If there are a number of terms in the lexicon of contemporary critical social, political, and legal thought that one cannot go about without invoking the name of Michel Foucault, “power” is definitely one of them—despite Foucault’s later protestations that the objective of his work has never been “to analyze the phenomena of power, nor to elaborate the foundations of such an analysis.”[1] This seeming renouncement actually hints at a novel and productive tension in his dealings with the question of power. On one hand, he saw “power” as a methodological concept operationalized in the service of his work vis-à-vis the existing notions of power, which he saw as no more suitable to the historical conjuncture they set out to explain, rather than an object that is out there waiting to be theorized. Simultaneously, on the other, he presented multiple arguments and trajectories to account for historical, especially modern, configurations of power (i.e., sovereign power, disciplinary power, biopower, pastoral power, governmentality) as if it was something out there, albeit dynamic and historical.
Often in the form of methodological “precautions” and reflections on his work,[2] Foucault offered definitions, clarifications, or a series of features of power or how to study power. First and foremost, power is relational; it emerges only in and through relations. He describes it as “relations of force”[3] and “action upon an action,”[4] meaning that power does not apply to individuals but emerges in their interactions with one another, in one’s acting upon another’s action.[5] This makes it an extensive, diffuse, dynamic, and capillary network that connects and passes through individuals and their actions. This network has neither peripheries nor a center; power is everywhere. This does not mean that power relations are symmetrical or egalitarian. On the contrary, they are almost always asymmetrical and might include violence and coercion. However, Foucault says, a relationship based purely on violence and coercion is not a relationship of power because “where there is power, there is resistance.”[6] There are points of resistance present everywhere in the power network but these points are inherent in the network rather than external to it. There is no resistance that targets the entire power network as a whole. Instead, all resistance is local and has no single unitary form and principle. Power, too, is local (hence the need to study its “micro-physics,”[7] its mobile strategies, techniques, and dispositions) but not localizable. It is not something that can be located in institutions and individuals, nor something that can be possessed, acquired, or seized because “power comes from below.”[8] It cannot be understood in terms of a binary between the ruler and the ruled, nor in terms of a group’s top-down imposition and domination over another. Thus, power is not repression: “If power were anything but repressive, if it did anything but to say no, do you really think that one would be brought to obey it?”[9] Power cannot be identified with the law or the right that prohibits and hinders. Instead, it is productive: “it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse.”[10] Unlike the commonplace dichotomy between power and knowledge/truth, they are always found in compound form. “[T]he exercise of power perpetually creates knowledge and, conversely, knowledge constantly induces effects of power… it is not possible for power to be exercised without knowledge, it is impossible for knowledge not to engender power.”[11]
These methodological remarks had been Foucault’s way of distinguishing his work from the existing discourses of power such as Marxist and Freudo-Marxist conceptions that see power primarily in terms of domination and repression or juridical ones that understand it through sovereignty, legitimacy, contract, and the state. Yet they are always accompanied by historical arguments concerning the shifts power has gone through with modernity. In a sense, Foucault does not only offer his conceptual framework in opposition to these existing notions of power but also critiques them for relying on an “outmoded” notion of power, unable to account for the concrete historical situations they aim to analyze, and, precisely for this reason, reproducing the power relations they are supposed to critique. This produces an essential question and perhaps an ambivalence: are Foucault’s above-mentioned methodological remarks power also a historical account? Put differently, is what has been described as power thus far only valid for modern power? I will return to this question at the end but now a summary of the historical configurations of power Foucault explicates is in order.
To describe modern power relations, Foucault devises a number of concepts such as disciplinary power, biopower, and governmentality. All these concepts are historically contrasted with the sovereign model of power that is characterized by violence, the right to kill, and an asymmetrical relationship between the ruler and the ruled. The sovereign (i.e., the figure of the king or the prince) can exercise his power over life only through his right to kill, through the death he is able to command. The sovereign’s words and deeds are equated with the law itself. Sovereign power runs within the limits of law, within a legal/illegal framework. The question its punitive mechanisms rest on is whether an act is legal or not, whether a particular person is guilty or not. The focus is on the crime and the aim is bodily public punishment and exclusion. Around the eighteenth century, this sovereign power started giving way to “disciplinary power,” which operates more widely through its ability to make nuanced distinctions since its basis is norms and techniques of normalization rather than the law. It is capable of making distinctions between healthy and sick, normal and abnormal, delinquent and docile (i.e., “dividing practices”). Its punitive focus is on the criminal rather than the crime, and it aims to correct, rehabilitate, normalize, and set the criminal right. Therefore, while sovereign power is exclusionary, violent, and based on visible bodily punishment, disciplinary power is corrective, rehabilitating, and normalizing.
In contrast to the sovereign power’s right to “take life or let live,” biopower is based on a new right to “foster life or disallow it to the point of death”[12] or “make live and let die.”[13] The sovereign power manifests itself through its right to kill, whereas biopower is characterized by making subjects live. Biopower has two poles. One of them is individualizing and disciplining, which ensure the subject’s docility and the optimization of its capabilities (i.e., disciplinary power). The second pole, on the other hand, is totalizing and regulatory, whose object is the population. It focuses on “the species body” and its processes: “propagation, births and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity”[14] (i.e., biopolitics). In this sense, biopower seems to be a more capacious concept. Moreover, in his historical analyses, Foucault sometimes uses biopower and the state interchangeably or takes the modern state’s rationality as the expression of the two poles of biopower: “Just to look at nascent state rationality, just to see what its first policing project was, makes it clear that, right from the start, the state is both individualizing and totalitarian. Opposing the individual and his interests to it is just as hazardous as opposing it with the community and its requirements.”[15] Both totalizing and individualizing, the state’s reason is now expanded into everywhere and everybody. In a sense, we are all states; we all think and act like a state. It is no longer an institution but a rationality that governs the lives of individuals. Perhaps that is why Foucault notes that today’s task is to save ourselves “from the type of individualization linked to the state.”[16]
In Foucault’s historical account, breaking out of the circular and self-referential logic of the sovereign,[17] biopower engendered a new reason. This reason is no longer interested in the person of the prince or the juridical theory of sovereignty but in the state itself. The state’s character and body are now the body of the population and that of the people who come to see themselves as part of this organic whole. “Interest as the consciousness of each individual who makes up the population, and interest considered as the interest of the population regardless of what the particular interests and aspirations may be of the individuals who compose it: this is the new target and the fundamental instrument of the government of population. This is the birth of a new art, or at any rate of a range of absolutely new tactics and techniques.”[18] This new reason is based on governmentality, an art of governing the state in the most economical and convenient way possible. Put differently, its aim is to regulate the body to such an extent that it governs itself.[19] Although these historical arguments seem to draw a clear-cut distinction between modern and pre-modern forms of power, Foucault makes a curious move to connect what he calls pastoral power and modern governmentality.
This connection sometimes sounds like an analogy between medieval Christian pastoral power and modern state rationality. Yet Foucault also seems to talk about a long-durée historical connection and continuity (i.e., the modern state being the secularized version of the pastor and taking up his confessional technique), which might come counterintuitive to the reader who is attuned to Foucault’s earlier work and sees him as a historian of “ruptures” and “breaks.” Alternatively, this form of power was one of the techniques invented with the emergence of Christianity but lay dormant for a long time until the early modern formations of the state. Pastoral power aims to lead the individual to her salvation in the next world. The modern state tries to ensure this in this world. Pastoral power does not only command but also is ready to sacrifice itself for the survival and salvation of the flock. Similarly, the modern state, with its expansive institutions of health, medicine, hygiene, and police, guarantees the lives of individuals and the population. Just like the two poles of biopower, the pastor not only looks after the whole community but also pays particular attention to each individual. Finally, both forms of power incite individuals to talk about themselves, find their own truth and identity, and actively make themselves into subjects. Through this subjectification, they become conscious parts of the population and community.[20]
Although this gives us a broad overview, the historical trajectories and connections Foucault draws constantly shift. Sometimes we deal with the nineteenth-century emergence of the nation-state and disciplinary power best exemplified by the emergence of prison as the fundamental technique of punishment, sometimes we trace it back to the Reformation and the early modern formations of the Polizei[21] and statistics, and sometimes we return to medieval Christianity to see how the modern secular state has taken up the governing techniques of the pastor. The list of shifting historical trajectories can be extended but the point is that Foucault’s genealogies offer myriad and always shifting beginnings of “today” or modern forms of power.
Let us go back to the tension in Foucault’s dealings with power: the tension between his use of power methodologically to critique the existing notions of power and his genealogies of modern power. His methodological remarks on how to study power target the modern modalities of power and his historical accounts show why the existing notions of power are unable to capture the contemporary workings of power. However, the existing notions are not only “outmoded.” They cannot understand “power” because they theorize it as an object. The moment they do this, power escapes them because, however paradoxical, there is no power at all. That is why Foucault insists that he uses power as merely a methodological concept and draws multiple histories, continuous and discontinuous, that are often in conflict or approach the issue from a different angle and problematic each time. In a sense, Foucault tries to hide power from power. He wants to avoid power; he puts on masks and refuses all forms of identity because “visibility is a trap.”[22] Power wants to see you talking about power. Falling back into the difficulty Foucault dealt with, namely, talking about power as a thing and as an agent, we can perhaps say this (which is wrong because, once again, there is no power): “power wants you to say that ‘power is such-and-such thing’ so that it can take a new shape and find ways of ceasing to be that thing immediately.” The productive tension in Foucault is this. Talking about power, Foucault does not want to theorize power because when one theorizes power (i.e., devises a conceptual framework to refer to the reality or object of power), power escapes it and, perhaps, turns it into another power relation. Therefore, power cannot be an object of study.
In his controversial 1977 essay “Forget Foucault,” Jean Baudrillard suggests that the reason why Foucault was able to write about power so well is that the power he describes is dead and informs the making of new ones. He suggests that Foucault’s “language itself gives birth to the operation of new powers.”[23] According to Baudrillard, turning it into an object of study, Foucault missed the real essence of power (which always escapes us) and ended up reproducing it in new forms. Baudrillard is right about power: it escapes whenever it is turned into an object of analysis. Yet he is wrong about Foucault. As I have explicated in this essay, Foucault knows this very well, and precisely for this reason, he always tried to find ways of not talking about power as an object. Foucault’s teaching is that the first rule for the study of power is not to talk about power as a thing. Likewise, the first rule about learning from Foucault is not to talk about Foucault or his “theories.” Forget him!
References
Baudrillard, Jean. 2007 [1977]. Forget Foucault. Translated by Nicole Dufresne. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e).
Foucault, Michel. 1978 [1976]. History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon Books.
Foucault, Michel. 1980. “Prison Talk.” In Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, edited by Colin Gordon, 37–54. New York: Pantheon Books.
Foucault, Michel. 1980. “Two Lectures.” In Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, edited by Colin Gordon, 78–108. New York: Pantheon Books.
Foucault, Michel. 1980. “Truth and Power.” In Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, edited by Colin Gordon, 109–133. New York: Pantheon Books.
Foucault, Michel. 1980. “The Eye of Power.” In Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, edited by Colin Gordon, 146–165. New York: Pantheon Books.
Foucault, Michel. 1995 [1975]. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books.
Foucault, Michel. 2003. “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76. Translated by David Macey. New York: Picador.
Foucault, Michel. 2019. “Governmentality.” In Power: The Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, edited by James Faubion, 201–222. New York: The New Press.
Foucault, Michel. 2019. “‘Omnes et Singulatim’: Toward a Critique of Political Reason.” In Power: The Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, edited by James Faubion, 298–325. New York: The New Press.
Foucault, Michel. 2019. “The Subject and Power.” In Power: The Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, edited by James Faubion, 326–348. New York: The New Press.
Foucault, Michel. 2019. “The Political Technology of Individuals.” In Power: The Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, edited by James Faubion, 403–417. New York: The New Press.
[1] “The Subject and Power,” 326.
[2] In the first volume of his History of Sexuality, he describes his understanding of power in the “Method” chapter of the book, 92–98. In “Two Lectures,” he lists the ways his work approaches power as “methodological precautions,” 96–100.
[3] “Two Lectures,” 90–91; “The Eye of Power,” 164. Foucault often uses “relations of force” when he invokes warlike strategic relationships and the notion of struggle, the reversal of Clausewitz’s formula “war is a continuation of politics by other means,” and Nietzsche’s understanding of knowledge formations.
[4] “The Subject and Power,” 340.
[5] However, although power relations are imbued with calculation, with a series of aims and objectives, they do not result from an individual choice or decision. They are “nonsubjective.” History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, 95.
[6] Ibid.Foucault points out, “Power is exercised only over free subjects and only insofar as they are ‘free’… Where the determining factors are exhaustive, there is no relationship of power: slavery is not a power relationship when man is in chains.” “The Subject and Power,” 342.
[7] Discipline and Punish, 26.
[8] History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, 94.
[9] “Truth and Power,” 119.
[10] Ibid.
[11] “Prison Talk,” 52.
[12] History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, 136–138.
[13] “Society Must Be Defended”, 241.
[14] Ibid., 139.
[15] “‘Omnes et Singulatim’,” 325.
[16] “The Subject and Power,” 336.
[17] “[T]he end of sovereignty is the exercise of sovereignty.” “Governmentality,” 210.
[18] Ibid., 217.
[19] “reason of state is not an art of government according to divine, natural, or human laws. It doesn’t have to respect the general order of the world. It’s government in accordance with the state’s strength. It’s government whose aim is to increase this strength within an extensive and competitive framework.” “‘Omnes et Singulatim’,” 317.
[20] “The Subject and Power,” 333–335; “Governmentality,” 301–303.
[21] For a detailed examination of this, see “The Political Technology of Individuals.”
[22] Discipline and Punish, 200.
[23] Forget Foucault, 30.
I really enjoyed how you summarised some concepts and defended how Foucault’s object of study was not power per se, but other types of relations. I just wonder: if power cannot be object of study, aren’t those mechanisms in which power surfaces also “power”? For example, prison and punishment mechanisms are forms of power. If they are, wouldn’t Foucault’s method become historical because he can only analyse those mechanisms from his historical position and retroactively?