relationship to power and discourse as the very site of struggle has perhaps never been clearer.

The play Frost/Nixon itself seizes the power of discourse to produce certain truths, certain effects. Perhaps to illustrate that the struggle never ends.