Michel
Foucault
on
Political Philosophy and Power
Methodology
How to conceptualize power?
Rejection of theory in favor of
analysis
Theory:
• starts with a prior objectification of [power as something substantial], •develops a theory for this object,
•proceeds to a conceptualization of its exercise on the basis of this theory.
Analysis
• starts with a concrete analysis of the exercise of power relations within social and political practices,
• proceeds to a conceptualization of “power” on the basis of this analysis
The ontology behind the methodology
Nominalism: Reduction of substances into relations.
•Reduction of “power” into power relations. •Asking how power relations are exercised
“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.”
If we speak of the structures or the mechanisms of power, it is only insofar as we suppose that certain persons exercise power over others.
The term “power” designates
relationships between partners (and by that … I am thinking of an ensemble of actions which induce others and follow one another.”
Nominalism implies that power is not
• an institution, • a structure;
• a certain strength we are endowed with;
Power is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a
The strategic understanding of power: Power must be understood
•as the multiplicity of force relations, and •the strategies in which they take effect.
The institutional crystallization of these strategies is embodied in the state
apparatus, in the formulation of the law, in
Historical approach
Analysis of the models according to which power relations are organized:
•The juridico-discursive model of power •Bio-power
•The disciplinary model of power
The juridico-discursive model of
power
A theoretical approach according to which power is taken to be a right
•which can be possessed like a commodity,
•which can be transferred or alienated, either wholly or partially, through an act that establishes a right, such as takes place through cession or
The partial or total cession of power, which every individual holds, enables political power or
sovereignty to be established.
The constitution of political power obeys the model of a legal transaction involving a contractual type of exchange.
[Hobbes, Leviathan; Locke, The Second Treatise of
This model of power is a historical outcome of the institutions that developed in the Middle Ages, such as monarchy and the state, in order to put an end to the struggles between feudal power agencies [Hobbes].
Theory of power essentially developed in terms of the problems of
•right and violence •law and illegality
•freedom and prohibition
Hence power as
•essentially negative and repressive, •identified with a law that says no,
•given the force of a prohibition.
Power is exercised mainly as a means of deduction, a subtraction mechanism, a right to appropriate a portion of the wealth, a tax of products, goods and services, labor and blood, levied on the subjects.
Power is essentially a right of seizure of things, time, bodies, and ultimately life itself; it culminated in the privilege to seize hold of life in order to suppress it:
Bio-power
“What occurred in the eighteenth century in some Western countries, an event bound up with the development of capitalism…was nothing less than the entry of life into history, that is, the entry of the phenomena peculiar to the life of the human species into the order of knowledge and power, into the sphere of political techniques…”
For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence…
Modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question
•Power no longer deals simply with legal
subjects over whom the ultimate dominion
was death, but with living beings;
•The mastery it exercises over them is applied at the level of life itself;
•It is the taking charge of life, more than the
threat of death, that gives power its access
Industrial capitalism: Need for labor-power
Labor-power: Human body Human body: Biological life
Mechanisms of bio-power are
• positive, productive, • seek to ‘foster life’
Mechanisms of the juridical forms of power are
• negative, restrictive,
• exercised by and through the sovereign’s right to ‘take life’
The growing importance assumed by the action of norm, at the expense of the juridical system of the law.
The law operates more and more as a norm, and the judicial institution is increasingly incorporated into a continuum of apparatuses (medical, administrative and so on) whose functions are for the most part regulatory.
A normalizing society is the historical outcome of a technology of power
The disciplinary model of power
[Discipline and Punish, The Will to Knowledge]
The anatomo-politics of the human body:
• aims to discipline the body, • optimize its capabilities,
• increase its usefulness and docility,
• integrate it into systems of efficient and economic controls
The governmental model of power
(Pastoral power)
[ The Will to Knowledge; Security, Territory,
Population, The Birth of Biopolitics]
Bio-politics of the population: • focuses on the species body
Governmental power works at two levels (individualizing and totalizing):
• Macro level (totalizing): administrative apparatuses
The relationship proper to power would not be sought on the side of violence or of struggle, nor on that of voluntary linking (all of which can, at best, only be the instruments of power), but rather in the area of the singular mode of action, neither warlike nor juridical, which is government
To govern is to structure the possible field of action of others.
Power applies itself to immediate everyday life, which
•categorizes the individual,
•marks him by his/her own individuality, •attaches him to his/her own identity,
•imposes a law of truth on him/her which s/he must recognize and which others
This is a form of power which makes individuals subjects.
Two meanings of the word subject:
• subject to someone else by control and dependence,
• tied to his/her own identity by a consciousness or self-knowledge.
Both meanings suggest a form of power which
Corresponding to the three models of power Foucault of specifies three types of state within European history
1. The state of justice:
• born in a feudal type of territoriality
• broadly corresponding to a society of customary d written law, with a whole interplay of commitments and litigations (from the Middle Ages to the 18th century);
In the state of justice, the law prohibits
2. The administrative state:
•corresponds to a society of regulations and disciplines (from the 15th and 16th centuries to the 18th century);
Discipline prescribes what to do (restriction of freedoms)
3. The state of government:
•essentially defined by a mass: the mass of the population, with its volume, its density, and the territory it covers,
•calls upon and employs economic knowledge as an
instrument,
•corresponds to a society controlled by apparatuses
of security (from the 18th century to the present).
The essential function of security,
without prohibiting or prescribing, but
possibly making use of some
instruments of prescription and
prohibition, is to respond to a reality in such a way that this response regulates it.
This regulation within the element of reality is fundamental in apparatuses of
