11. The birth of the prison ushers in a new age where the economy and society require a new form of individual subordination. The systemic demands of this new dynamic social ensemble geared to order and productivity engendered a whole range of disciplinary mechanisms and professionals whose principal task it was to ensure the normality of the population. The imperatives of the new political economy required productive service from individuals in the interstices of their concrete lives. The regime has to gain access to the bodies of individuals and exercise control over attitudes and acts; to be most productive power had to be internalised. This degree of control was obtainable only when the teacher, the social worker and the factory manager complemented the network of penal institutions. These are all agents of an overarching, yet de-centred and anonymous system of normalizing power that was able to supervise and judge the individual from the cradle to the grave, shaping body, gestures, aptitudes and behaviour to become orthopaedists of individuality. Modern society is a complex, de-centred matrix of many mechanisms that somehow interlock without any designer or controller. The nascent human sciences prove indispensable at this junction by conjuring a whole arsenal of theories, therapies and techniques especially crafted to assist in the production of the required new shape of subjectivity. In conjunction with the subjecting disciplinary practices, these new sciences objectify this subject in a whole range of scientific discourses (cases, management files, reports, investigations, knowledges) that become indispensable organs of a new social power whose domination is infinitely productive, de-centred and inescapable. In this new regime, the position of the professional and the administrator may be enhanced but they do not control the workings of the whole. The judges of normality are nevertheless ubiquitous. They are like tentacles of a normalising power, all the more effective as a result of its radical dispersion.
12. While both the Frankfurt School and Foucault paint uncompromisingly
harrowing portraits of the extent and depth of modern domination, neither entirely relinquishes the possibility of resistance. I have already underscored the weaknesses of Horkheimer and Adorno's emancipatory outlook. Nevertheless, while they see no sociologically significant addressee for their revamped negative critical theory, their message itself implies the possibility of resistance. Secondly, at various points in their exposé of the history of instrumental rationality they indicate that there have been opportunities to reverse the march of domination. Domination is thus a contingent fact of history not its necessary and irreversible meaning. Finally, the theories of non-identity and mimesis hint at a residue of nature that remains non-compliant to the requirements of domination. Here is another minimal platform for resistance.
13. Foucault builds resistance into his account of modernity at a more fundamental theoretical level. While his description of the “carceral” creates the impression of a pervasive discipline infiltrating every pore and crevice, resistance remains a vital element of his novel theory of power. He says in Discipline and Punish “this does not mean that it (the prison system) cannot be altered, nor that it is once and for all indispensable in our kind of society” (D&P, p.305). His works presuppose and articulate the resistance in modernity of those marginalised groups like the mentally ill, the deviant and prisoners. He conceives “resistance” itself as dispersed in accord with the multiple struggles that characterises the post-68 political terrain. Yet, Foucault provides this empirical resistance with a theoretical supplementation. He renews the Nietzschean inspired assertion that all social life is constituted by struggle and that all discourses carry a hidden power and derive from the practices of power.
14. This renewed interest in power required a rethinking of its available understandings. Foucault wants to depict and analyse the forms and techniques of a modality of power that is uniquely modern. At first glance he pursues a line of argument not unlike Marx. Those who did the first part of this course will recall that Marx views the democratic and legal forms of bourgeois society as a veneer that both masked and facilitated the oppression of workers. So the core categories of civil society--law, rights, autonomy, personhood, plurality, publicity, and parliament--rather than articulating the limits of domination instead support it. The classic example here is the labour contract: ostensibly a reciprocal exchange of equivalents amongst autonomous agents, in reality it encodes and conceals the asymmetrical power relations that exist in the economic sphere resulting from unequal control of the means of production. Foucault universalises this critique to the social contract in general and argues that bourgeois rights and forms obscure a deeper level of asymmetrical relations, deeper control and oppression associated with the disciplines. But he wants to radicalise this critique by revisiting the mechanisms of oppression involved and linking them to the new power relations that now pervade social life. It was not the 19th century bourgeoisie that invented and imposed relations of domination. The relations of production signify a complex level of reality that is only relatively independent. The power relations inscribed in them were inherited from the disciplinary technology of earlier times and simply modified and intensifying for their own purposes. These power relations do not emanate from a single source like the new economy and its labour relations. Rather the extension of disciplinary technology and norms make it possible to organise labour in a way the facilitates capitalist efficiency and domination.
15. This brings Foucault to a more fundamental challenge what he calls the juridical model of power. The legal edifice of Western societies operates with a discourse of sovereign power. Even after the challenge to monarchical rule, legal right is that of sovereign power. Sovereignty is defined in juridical terms. Power is viewed as the legitimate right or possession of the sovereign when it is lawfully constituted. Legality also allows power to be put in question and see its prerogatives challenged when it is not the legitimate expression of that unified will. This juridical model articulates a specific conception of the way power is exercised. It effaces the domination intrinsic to power by legitimising it: sovereign power is the rightful expression of a lawful form of violence. Foucault argues that while the judicial model has not been completely superseded, it lacks the flexibility to capture the new modalities of power. It may have corresponded to the way power functioned under absolutist monarchies but it is now outdated. Foucault views it as merely repressive; it has only one force, the force of denial, it is the power of negation and limits. It is expensive, poor in resources, methods, monotonous in tactics, unproductive.
16. Foucault's thesis is that a new type of power began to emerge in the late 18th century that becomes global and perfected in the 19th and 20th centuries. As should be already clear, he refuses to equate this new type of power with the democratic struggles against absolutism and limited suffrage. Liberal political theory established the contractarian illusion that power issues from discreet primitive elements like subjects, that it can be made visible, localised and restricted to the political state whose authority issues and is delimited and regulated by the free social community. Here Foucault's radical scepticism regarding enlightenment and its values of rationality and progress is clearly evident. He suggests that the idea that democracy, reformist humanitarianism and human rights have restricted power, made it the servant and the instrument of a genuinely common will is an illusion produced by entrapment within the juridical model of power. This is because new forms of power cannot be comprehended in juridical concepts as relations between sovereigns and subjects or in terms of the opposition between state and society. They in fact predate these relations and oppositions and were absolutely crucial to their emergence. Before personhood was the disciplinary technology and normalising processes that shaped the modern subject as such a bearer of bourgeois right. For Foucault, the state is not sole or even primary source of these relations. They emerged beneath the visible struggles over sovereignty in the revolutions of the bourgeois period within the grid of disciplinary institutions (convent, army, the clinic, the school, hospital, the factory and the prison). Because these institutions emerged almost silently within the womb of the old society, their essential shape is not constrained by the new forms of state legitimacy and the sphere of bourgeois publicity. They remained largely outside the specific projects of liberalisation and democratisation. One of Foucault's major points is that the public, impersonal, rule-bound character of the administrative power of state bureaucracies and agencies does nothing to restrict or limit the reach or scope of disciplinary power. Remember this is counter-law. Rather, the lawyer and the bureaucrat legitimate the free scope to a whole other tier of power: that of the teacher, doctor, judge, social worker, psychiatrist and warden that renders the multiple processes of discipline and normalisation more effective and efficient. Simultaneously, they soften the very idea of punishment rendering it not only just but also humane and constructive.
17. The Foucauldian notion of power fundamentally demarcates itself from the juridical notion that power as something to be possessed either by individuals or groups. In its place power is conceives as a relation of forces:
Power must be analysed as something that circulates or rather as something which only functions in the form of a chain. It is never localised here or there, never in anybody's hands, never appropriated as a commodity or piece of wealth. Power is employed and exercised through a net-like organisation. And not only do individuals circulate between its threads; they are always in the position of simultaneously undergoing and exercising this power.
This dispersed conception of power makes it co-extensive with the social body. As Foucault puts it in an interview: “all relations are at least partially power relations”. Power is not localised in specific institutions but imbricated and fused with all other relations including production, the family, sexuality, knowledge and kinship. Power relations are both the internal conditions and the immediate effects of all variety of divisions, inequalities and disequilbria. They are localised, heterogeneous and dispersed, exercised through a multitude of strategies and techniques while still accessible to integration into more global strategies to serve economic and state goals. This is why Foucault recommends as a methodological starting point that our analysis of power should be ascending: rather than meeting power in its most global and also domesticated form, he suggests beginning with its infinitesimal mechanisms, which have their own history, trajectory and tactics and see how they have been invested, colonized, used, transformed and extended by increasingly general mechanisms and forms of overall domination. (SMBD, P30)
18. Foucault concludes that power is everywhere, not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere. This notion of de-centred and dispersed power in turn rests on a strategic model of hostile, asymmetrical relation of social forces. To completely capture the fluidity and relationality of power, Foucault sometimes has recourse to the image of the endless battle: changing alignments, dynamic resistances constantly recharged and eclipsed, where victory is only a momentary respite. He is a little cagey as to how far he is prepared to push the analogy between social life and battle. However, he clearly views the paradigm of war as a more appropriate metaphor to get beyond the sovereign model of power and its vision of society as a unified expression of subjects, unitary power and law. Foucault’s hunch is the Nietzschean conviction that behind these primitive elements of peaceful and stable civil society lies a constant subterranean struggle of fear, aggression, violence, servitude and oppression.
This does not mean the society, the law and the state are like armistices that put an end to wars, or that they are the products of definitive victories. Law is not pacification, for beneath the law, war continues to rage in all the mechanisms of power, even in the most regular. War is the motor behind institutions and order. In the smallest of its cogs, peace is waging a secret war. To put it another way, we have to interpret the war that is going on beneath the peace; peace itself is a coded war. We are therefore at war with one another; a battlefront runs through the whole of society, continuously and permanently, and it is this battlefront that puts us all on one side or the other. There is no such thing as a neutral subject. We are all inevitably someone’s adversary. (SMD pp50/51)
Foucault traces the genealogy of this war within the counter official historiography that emerged in the 17th century. According to these historians, society exists in the binary mode of a race war. Race here need not stand as a biological category but refers simply to differences between ethnic and language groups, to differences in degree of force, vigour, energy and violence. However, whether this opposition was articulated in terms of race, religion or class, the most important point is that this clash ran through society from top to bottom and forms the matrix of social warfare beneath every of appearance civil peace and political unity. Of course, Nietzsche is not Foucault’s only forerunner in viewing social struggle as a primal fact of social existence. We have already seen the figure of class struggle as the key to history in Marx and the role of contradictions as the key to historical dynamics in Hegel. Yet Foucault believed that the idea of dialectic does not actually validate war and struggle philosophically but codified them within a comprehensive logic . This means they are actually totalised into a rationality that was more basic and irreversible. War and social conflict is subsumed into a universal subject, a reconciled truth and a right in which all particularities have a pre-ordained place (SMD, p58). This is why Foucault prefers Nietzsche as his closest predecessor.
19. Foucault puts special emphasis on the productivity of modern power. In fact he introduce a distinction between disciplinary power and bio-power. The former is a normalising power focused on the subjugation of the individual body through the techniques of discipline. This includes devices to ensure their spatial distribution, their individuation and their visibility, like separation and surveillance as well as micro technologies like drill, inspection and exercises aimed at taking control of bodies and making them more productive forces. They also rationalise and economise power by internalising norms of control and appropriate conduct. Bio-power, on the other hand, is applied to living man or man as a species. This is more regulatory power in so far as it aims to control the general conditions of birth, death, production and illness that impinge on populations as a global mass. It concerns are town planning, public hygiene, sexuality, life expectancy in general, the security, health and productivity of the population. Its aim is to control the random event, to predict its probability and compensate for its effects and preserve the homeostasis of the whole. These two forms of modern power are not mutually exclusive and can be articulated with each other; they constitute two poles around which the productive organisation of power in modernity is deployed while each has its own specific level, techniques and aims. Bio-power is a latecomer because regulating the bio-sociological processes of the human masses implied more complex systems of co-ordination and centralisation and therefore of a more prominent role for a sophisticated bureaucratic state. However, together these two powers, at the level of both detail and of mass, cover the entire surface of modernity and take control of life.
20. In his self-criticism towards the end of his life, Foucault will suggest that the work of the Discipline and Punish period gave too great a priority to disciplinary power and had not sufficiently theorised how the subject constituted itself through certain practices and games of truth. His later solution to this shortcoming was to move to a more comprehensive model that he called “Governmentality” where he attempted to redress the balance. Government is here understood in the broadest possible sense as the totality of strategies and practices whereby individuals regulate their conduct in regard to themselves and others.
If we understand by governmentality a strategic field of power relations in their mobility, transformability and reversibility, then I don not think that reflection on this notion of governmentality can avoid passing through, theoretically and practically, the element of the subject defined by the relationship of self to self…Quite simply, this means that in the type of analysis I have been trying to advance for some time you can see that power relations, governmentality, the government of the self and of others, and the relationship of the self to self constitute a chain, a thread, and I think it is around these notions that we should be able to connect together the question of politics and the question of ethics. (H of S, p252)
This model prioritises the self relation as a care of the self, but incorporates the other relations like that of strategic relations to others, technics of government and includes a notion of domination defined as relations wherein power is asymmetrically fixed. Foucault gives priority to the self-relation because he maintains that an ethics of the self may be an urgent, fundamental and politically indispensable task and that “there is no first or final point of resistance to political power other than in the relationship one has to oneself”(H of S, p252)
21. Where power is dispersed, so is resistance. De-centred power finds its own inverse energy in a similarly dispersed resistance. The key to this conception of the relationality of power is that neither power nor resistance can be substance. The template of modern power relations, as we have seen, lies in the post 68 politics of social movements. This appeared to Foucault as an explosion of local, dispersed resistances to the totalising aspirations of the whole range of institutional authorities in the bureaucracy, universities, schools, hospitals and prisons. Foucault's ideas gave expression to this new configuration of resistances. But on a theoretical level, Foucault’s interpretation inflects these developments in the light of Nietzsche’s idea of the "will to power" as a ubiquitous, anonymous power in general. While Nietzsche chose to anchor the will to power in life itself, Foucault prefers to view it traversing the social body but metaphysically adrift. He therefore denied that he was offering an alternative theory of power. He stresses that his ideas on power arise from the inadequacy of existing models to explain the historical phenomena he confronted in his attempts to theorise madness, prisons, sexuality and truth. Yet, his understanding of resistance seems to inject these post-68 socio-political struggles with trans-historical significance. Inflected in this vision, social life becomes a force field of asymmetrical power relations, the binary battlefront referred to earlier, dominated by purely strategic considerations. The dispersion of anonymous power presupposes the generalised proliferation of resistance as the mere other of power. The result of all this is that resistance loses all historical and sociological specificity. It is simply posited by the theory as ubiquitous and amorphous. Where there is a power relation there is the possibility of resistance.
