The essence of this paper is that it sets up a problem that Foucault defined but never solved. In fact, he more or less wrote around and around this problem all his life. The next step for this paper (or maybe another paper, since academic papers are only allowed to represent the advancement of knowledge in tee-ninsy little steps--or maybe another 10,000 papers) would be to show how an understanding of Power and Authority, in Positional and Personal forms, would basically solve Foucault's problem, thank you very much.
So, the use of "power" in this paper has nothing to do with Juanita's concept of Power. This paper only explores Foucault's use of power and really it just shows how Foucault knew that something called "power" was important in many different ways, but he didn't understand WHY certain things can happen.
Foucault's Conception(s) of Power
Carolyn Cutler Osborne
In a late essay, "The Subject and Power," Foucault states:
I would like to say, first of all, what has been the goal of my work during the last twenty years. It has not been to analyze the phenomena of power, nor to elaborate the foundations of such an analysis.
My objective, instead, has been to create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects. (p. 417)
Foucault's biographer, James Miller, points out that Foucault's conception of power changed significantly across the course of his life. According to Miller, some of Foucault's earlier political activities might be considered problematic in light of his later conceptions of power. These later conceptions of power are based on Foucault's experiences, his observations of how events in which he participated played out, and further reading. Thus, it would be problematic to approach Foucault's conception of power as a consistent set of ideas across his oeuvre. In fact, given the connections between Foucault's life and his theorizing that Miller's book underscores, one can assume that the later essays of Foucault about power are more likely to have Foucault's most mature and complex conceptions of power. Therefore, in this study of Foucault's conception of power, I take into account the chronology of Foucault's writing, and will use Foucault's later works as my main guide to understanding his ideas about power.
While Foucault makes the claim in "The Subject and Power" that he is not a theorist of power, he is being somewhat disingenuous. The second half of the essay is devoted to the subject of power and he brings to the fore many different ideas in relation to power. Furthermore, the issue of power has been central to if not constituitive of the main body of Foucault's work, from his histories, e.g., The History of Sexuality and Discipline and Punish, to collections of his essays, notably, Power/Knowledge. The problem in discerning Foucault's conceptions of power is not only that it changed over the course of his life but also because the one word, power, subsumes many concepts, some of which are problematic in their relationship with the subject.
What is Power?
In a discussion of his history of prisons, Discipline and Punish, Foucault states:
It was Nietzsche who specified the power relation as the general focus, shall we say, of philosophical discourse--whereas for Marx it was the production relation. Nietzsche is the philosopher of power, a philosopher who managed to think of power without having to confine himself within a political theory in order to do so. (Power/Knowledge, p. 53)
Foucault amplifies this concern with traditional conceptions of power in the first of two lectures printed in Power/Knowledge:
The issue here can be crystallised essentially in the following question: is the analysis of power or of powers to be deduced in one way or another from the economy?...It is not at all my intention to abstract from what are innumerable and enormous differences; yet despite, and even because of these differences, I consider there to be a certain point in common between the juridical, and let us call it, liberal, conception of political power...and the Marxist conception, or at any rate a certain conception currently held to be Marxist. I would call this common point an economism in the theory of power. By that I mean that in the case of the classic, juridical theory, power is taken to be a right, which one is able to possess like a commodity, and which one can in consequence transfer or alienate, either wholly or partially, through a legal act or through some act that establishes a right, such as takes place through cession or contract...In the other [Marxist] case...one finds none of all that. Nonetheless, there is something else inherent in this latter conception, something which one might term an economic functionality of power. This economic functionality is present to the extent that power is conceived primarily in terms of the role it plays in the maintenance simultaneously of the relations of production and of a class domination which the development and specific forms of the forces of production have rendered possible. On this view, then, the historical raison d'être of political power is to be found in the economy. (pp. 88-89)
The main conceptions of power available to us have been limited to an understanding of power as commodity, an economic conception of power. Foucault returns to Nietzsche in order to find the roots of a conception of power which avoids, presumably, an oversimplification of the concept of power through limiting it to the quality of commodity.
In the late essay, "The Subject of Power," the one in which Foucault refuses the status of a theorist of power, Foucault does state what he thinks power is:
The exercise of power is not simply a relationship between partners, individual or collective; it is a way in which certain actions modify others. Which is to say, of course, that something called Power, with or without a capital letter, which is assumed to exist universally in a concentrated or diffused form, does not exist. Power exists only when it is put into action, even if, of course, it is integrated into a disparate field of possibilities brought to bear upon permanent structures. This also means that power is not a function of consent. In itself it is not a renunciation of freedom, a transference of rights, the power of each and all delegated to a few (which does not prevent the possibility that consent may be a condition for the existence or the maintenance of power); the relationship of power can be the result of a prior or permanent concent, but it is not by nature the manifestation of a consensus...In effect, what defines a relationship of power is that it is a mode of action which does not act directly and immediately on others. Instead, it acts upon their actions: an action upon an action, on existing actions or on those which may arise in the present or the future. (pp. 426-7)
Power is how the subject's actions are limited by someone else. Over the course of his work, Foucault engaged significantly with several types of power: bio-power, sovereign power, infrapower, discipline, and pastoral power. This list is by no means exhaustive, as Foucault defined power in relation to many different contexts. These types of power extend well beyond an economic conception of power; they show the potential effect of power on all aspects of a person's life.
Bio-Power
Bio-power is a type of power that is inextricably intertwined with the body. This is the power of life and death, but also bodily desire. Foucault points out that the power of life and death has often been associated with sovereign power (a type of power which is discussed below) but it is not limited to sovereign power. That is, the ability to kill another person has been used in the context of sovereign power in order to protect that power, but it is not limited to that power.
Bio-power carries a limit with it in the form of a scandal, which Foucault points out:
Now it is over life, throughout its unfolding, that power establishes its domination; death is power's limit, the moment that escapes it; death becomes the most secret aspect of existence, the most "private." It is not surprising that suicide--once a crime, since it was a way to usurp the power of death which the sovereign alone, whether the one here below or the Lord above, had the right to exercise--became, in the course of the nineteenth century, one of the first conducts to enter into the sphere of sociological analysis; it testified to the individual and private right to die, at the borders and in the interstices of power that was exercised over life. (The History of Sexuality Vol. 1, pp. 138-39)
Ironically, the ultimate control one can have over the life of another is to end that life; at the point at which that life is ended, the control is ended.[1]
In the process of discussing bio-power, Foucault outlines what is at stake in terms of the historical struggles over who controls the body:
The "right" to life, to one's body, to health, to happiness, to the satisfaction of needs, and beyond all the oppressions or "alienations," the "right" to rediscover what one is and all that one can be, this "right" --which the classical juridical system was utterly incapable of comprehending--was the political response to all these new procedures of power which did not derive, either, from the traditional right of sovereignty. (The History of Sexuality Vol. 1, p. 145)
In this passage, we can see that a judicial notion of "power" is not adequate for defining the role of power in a person's life, an affirmation of the limitations of an economic notion of power. The power that Foucault is talking about is the power of desire, which is why this discussion appears in his History of Sexuality. Who has the right to control how we engage with our own bodily desires?
In a late interview, published just after Foucault's death, Foucault amplifies this concern with power:
In the Western industrialized societies, the questions "Who exercises power? How? On whom?" are certainly the questions that people feel most strongly about...Who makes decisions for me? Who is preventing me from doing this and telling me to do that? Who is programming my movements and activities? Who is forcing me to live in a particular place when I work in another? How are these decisions on which my life is completely articulated taken? All these questions seem to me to be fundamental ones today. And I don't believe that this question of "who exercises power?" can be resolved unless that other question "how does it happen?" is resolved at the same time. (Politics, Philosophy, Culture, p. 103).
In other words, how are all aspects of our lives, not just economic ones, inscribed in power?
In his biography of Foucault, Miller points out the connections between Foucault's life and his theorizing. I believe that in the passages above from the History of Sexuality, we have the crux of Foucault's concern about power. What is at issue for Foucault is not only the ways in which some people control the access of others to material goods or to the right to make laws. Foucault also sought to understand the ways in which a person's actions in relation to his or her own body might be circumscribed by people in power.
Materialist and judicial models of power fail to explain bio-power, just as changes in laws and economic practices do not end the oppression of desire. At the same time that Foucault is pointing out the failures of these models, he is also creating an alternative model of freedom: all people should have the rights he outlines, rights which far exceed our traditional judicial notions of rights. In fact, much of his work on power is an exploration of the ways in which bio-power is enacted over people, the ways in which people's actions over their own bodies are limited.
Sovereign/Infra- Power
Sovereign power is the form of power most closely related to economics. After all, the materialist history of struggle which Marx outlines is a history in the shifts of sovereign power (the power of the state) in relation to economic structures. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault explores sovereign power not in relation to economics, however, but in relation to the ways in which the state seeks to limit criminal activity.
Public executions, according to Foucault, are the enacting of sovereign power, historically a revenging for a crime against the king. Foucault points out the complex ways in which the people who witnessed the execution were taking part in the revenge while, at the same time, the execution itself was an enactment of sovereign power over the people. The execution served as an opportunity for people both to identify with sovereign power and to be warned against committing crimes themselves because of the possible consequences.
Yet public executions were not unruptured expressions of sovereign power. In fact, Foucault identifies and documents the use of what he calls "infrapower" during the process of a public execution:
It was evident that the great spectacle of punishment ran the risk of being rejected by the very people to whom it was addressed. In fact, the terror of the public execution created centres of illegality: on execution days, work stopped, the taverns were full, the authorities were abused, insults or stones were thrown at the executioner, the guards and the soldiers; attempts were made to seize the condemned man, either to save him or to kill him more surely; fights broke out, and there was no better prey for thieves than the curious throng around the scaffold...But above all--and this was why these disadvantages became a political danger--the people never felt closer to those who paid the penalty than in those rituals intended to show the horror of the crime and the invincibility of power; never did the people feel more threatened, like them, by a legal violence exercised without moderation or restraint. The solidarity of a whole section of the population with those we would call petty offenders--vagrants, false beggars, the indigent poor, pickpockets, receivers and dealers in stolen goods--was constantly expressed: resistance to police searches, the pursuit of informers, attacks on the watch or inspectors provide abundant evidence of this...And it was the breaking up of this solidarity that was becoming the aim of penal and police repression. (p. 63)
The idea behind public executions is to demonstrate the "invincibility" of sovereign power; yet, as Foucault describes, the witnesses to this demonstration intervened, occasionally even preventing the execution from taking place. In this sense, this "infrapower" can be seen as stronger than "sovereign power" since, as Foucault points out, the users of sovereign power had to change their tactics in order to retain their power. Although Foucault details the shift in the enactment of sovereign power through changes in penal and police practices in response to infrapower, he never discusses how infrapower might be stronger than sovereign power or the ramifications of that observation.
Discipline and the Power of the Gaze
The history which Foucault outlines in Discipline and Punish is a history of the way in which power is enacted over people who are identified as criminals. Over the course of this history, this power has been enacted less and less on the physical body. Torture is a direct enactment of power on the physical body; surveillance, a much later technology of power, is an enactment of power that does not touch the body.
Foucault points out that the common people reacted strongly against public executions. Too, these public executions were becoming increasingly dangerous in that the invincibility of sovereign power was becoming less convincing to those who were living under it. More "humane" practices were proposed by various groups of people and were adopted.
The quintessential example of these "humane" practices was the panopticon, a disciplinary architecture designed by Jeremy Bentham. The panopticon allows for complete surveillance of a group of people who are also separated one from another. The inhabitants live in cells which surround a central observation point. The cells are separated from each other by solid walls, floors, and ceilings, preventing contact between inmates; the transparent wall between the cell and the observation point allows for all activities within a cell to be observed by those in power.
Foucault points out that those who enact the power of the gaze can do so for many reasons--for the "good" of those being observed or for their own perverse pleasure. The architecture does not determine the reasons for which this kind of power is enacted. Further, Foucault states that the effect of this power on the subject is that the subject internalizes the gaze of the other and disciplines his or her own actions in relation to the surveillance. In other words, this enactment of power places the subject in the position of changing his or her own behavior in relation to the power; it does not depend on the external controls of, for example, torture devices or strait jackets. The power of the gaze, discipline through surveillance, is presented as an all-encompassing type of power because of the separation of subjects from each other (preventing the sort of mob mentality that could block an execution) and because of the process of internalization of the surveillance by the subject. There seems to be no room here for infrapower.
Initially, the power of the gaze can be seen as just another enactment of sovereign power, one that is more effective because of its elimination of the cruder forms of infrapower. Yet it is interesting that Foucault gives several examples that get away from the prison model per se. The actions of schoolboys, patients, and the poor are controlled by surveillance. The relations that Foucault describes are most visible in the architectural construction of the panopticon, yet this hierarchical relation of power can be enacted without the actual physical construction. Foucault gives the example of the way in which the church supervised the poor in order to assure their compliance with church practices. Church officials visited poor families, in part, to check on the number of beds in the house and the sleeping arrangements of family members.[2] What is important to keep in mind is that the process of surveillance does not determine who is doing the inspection or the reasons for which they are doing it. Thus the power of the gaze can be sovereign or it can be an enactment of other types of power.
Pastoral Power
Perhaps if Foucault had lived longer, he might have eventually completed a genealogy of pastoral power that would have had similarities with Discipline and Punish. Instead, what we have is a very brief outline of pastoral power in "The Subject of Power" and the strategies for studying power that Foucault uses in his books. According to Foucault, pastoral power is a form of power that has emerged in the form of Christianity:
1. It is a form of power whose ultimate aim is to assure individual salvation in the next world.
2. Pastoral power is not merely a form of power which commands; it must also be prepared to sacrifice itself for the life and salvation of the flock. Therefore, it is different from royal power, which demands a sacrifice from its subjects to save the throne.
3. It is a form of power which does not look after just the whole community but each individual in particular, during his entire life.
4. Finally, this form of power cannot be exercised without knowing the inside of people's minds, without exploring their souls, without making them reveal their innermost secrets. It implies a knowledge of the conscience and an ability to direct it. (p. 422)
This form of power seems to be anomalous to the other forms of power already discussed. After all, how does one control the actions of another and still be prepared to sacrifice for the good of the other?
Yet the fourth point reveals where pastoral power is in relation to other forms of power. Torture was a way of physically controlling the body; discipline brought to bear the person's own control over him or herself as it was enacted through surveillance. Pastoral power is an escalation of this process in that it seeks to inspect that which is invisible in the person, his or her thoughts and secret desires and it seeks to have access to these thoughts and desires across the lifetime of the person. What we can see with pastoral power is a further effacing of the possibility of infrapower. This effacement of infrapower reduces the possibility of resistance, allowing those who have pastoral power to continue their control over the actions of those who lack pastoral power.
Resisting Power
Power, the control of actions of an individual or a group of people, is where oppression takes place. This oppression can be material/economic, as in the way that capitalism justifies differential access to material resources--those with capital control those without it; those with capital control the bodies of those without, transforming those bodies into cogs of factory machinery, replacing worn out bodies with new younger ones as required by the on-going accumulation of capital. The oppression can be judicial, as in the laws which allow capital punishment and laws which create limits on people's activities. This oppression can also occur in the forms which alienate the person from his or her own body, through channels which impinge on a person's mind and soul.
While Foucault defines several ways in which power can be used to oppress, inherent to his descriptions are possibilities for challenging that power. The ultimate form of power, bio-power, is limited by the death of the oppressed person. Additionally, we have seen what might be termed an escalation of power that goes away from direct physical control of a person's body and towards control of the person's mind and soul. This shift can be seen as a result of resistance to the sovereign enactment of bio-power in the form of public executions.
The question becomes, how can we understand this resistance? Foucault names the power of resistance in the example of public executions, "infrapower." A number of questions emerge:
•Are all forms of power oppressive? Is infrapower oppressive?
•What are the forms of resistance that are available against a given form of power? Which kinds of resistance are effective? Is the elimination of infrapower possible?
•What are the differences between resistant subjects and non-resistant or compliant subjects?
•What are the relationships between power and desire in terms of creating a non-oppressive society?
•What bearing does context (e.g., pastoral, judicial, governmental) have for power practices and resistance to power?
Infrapower and resistance
The key to resistance seems to be in the form of infrapower, which consists, in Foucault's terms, in some kind of solidarity between members of an oppressed group. This form of power belies the "invincibility" of sovereign power: it can disrupt sovereign forms of control and it causes sovereigns to seek more effective ways of control. In this instance, infrapower becomes a form of control over the oppressors, in that oppressors have to find ways of enacting power that reduce (or eliminate) the possibility for infrapower.
Infrapower, in the form of "workers of the world unite," was recognized by Marx. In fact, this form of power is the driving force behind Marx' materialist conception of history. Infrapower becomes the antithesis of whatever system is ascendant, presumably until oppression is ended.
In his consideration of oppressive events in the
The Gulag question, on the other hand, involves a political choice. There are those who pose it and those who don't. To pose it means...:
...Refusing to question the Gulag on the basis of the texts of Marx or Lenin or to ask oneself how, through what error, deviation, misunderstanding or distortion of speculation or practice, their theory could have been betrayed to such a degree. On the contrary, it means questioning all these theoretical texts, however old, from the standpoint of the reality of the Gulag. Rather than of searching in those texts for a condemnation in advance of the Gulag, it is a matter of asking what in those texts could have made the Gulag possible, what might even now continue to justify it, and what makes it intolerable truth still accepted today. The Gulag question must be posed not in terms of error (reduction of the problem to one of theory), but in terms of reality. (Power/Knowledge, p. 135).
Later in the same interview, on the same subject, he states:
The Gulag is not a question to be posed for any and every country. It has to be posed for every socialist country, insofar as none of these since 1917 has managed to function without a more-or-less developed Gulag system.[3] [original italics] (Power/Knowledge, p. 137)
Given what we know about Foucault's critique of Marxism, the answer to where in Marx does the Gulag lie, is likely to be, Marx limits his understanding of power to a judico-economic form, one which does not account for so many ways in which power can be enacted over people. Thus, as the
The traditional conception of infrapower in the form of proletarian power (in a materialist sense) is not adequate to explain the realities of the ways in which power is enacted and can be responded to. That is, the dictatorship of the proletariat can be just as problematic and oppressive as any other form of dictatorship and it can lead to an enactment of infrapower. What becomes key here is the ways in which what was originally the power of the oppressed becomes the power of the oppressors, a concept which Foucault does not explore.
Forms of resistance, forms of power
What Foucault does not openly state, but what has become clear in this recounting of his conceptions of power, is that each form of power has a set of limits. Bio-power has the limit of death. Sovereign power has the limit of infrapower in the form of groups of oppressed who revolt (whether that revolution effectively ends oppression or not). Foucault recognizes these limits although he does not deal with the ramifications of them, nor does he generalize this notion of limits to other forms of power.
When we are dealing with stronger forms of power, surveillance and pastoral power, we have to begin to look for the roots of infrapower within the individual subject. The example of Nien Cheng comes to mind. She was imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution in the People's Republic of
In her account of her imprisonment, Cheng describes her response to the surveillance of her isolated cell: "Often I would sit there [on her bed] with Mao's book on my lap as if I were absorbed in reading his essays, but actually my mind was filled with the stanzas of Li Bo or Du Fu" (p. 267). In other words, Cheng had the appearance of complying with the terms of surveillance, that is, governing her own actions. In reality, she was reconstructing the poems she had learned as a child, poems which were considered to be anti-revolutionary by the Maoists. This process of remembering poetry was one of several tactics she developed that helped her to keep her sanity and sense of self during her imprisonment; the poems helped her to maintain a consistent stance of resistance against those who wanted her to make a false confession to having been a foreign spy. The very act of appearing to conform to the requirements of those in power was one of rebellion.
The situation of Cheng is one of a woman using an internal form of infrapower to make a response to surveillance. When churches place their members in the position of following a given, narrow doctrine and threaten the loss of salvation for those who don't follow that doctrine, we need to find the limits to that power, ways to resist the take-over of the soul. Foucault does not explore the resistance necessary to challenge pastoral power. Yet, there have to be forms of infrapower that limit the exercise of pastoral power. We must look within the subject to find the roots of infrapower.
Resistant subjects
In his discussion of infrapower, Foucault implies that it comes from groups of oppressed people, the mobs that storm the gallows. Yet, as we have seen, infrapower can reside within the individual subject. In a late essay in which he re-reads a short essay by Kant, Foucault discusses aspects of the individual which might be related to the notion of individualized infrapower.
Writing in 1784, Kant was responding to a question asked by a journal, What is Enlightenment? He begins his essay:
Enlightenment is man's leaving his self-caused immaturity. Immaturity is the incapacity to use one's intelligence wtihout the guidance of another. Such immaturity is self-caused if it is not caused by lack of intelligence, but by lack of determination and courage to use one's intelligence without being guided by another. Sapere Aude! Have the courage to use your own intelligence! is therefore the motto of the enlightenment. (Kant, p. 132)
The rest of the essay is devoted to immaturity and the ways in which a person might use maturity to make a critique of society. Kant suggests that a clergyman, for example, is required by his employers to present church doctrine with which he might disagree, but that he can also use his individual scholarship to make a critique of those doctrines and to make that critique public. Kant also advocates paying one's taxes and using one's intelligence to critique government. Thus, Kant is advocating a process of critique that at first glance does not dismantle that which is being critiqued--certainly this scholarly critique is a very different activity from throwing rocks at the executioner.
Foucault comments upon the passage quoted above:
Kant indicates right away that the "way out" that characterizes Enlightment is a process that releases us from the status of "immaturity." And by "immaturity," he means a certain state of our will that makes us accept someone else's authority to lead us in areas where the use of reason is called for. Kant gives three examples: we are in a state of "immaturity" when a book takes the place of our understanding, when a spiritual director takes the place of our conscience, when a doctor decides for us what our diet is to be. (Let us note in passing that the register of these three critiques is easy to recognize, even though the text does not make it explicit). In any case, Enlightenment is defined by a modification of the preexisting relation linking will, authority, and the use of reason.
We must also note that this way out is presented by Kant in a rather ambiguous manner. He characterizes it as a phenomenon, an ongoing process; but he also presents it as a task and an obligation. From the very first paragraph, he notes that man himself is responsible for his immature status. Thus it has to be supposed that he will be able to escape from it only by a change that he himself will bring about in himself. (The Foucault Reader, pp. 34-35)
It is in the ideas of Kant and in Foucault's reading of these ideas that we have a possibility of understanding differences between people who successfully resist tyranny and those who do not: individualized infrapower has its source in "courage" and "maturity." However, this does not altogether solve the problem for Foucault. How do we escape from immaturity? Is there such a state as maturity or is it a process? What changes are required? How can those changes be made? Foucault has no answers for these questions.
Power and desire
In 1972, according to Miller, Foucault organized a seminar around the life of one Pierre Rivière, a man who from childhood had "taken delight in torturing small animals: crucifying birds, flaying frogs, inventing clever new instruments of his own design for heightening pain while inflicting death" (Miller, p. 226). Finally, Rivière killed his mother, sister, and brother. He killed himself in prison, but not before writing a memoir which Foucault and his students explored along with subsidiary documents about Rivière's life.
Miller sums up Foucault's response to Pierre Rivière:
In Foucault's view, the application of such categories [criminal or madman] was a way to "defuse the terror" of a life such as Rivière's--and so to rob it of its true "power." He thought that Rivière's acts merited neither therapy nor confinement. Rather--in his words--they warranted "a sort of reverence." "The most intense point of lives, that which concentrates their energy," he wrote, "is precisely where they clash with power, struggle wtih it, and attempt to use its forces or escapes its traps." Through this struggle, and through "sacrificial and glorious murders," a man like Rivière became a "lightning-existence," illuminating the "ambiguity of the justifiable and the outlawed," revealing "the relation between power and the people, stripped down to essentials: the order to kill, the prohibition against killing; to make oneself kill, to be executed; voluntary sacrifice, ordained punishment; memory, oblivion."
Rivière, in short, was a "tragic" hero--just like Sade, or Artaud. His murders, like his memoirs, were an admirable work of art. (p. 228)
This set of ideas is somewhat problematic in that they were not repeated and amplified later in Foucault's life. In fact, given Foucault's later reading of Kant, I think he pulled away from this sort of Dionysian conception of power.
Yet this passage brings to the fore a problem that Foucault did not work out in conceiving of the way in which power might be used: what is at issue is reciprocity. In other words, how do we negotiate the enactment of power in relation to desires--and Miller's use of Sade connects this power to sexual desire--in ways that are not oppressive to others? Where are the limits to our own power, limits which are a result of our living in proximity to other human beings--not limits that are due to oppressive uses of power? Rivière might have produced art--but at the cost of the lives of other people.
There are two sides of oppression in relation to bodily desire. One side is the puritanism in which one's relationship to one's own body is sharply circumscribed by surveillance and pastoral power. With this oppression, the body becomes a commodity of those in power. The other side of oppression--and I think this is the side to which Foucault went in an attempt to use infrapower against the power of puritanism--is to enact all bodily desires in an attempt to reclaim one's own body, but without regard for the ways in which those enactments create a bodily alienation for another subject.
Foucault did not continue to valorize Pierre Rivière in his later writings. Yet, this same theme became an issue when he became HIV positive at the end of his life. In the early 1980's, when Foucault was spending a lot of time in
Obviously, there has to be limits on one's use of power in relation to bodily and other desires. How do we negotiate those limits and still recognize the sovereignty of the individual over his or her own body? Foucault's answer is not an acceptable one and neither is puritanism.
Contexts of power
In his 1972 discussion with Maoists (in Power/Knowledge), Foucault cautions against using the form of the court in order to ensure justice. Courts are forms developed by the bourgeoisie and, as such, are structurally problematic, according to Foucault. As Foucault discusses the panopticon, it is clear that it is a form of a power--it is a structure which can be used for many different purposes. Likewise, as we have seen, Foucault speaks of several different kinds of power which create oppression in several different ways. We have seen that there are different responses to these oppressive powers--different forms of infrapower that challenge oppression.
Ultimately, what is at issue here, and this is congruent with the questions I have been raising about Foucault's understanding of power in general, is a process of discernment. There are several requirements for the resisting subject that become clear through this reading of Foucault:
•This person must be aware of the existence of infrapower.
•This person must be able to find sources of infrapower within him or herself.
•This person must have courage and maturity, even if those concepts are hard to define.
•This person must be able to negotiate his or her own use of power so that it does not in turn become oppressive towards others.
•Finally, this person must be able to choose strategies based on the context of power--the form of power being enacted.
These are the characteristics of the resisting subject that emerge from a reading of Foucault's works on power. What remains to be understood is why and how this works.
Postscript:
Foucault's work is difficult to understand, much less to critique. Given the current conceptions of power, it is very difficult to articulate the concepts Foucault has, much less the problems within those concepts. I am very grateful to Juanita D. Price for giving me ways of understanding and articulating ideas about power which make it possible for me to make this critique of Foucault.
References
Cheng, Nien. Life and Death in
Foucault, M. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan.
Foucault, M. The Foucault Reader. Edited by Paul Rabinow.
Foucault, M. The History of Sexuality: Volume1: An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley.
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Foucault, M. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977. Edited by Colin Gordon, Translated by Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, and Kate Soper.
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[1]I am reminded of a battered woman whom my shelter attempted to help, but who committed suicide because of the continuing harassment by her former husband even though she was divorced from him and had taken every legal action against him that she could possibly take. A couple of years after this woman died, we received a phone call from a woman who was seeing the same man. She was being harassed by him and was afraid. He had begun the harassment of her on the anniversary of the suicide of his former wife.
[2]Of course these practices are very prominent in today's "welfare" system. Recipients of Section VIII housing are subject to yearly inspections by housing authorities. Those who need food from foodbanks must bring evidence of their income and their expenses--evidence which is inspected by foodbank personnel. The shopping carts of foodstamp users are often inspected by others in the grocery line; this inspection is the source of "welfare queens who eat steak every night" stories that have been the basis of recent Republican rhetoric, not to mention legislation. The switch from paper foodstamps to electronic "benefits" cards will up the ante on the inspection of the economically deprived, as with these cards the food one buys with foodstamps can potentially be recorded, inspected, and judged. One's life becomes an open book to state officials in the process of applying for (and maintaining) Aid to Families with Dependent Children or General Relief. And economically deprived people are much more likely to have open cases with Children's Services, in which one's relationships with one's children are open to scrutiny. This is, in Foucauldian terms, an enactment of power from several sources (state, middle and upper class individuals, and, in the case of some foodbanks, the church) that has as its focus the actions of people who are economically deprived. Contrary to the principles on which this country was founded, privacy is a commodity available only to those who can afford it.
[3]This statement, originally published in French in 1977 (so, presumably written in the mid 1970s) brings a real irony to the first chapter of Power/Knowledge, which consists of Foucault's 1972 discussion of popular justice with a group of French Maoists. Foucault warns the Maoists in that interview, almost presciently, of the dangers of conceiving of popular justice in the form of courts, that is, using a form that derives from the bourgeois and expecting that form to lead to a just exercise of proletarian power.
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