A Re-elaboration of the Theory of Power
In framing his theory of power, Foucault looks beyond the questions of free will and authority, past questions that are central to the concepts of law and order in Western societies. Instead of merely asking “What is sovereign? What bond of obedience ties individuals to the sovereign?” questions reworked even by the Existentialists, he follows a course of analysis that asks different questions. These questions, he says also, “concern our bodies, our lives, our daily existences” (Gordon 187), but conceive of relations of power which are “not purely and simply a projection of the sovereign’s great power over the individual; they are rather the concrete, changing soil in which the sovereign’s power is grounded…and make it possible for it to function” (Gordon 187).
The Oxford English Dictionary includes these definitions for the word “sovereign:”
1. Of persons: Having superior or supreme rank or power 2. Of or belonging to, characteristic of, supremacy or superiority 3. A free citizen or voter of America. Sovereignty, then, has a duality in everyday meaning, being both supreme rank and independence or freedom, and is defined using the same slippery word- power - at which we are trying to grasp. If being sovereign can mean both subjugating others and the condition of being free, then perhaps the word “freedom” needs clarification. Some of the OED’s 30+ definitions of “free”: 1. Not in bondage to another. 2. Guiltless, innocent, acquitted. 3. Showing absence of constraint or timidity in one's movements. 4. Released or exempt from work or duty. 5. Of power or energy: Disengaged, available for ‘work’. Said of workmen who are not members of a trade union. Freedom can be both the exemption from work, and also the state of being ready for work.
Clearly, the most fundamental words with which we frame our concepts of self, state, politics, science, and history are subject to a plethora of contradictory, interconnecting, and complex meanings. Foucault calls this sticky situation the internal discourse of the institution- in this example the institution being institutionalized language- which uses itself to address itself, and is circulated by those that make it function. Like we shall see about power, language is everywhere- we are “always-already trapped” (Foucault 83). It is with this in mind that a deconstruction of the word “power” is attempted, and Foucault’s specific meaning and usage of the word investigated and explained.
Power has various meanings in cultural use. It is a word used to describe conditions that are political, legal, mathematical, statistical, mechanical, electrical, and optical; from quite specific to general concepts. When Foucault talks about Power he is does borrow any of these common meanings. While it seems that many of these definitions can be applied without much stretch to fit into Foucault’s theory of power, his definition is much broader, equating power with the generative properties of soil, a moving substrate, a shifting grid, an interlocking system of chains, and the processes, mechanisms, strategies, differential relations, methods, “polymorphous” techniques, and procedures in which it takes form, and the discourses which serve to transmit and produce it.
Foucault develops a concept of power that “no longer takes law as model and a code” (Foucault 90). Therefore, power cannot be conceived of as being grounded in authority or individuals with influence and control, nor the forces of armies that they command. It is not the “power/agency of the law” or the struggle against it embodied in movements like “black power” and “labor power.” It is not an authoritative general system of domination or a group of institutions and mechanisms designed to ensure the subservience of the populace. It may function this way, but it is not designed and conceived of for that purpose.
Power is also not merely, essentially prohibitive. The laws and taboos that function as prohibitions and denials are “negative elements” of power, while less acknowledged “positive” ones exist as well, consisting of specific force-relations and power-differentials being strengthened and supported by one another and functioning to invest life energy as capital in the machine of production. “Power as a pure limit set on freedom is, at least in our society, the general form of its acceptability” (Foucault 86). Foucault posits that the deployment of the discourse of sexuality is a more sophisticated mechanism of power, which continues the control of life more clear in the older, pre 18th century discourse of family alliances, bloodlines. In this way it effectively masks its pro-activity, rendering it tolerable to the populace.
Power is “the multiplicity of force-relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their organization; as the process through which ceaseless struggles and confrontations transforms, strengthens, and reverses force relations” (Foucault 92). It is the support these force relations give and receive from one-another, and also the “disjunctions and contradictions which isolate [them]… from one another,” as if forming links in a chain in a moving medium of force relations, strengthened at certain connection point as in a web. By virtue of their inequality, these force relations “constantly produce states of power at local, unstable levels” (Foucault 98). States of power are “complex strategical sitituation[s] in a particular society” (Foucault (?)). Politics is a “…more or less global strategy for co-ordinating and directing [force] relations….Every relation of force implies at each moment a relation of power (which is in a sense its momentary expression) and every power relation makes a reference… to a political field of which it forms a part” (Gordon 189). In this way it is clear that power is not something “super-structural” that originates at the top, but is generated “moment to moment…in every relation from one point to another in the field of force relations.” Power is everywhere because it is created all around us, all of the time, in the form of immediate and local power relations that are shifting and unstable.
Discourse (tactical elements in the field of force-relations) joins power with techniques of knowledge (How do we know? What do we search for? What is the process of that search? What is considered important? How do people figure into this?) Discourse justifies these techniques of knowledge by joining them with strategies of power. Foucault’s goal is not to determine if the discursive productions (what is said, who says it, how it shapes dialogue/desire/culture) are true or false as relates to sexuality, but instead to “bring out the ‘will to knowledge’ that serves as their support and their instrument” (Foucault 12). He explains how the discourse of Christian confession was translated into political, economic, and technical terms during the eighteenth century when the bourgeoisie, mimicking aristocracy, became obsessed with their bloodline, but this time it was shrouded in concepts of heredity grounded in “scientific” discourse. The body, and its perceived raging, lethal sexuality became part of this obsession, stressing family dynamics and necessitating scientific medical and psychological attention. Dominant discourses, a tool and effect of power, can effectively program and control our perceptions of these shifting forces, and we give ourselves, body and mind, to the strengthening of certain power differentials and the strategies which codify and embody them in the State, law, and social hegemonies.
Since the Middle Ages, power has been represented in the Juridical/Monarchic and Political/Juridical institutions, which rely on the concept of public law as necessary to keep peace as a basis for their right to exist. Power has been formulated and exercised through law. The major concerns, concepts, and problems considered important by these institutions have molded Western societies. Concerns with issues of right, violence, law/illegality, freedom/will, state and sovereignty, were exacted with a method of power that endows some with the hierarchical right of power over life and death; a strategy of power and discourse which Foucault calls the deployment of alliance. What he endeavors to explain in The History of Sexuality Vol. 1, is how another strategy of power, the deployment of sexuality, “has its reason for being… in penetrating bodies in an increasingly detailed way, and in controlling populations in an increasingly comprehensive way,” using techniques of power, now present at every level of the social body (family, schools, police, military, prisons, hospitals) for maximizing life for the ruling class, amplifying the aptitude and production force of life without making it more difficult to govern (Foucault 107). Masked as themes of “useful public discourses” like health, progeny, future of the species, vitality of the social body, and race, methods of power that in pre-industrial time wielded the sword, switched to modifying and controlling life. This is the ruse of capitalism’s rise to power. Foucault’s argument is that the reason we go along with it all is because this transformation is carefully shrouded in discourses that hide the specific network of power that now renders law as a system of norms, producing a “normalizing society,” that normalizes power itself, turns the old tool of punishment into the control of the body and population at all levels in new forms, and does all the work of the sword without the loss of life that is now a valuable resource.
Ultimately, economic processes acting within the state/capitalism dynamic encourage the formulation of an entire system of micro-powers concerned with the body so as to discipline it through discourses/techniques of knowledge using sex as a tool to harness the bio-power/energy of at least the working class subjects and penetrate their bodies through the discourse of science and psychology, maximizing work-life expectancy and controlling reproduction. This has taken the form of innumerable little controls; surveillance, meticulous orderings of space, and medical and psychological examinations (Foucault 145).
What Foucault is trying to say with all this set-up about power, is that we are being told by the master narrative forces, using the discourse rooted in norms of our era, that in order to liberate ourselves from the repression and silence about sex that we have supposedly endured for so long, we need to further embrace the deployment of sexuality. In reality, we have been “subject... [to the] austere monarchy of sex,” the “systematization of pleasure” according to the ‘laws’ of sex, and encouraged through various strategies of power to take it stoically (Stoic: the Greek school of philosophy advocating calm acceptance of all occurrences; the universal philosophy of the Roman Empire which Christianity incorporated), without looking it in the eye, refusing to recognize the techniques and methods of power that have acted as radical agents in the transformation of human life in the past three centuries. If the public now permits the normalization of things previously considered perverse, then the masquerade that we are still dealing with the old world’s system of alliances and laws can end. But, by accepting “sexuality” as something natural and ahistorical, rooted in science and reason, is still refusing to see the field of power in which our lives and our bodies exist. Indeed, our very liberation depends on our seeing the points of resistance that exist within the power network, and creating an informed analysis leading, ironically, to our talking about it: adapting discourses to expose and undermine the powers that bleed us of our life energy, developing new strategies of power and strengthening new force-relations that recognize and affirm life, humanity, and the endless possibilities of existence and disengage from hierarchy, segregation, racism, genocide, state and corporate directed greed, hate, and war.
To do this, perhaps we should begin by aiming, as Foucault suggests, at “a desexualization, at a general economy of pleasure not based on sexual norms” rather than believe we are liberating ourselves “when we ‘decode’ all pleasure in terms of a sex shorn at last of disguise” (Gordon 191). Foucault views the purpose of political analysis and criticism, as being to bring new schemas of politicization (“everything is political”). “To the vast new techniques of powers correlated with multinational economies and beaurocratic States, one must oppose/[create] a politicization which will take new forms” (Gordon 190).