Foucault and power revisited

European Journal of Political Theory

Volumn 3, Issue 4, 2004, Pages 411-432

  Widder, Nathan ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF EXETER   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Difference; Foucault; Identity; Post identity politics; Power

Indexed keywords

EID: 34248058012     PISSN: 14748851     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/1474885104045913     Document Type: Article

References (98)

1. Michel Foucault (1989) The Archaeology of Knowledge, tr. A.M. Sheridan Smith, pp. 11-14. London: Routledge.
2. Michel Foucault (1982) 'Afterword: The Subject and Power', in Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (eds) Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, pp. 208-26, pp. 211-12. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf.
3. Michel Foucault, Michel Foucault: beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Ibid. p. 212.
4. Michel Foucault, Michel Foucault: beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Ibid. p. 219.
5. See Jürgen Habermas (1987) The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, tr. Frederick Lawrence, pp. 266-92. Cambridge: Polity Press.
6. Habermas focuses on the incoherence of a critique of rationality from a perspective of omnipresent power, arguing that Foucault cannot escape a fall into relativism and performative contradiction, and does not examine Foucault's later work on the self. Although she is sympathetic to Foucault's shift to practices of the self and sees it as implicit in his earlier works on power, Lois MacNay still sees the problematic as one in which disciplinary forms of power dominate and subject individuals, forcing them to become 'docile bodies', while the practices of the self oppose these forms: (1992) Foucault and Feminism. Cambridge: Polity Press.
7. MacNay also finds Foucault's theories ultimately need to be supplemented by Habermasian communicative action. Other readings that can be included under this normative type are Nancy Hartsock (1990) 'Foucault on Power: A Theory for Women?', in Linda Nicholson (ed.) Feminism/Postmodernism, pp. 157-75. New York and London: Routledge.
8. Nancy Fraser (1989) Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press.
9. Judith Butler (1993) Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of 'Sex', pp. 9-10. New York and London: Routledge.
10. Judith Butler (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, p. 29. New York and London: Routledge:
11. For Foucault, those prohibitions are invariably and inadvertently productive in the sense that 'the subject' who is supposed to be founded and produced in and through those prohibitions does not have access to a sexuality that is in some sense 'outside,' 'before,' or 'after' power itself. Power, rather than the law, encompasses both the juridical (prohibitive and regulatory) and the productive (inadvertently generative) functions of differential relations. Hence, the sexuality that emerges within the matrix of power relations is not a simple replication or copy of the law itself, a uniform repetition of a masculinist economy of identity. The productions swerve from their original purposes and inadvertently mobilize possibilities of 'subjects' that do not merely exceed the bounds of cultural intelligibility, but effectively expand the boundaries of what is, in fact, culturally intelligible. Butler's ascription of this division of juridical and productive powers to Foucault is certainly problematic. Foucault, in The History of Sexuality, vol. i, does not speak of juridical forms of power, but rather of juridico-discursive models, which, he argues, may have been sufficient to describe previous regimes of power but are incapable of grasping the subtleties of contemporary forms of power.
12. See Butler (n. 7), pp. 93-106;
13. and Judith Butler (1987) Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France, pp. 217-29. New York: Columbia University Press.
14. According to some of the readings that adopt this criticism, what Foucault fails to appreciate fully is that the site of resistance is a structural Lack within power relations themselves: although power may work to fix the identities of its subjects or to compel subjects towards acts of identification, it must do so in ways that continually reinvoke this Lack, which deconstructs its formations. This line of argument is found in Saul Newman (2001) From Bakunin to Lacan: Anti-Authoritarianism and the Dislocation of Power, esp. ch. 4. Lanham, MD, and Oxford: Lexington Books.
15. reviewed Newman's book in (2002) History of Political Thought 23(4): 694-6.
16. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000) Empire, pp. 24, 330. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press.
17. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, Ibid., esp. pp. 22-8, 327-30.
18. See e.g. Dreyfus and Rabinow (n. 2), pp. 102-5; also Habermas (n. 5), pp. 266-70.
19. It should be appreciated that Foucault never suggests that these 'non-discursive' elements are ever absent from or extraneous to the assemblages that constitute meanings and knowledges, and, as Deleuze notes, he soon abandons the term and its connotations of being strictly separated from discursive formations, instead conceiving of these assemblages as being organized by an interplay of the visible and the articulable. Gilles Deleuze (1988) Foucault, tr. Seán Hand, pp. 9-10, 31-3 and 47-69. London: Athlone Press.
20. Michel Foucault (1990) The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, tr. Robert Hurley, p. 86. New York: Vintage Books.
21. Gilles Deleuze (1994) Difference and Repetition, tr. Paul Patton, p. xix. London: Athlone Press.
22. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, tr. Brian Massumi, pp. 530-1, n. 39. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
23. Also Gilles Deleuze (1997) 'Desire and Pleasure', in Arnold I. Davidson (ed.) Foucault and his Interlocutors, pp. 183-92. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
24. Indeed, Deleuze seems to jettison completely his earlier critique when he describes resistance as being the outside of power, in the same way that Deleuzean desire is outside in the sense of being different from any oppositional schema. See Deleuze (n. 11), esp. pp. 89-90.
25. Foucault (n. 1), p. 21.
26. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault and his Interlocutors, Ibid. p. 23.
27. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault and his Interlocutors, Ibid. pp. 31-7.
28. 'My intention was not to deny all value to these unities or to try to forbid their use; it was to show that they required, in order to be defined exactly, a theoretical elaboration' (Gilles Deleuze, Foucault and his Interlocutors, ibid. p. 71).
29. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault and his Interlocutors, Ibid. pp. 40-4.
30. See Louis Althusser (1996) For Marx, tr. Ben Brewster, esp. chs. 3, 6. London and New York: Verso.
31. Foucault (n. 1), pp. 45-6.
32. Louis Althusser, For Marx, Ibid. pp. 62, 65-6.
33. Louis Althusser, For Marx, Ibid. p. 74.
34. Louis Althusser, For Marx, Ibid. p. 86.
35. Louis Althusser, For Marx, Ibid. pp. 118-19.
36. Louis Althusser, For Marx, Ibid. p. 89.
37. Louis Althusser, For Marx, Ibid. p. 98.
38. Louis Althusser, For Marx, Ibid. p. 89.
39. Louis Althusser, For Marx, Ibid. p. 91.
40. Louis Althusser, For Marx, Ibid. p. 96.
41. Louis Althusser, For Marx, Ibid. p. 120.
42. Louis Althusser, For Marx, Ibid. p. 122.
43. Louis Althusser, For Marx, Ibid.
44. Louis Althusser, For Marx, Ibid. p. 86.
45. Louis Althusser, For Marx, Ibid. p. 12.
46. Michel Foucault (1984) 'The Order of Discourse', in Michael Shapiro (ed.) Language and Politics, pp. 108-38, p. 109. New York: NYU Press.
47. Michel Foucault, Language and Politics, Ibid. p. 113.
48. Michel Foucault, Language and Politics, Ibid. p. 112.
49. Michel Foucault, Language and Politics, Ibid. p. 114.
50. Foucault (n. 12), p. 54
51. Michel Foucault, Language and Politics, Ibid. pp. 54-5.
52. Michel Foucault, Language and Politics, Ibid. p. 55.
53. Michel Foucault, Language and Politics, Ibid.
54. Michel Foucault, Language and Politics, Ibid. pp. 36-49.
55. A similar point can be made regarding historical analysis, which can accept the contingency of events but nonetheless reveals its will to truth in the way it reduces events to their chronological sequence: History as practised today does not turn away from events. . . . But the important thing is that history does not consider an event without defining the series of which it is part, without specifying the mode of analysis from which that series derives, without seeking to find out the regularity of phenomena and the limits of probability of their emergence, without inquiring into the variations, bends and angles of the graph, without wanting to determine the conditions on which they depend. Of course, history has for a long time no longer sought to understand events by the action of causes and effects in the formless unity of a great becoming, vaguely homogeneous or ruthlessly hierarchized; but this change was not made in order to rediscover structures, alien and hostile to the event. It was made in order to establish diverse series, intertwined and often divergent but not autonomous, which enable us to circumscribe the 'place' of the event, the margins of its chance variability, and the conditions of its appearance. (Foucault (n. 37), p. 128)
56. Michel Foucault, Language and Politics, Ibid. p. 132.
57. On the Althusserian notion of interpellation see Louis Althusser (1984) 'Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)', in his Essays on Ideology, pp. 1-60. London: Verso. See also Butler (n. 6), pp. 121-4.
58. Michel Foucault (1979) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, tr. Alan Sheridan, p. 301. New York: Vintage Books.
59. See Michel Foucault (ed.) (1975) I Pierre Rivière, Having Slaughtered my Mother, my Sister, and my Brother: A Case of Parricide in the 19th Century, tr. Frank Jellinek. Lincoln, NE, and London: University of Nebraska Press;
60. and (1980) Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century French Hermaphrodite, introd. Michel Foucault, tr. Richard McDougall. New York: Pantheon Books.
61. Foucault (n. 12), p. 94.
62. Foucault (n. 49), p. 277.
63. See Michel Foucault (1991) Remarks on Marx: Conversations with Duccio Trombadori, tr. R. James Goldstein and James Cascaito, pp. 171-2. New York: Semiotext(e).
64. See Michel Foucault (1977) 'Intellectuals and Power', in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, pp. 205-17, p. 210. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
65. Foucault (n. 12), pp. 86, 89.
66. Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, Ibid. p. 89.
67. 'There is no discontinuity between them, as if one were dealing with two different levels (one microscopic and the other macroscopic); but neither is there homogeneity (as if the one were only the enlarged projection or miniaturization of the other)' (Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ibid. pp. 99-100).
68. Foucault (n. 49), p. 26.
69. Foucault (n. 12), p. 93.
70. Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, Ibid. pp. 99-100.
71. In the United States, one strategy for problematizing the authority of an authority figure is to ask defiantly, 'who do you think you are?' In societies that are more status oriented, the question might be, 'do you know who you are talking to?' - a question that is generally ineffective in the US and tends to get many celebrities arrested on the spot. These tactics are dictated by the rules of discursive games and so they are not outside or opposed to power but are rather the result of the discontinuities that power relations inevitably establish. They provide possibilities to disrupt, even if only briefly, microscopic hierarchies and even if such strategies are not revolutionary it would be hard to suggest that they are not, in some sense, political.
72. Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, Ibid. p. 94.
73. (1991) 'Revolutionary Action: "Until Now"', in Foucault (n. 54), pp. 218-33, p. 230.
74. See Foucault (n. 49), pp. 264-8.
75. Foucault (n. 12), p. 96.
76. 'Revolutionary Action: "Until Now"', Ibid. p. 95.
77. 'Revolutionary Action: "Until Now"', Ibid. p. 96. Elsewhere, Foucault acknowledges that both dispersed procedures of power and multiple forms of resistance can be integrated into 'global strategies', but he still warns: . . . one should not assume a massive and primal condition of domination, a binary structure with "dominators" on one side and "dominated" on the other, but rather a multiform production of relations of domination which are partially susceptible of integration into overall strategies.
78. Michel Foucault (1980) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, tr. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham and Kate Soper, ed. Colin Gordon, p. 142. Brighton: Harvester.
79. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, Ibid. pp. 111-12.
80. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, pp. 44-5.
81. This may be compared with the functioning of desiring machines in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1983) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, tr. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
82. Foucault (n. 12), p. 159.
83. See Michel Foucault (1988) 'The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom', in James Bernauer and David Rasmussen (eds) The Final Foucault, pp. 1-20, p. 15. Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press.
84. This excess is worked out in relation to Foucault's ethical works in Sue Golding (1995) 'The Politics of Foucault's Poetics, or, Better Yet: The Ethical Demand of Ecstatic Fetish', in Judith Squires (ed.) (June, 1995) Michel Foucault: J'Accuse (New Formations) 25 (June): 40-7.
85. Parallels can be drawn here to Lyotard's understanding of 'the jews' as an excess that cuts up the soul. See Jean-François Lyotard (1990) Heidegger and 'the Jews', tr. Andreas Michel and Mark S. Roberts, esp. p. 17. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
86. See Michel Foucault (1985) The History of Sexuality, vol. 2, The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley, Introduction. London: Penguin Books.
87. Michel Foucault (1984) 'On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of a Work in Progress', in Paul Rabinow (ed.) The Foucault Reader, pp. 340-72, pp. 344-51. London: Penguin Books.
88. Such a sacrifice of the self is the premise of the Christian practices of exomologesis and exogoreusis. See Michel Foucault (1999) 'About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self', in Jeremy R. Carrette (ed.) Religion and Culture by Michel Foucault, pp. 158-81. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
89. Foucault (n. 75), p. 68.
90. See Michel Foucault (1986) The History of Sexuality, vol. 3, The Care of the Self, tr. Robert Hurley, pp. 116-17. London: Penguin Books.
91. This conception of the self as a nexus of interpenetrating material, social and visceral relations has been developed prominently in political theory in the work of William Connolly, most recently in (2002) Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed, esp. ch. 4. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.
92. See Foucault (n. 75), pp. 185-225, and (n. 79), pp. 37-68, 189-232.
93. I owe this point to an excellent paper entitled 'How does one think with what is already thinking?' delivered by Matthew Hammond at the Exeter SHiPSS Graduate Conference, 28 May 2003.
94. Michel Foucault, 'Preface', in Deleuze and Guattari (n. 70), pp. xi-xiv.
95. See Foucault (n. 53), pp. 180-1.
96. On the other hand, for readings that work with the theme of micropolitics see Golding (n. 73), Connolly (n. 80) and Deleuze (n. 12), pp. 94-123.
97. See Michel Foucault (1984) 'Politics and Ethics: An Interview' in Rabinow (n. 76), pp. 373-80, p. 375.
98. Foucault M., Foucault (n. 83), pp. xiii-xiv.