Power.

It’s an ambiguous concept.

In physics we talk about power as the transfer of energy. Or the potential to transfer energy.

The sun has enough power to…

And social and political power is thought of in a similar way.

The power to… stop someone doing something – the power of the police to stop a speeding car.

But the way people and institutions wield power, or how power has an effect on people, is a difficult concept to understand.

French philosopher Michel Foucault, whose thought I’ve introduced in a previous video, had a particularly influential theory of how power operated.

It underpins almost all of Foucault’s work, but it’s also worth looking at in depth for another reason: the most frequent criticism of him is that his work is, cynically, all about power.

This is true – but the cynicism is misdirected.

Because although Foucault is interested in the power to… for example, stop someone doing something, he is more interested in power in a more neutral sense – how power can be productive as well as oppressive.

To understand this, it’s essential to understand how three Foucauldian concepts relate: the subject, power, and knowledge.

In Why Study Power? The Question of the Subject – Foucault writes, ‘My objective has been to create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects’.

What does he mean by subjects?

Foucault has a unique understanding of the subject – of how the human mind is constructed.

He says it has become objectivised – that is, that it’s a subject and an object at the same time.

Take the study of the speaking human. It’s only in the 19th century that we begin to study human speech as an object, as a science. We start to study grammar, then philology, linguistics, we start to categorise, measure, compare.

The human becomes an object, it becomes written down, quantified, put in boxes, interpreted. Humans as a species become things to be studied.

But, this objectification then becomes subjectification. This new information has power over us – encourages us to act in certain ways. It subjectifies us.

In a very obvious sense, for example, we teach children in schools by the standards dictated by the history of linguistics. Or economics based on a very limited and particular understanding of how humans have produced and consumed over the last few centuries.

This information becomes authoritative.

Many would argue that the way linguistics, for example, has developed and the reasons we teach children this or that grammar is purely rational – a product of becoming more intelligent as a species.

But Foucault says the word ‘rationalization’ is dangerous. He writes ‘what we have to do is analyze specific rationalities rather than always invoke the progress of rationalization in general’.

His point is that if there are innumerable different ways of doing something – as exemplified by the thousands of types of language and communication over the world – what justifies doing something one way over the other?

His answer is power. That social systems affect us to do certain things in certain ways.

Between 1970 and 1982, Foucault gave a series of lectures at the College de France. One of the more influential, given in 1978, was Security, Territory, and Population, which was published posthumously.

In it he takes biopower as the central concept. He writes, ‘this year I would like to begin studying something that I have called, somewhat vaguely, bio-power. By this I mean a number of phenomena that seem to me to be quite significant, namely, the set of mechanisms through which the basic biological features of the human species became the object of a political strategy, of a general strategy of Power’.

Our traditional understanding of power is a product of the Enlightenment.

Starting in the 17th century, social contract theorists like Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau all discussed the justifications for and limits of government – of why and when rulers have power over us.

Hobbes, for example, argued that the sovereign – the king or queen – had power because if no one ruled, anarchy would reign.

But the type of power these thinkers conceptualised was juridical power – it’s the power of the law over us. The banning of certain actions – speeding for example – and the threat of violence if the rule is not adhered to.

But as these enlightenment philosophers were writing a new type of power was emerging – the power not of ruling, but of governing too – of managing grain prices, of maximising profit of foreign trade through mercantilism, then, slowly, of poor relief, then education, healthcare, the disciplining of delinquency, the practices of psychiatry, of encouraging certain types of medical knowledge, of planning and executing epidemic control – in all of these cases, a certain type of power is exercised, using certain methods, by certain groups of people over others.

All of this was not the exercising of juridical power, not simply the power of the law, but of what Foucault calls biopower – the power to produce subjects.

He argues that this is a type of power that the state in the West has inherited from the church. It doesn’t simply command to do or do not, and punish according to that law, but also aims to know people’s minds – seeks to direct thought and desire itself.

Foucault recognises two distinct things happening in all of this.

On the one hand there is simply the relaying of information – the communication of ideas, of psychiatric care, of medicinal knowledge, of moral instruction, of just laws.

But there is also something else – the power relations that make the relaying of them, the instructing, the authority, effective.

Foucault writes, ‘The activity which ensures apprenticeship and the acquisition of aptitudes or types of behavior is developed there by means of a whole ensemble of regulated communications (lessons, questions and answers, orders, exhortations, coded signs of obedience, differentiation marks of the “value” of each person and of the levels of knowledge) and by the means of a whole series of power processes (enclosure, surveillance, reward and punishment, the pyramidal hierarchy)’.

How can we separate the two?

He argues that biopower doesn’t necessarily have an effect on people physically. But it does have an effect on possible future actions, possibilities, and choices.

He says power is ‘an action upon an action’ – it constrains and encourages.

The teacher, for example, has the power to mark a test, assign grades which employers use to judge potential candidates.

The teacher doesn’t hold a gun over the students heads. But the student knows the power they do have has an effect on their future.

He writes, ‘faced with a relationship of power, a whole field of responses, reactions, results, and possible inventions may open up’.

‘It is a total structure of actions brought to bear upon possible actions; it incites, it induces, it seduces, it makes easier or more difficult; in the extreme it constrains or forbids absolutely; it is nevertheless always a way of acting upon an acting subject or acting subjects by virtue of their acting or being capable of action’.

And finally, ‘To govern, in this sense, is to structure the possible field of action of others’.

Juridical power, the power of law, is subtracting – it removes the option to do something – to speed for example.

In a way, this is repressive.

But, again, the biopower Foucault describes is productive.

Sometimes institutions like the government, police or the military exert their power by physical, repressive shows of force – crowd control, tear gas, executions, military occupations.

But they also exert biopower by way of discipline and training.

Again, we think of an ‘action on an action’.

Handling weapons, driving, flying, schedules, tests, grading, assault courses, police conduct – these are the moments biopower is exerted through the possibility of rewarding or punitive measures – the encouraging of certain actions.

These actions then have an effect on others – citizens, for example, and their possible actions, where they go and how they act.

Take criminology and its use by governments: There must be checks, supervision, investigation, correction. But also preventative measures – what is the crime rate in a certain area, how can one predict crime and prevent it, how expensive are certain measures and are they worth it? To what extent should surveillance of any kind be used? How can we understand the criminal? Is it worth trying to correct? What level of comfort and freedom should be allowed? Are they dangerous? What is optimal? What’s the norm, the base rate, that we compare all of this to?

Foucault writes, ‘discipline classifies the components thus identified according to definite objectives. What are the best actions for achieving a particular result: What is the best movement for loading one’s rifle, what is the best position to take? What workers are best suited for a particular task? What children are capable of obtaining a particular result?’

Ultimately, he writes, it reduces to economics. He writes, ‘the fundamental question is economics and the economic relation between the cost of repression and the cost of delinquency’.

All of these modern phenomena of objectifying humans has the effect of creating standards by which individuals should be measured – a norm, or a normalising judgement.

How good is child X at maths compared to the norm? How much crime is in area Y compared to the norm? How efficient is soldier Z compared to the norm?

Which leads Foucault to another point.

A norm, a standard, is only possible in reference to a group.

And modern governmentality is only possible in reference to a population.

All of these practices emerge at the same time as our modern understanding of what a population is.

In Security, Territory, Population, Foucault shows that definitions of population used to define the term as repopulating a territory.

It had a slightly different understanding to today.

In the 17th century it begins to take on its modern usage.

Population becomes important analytically – to study, to understand, to quantify – because the population of a country provides manpower, economic development, agricultural output, it becomes the source of the states wealth – birth, death, sickness, productivity rates become important.

Population, then, as an aggregate creates a mean – an average citizen – and a normative curve against which exams, tests, requirements can be assessed – how can the correct sort of population be encouraged?

It is only then with the modern concept of population that we get the modern form of governmentality.

In Security, Territory, Population, Foucault writes, ‘Baldly, at first sight and somewhat schematically, we could say that sovereignty is exercised within the borders of a territory, discipline is exercised on the bodies of individuals, and security is exercised over a whole population’.

Many have criticised Foucault’s understanding of power and its usefulness.

Charles Taylor concludes that if power, knowledge, and the subject are a result of a particular political or social regime, then ‘There can be no such thing as a truth independent of its regime, unless it be that of another. So that liberation in the name of “truth” could only be the substitution of another system of power for this one’.

Nancy Fraser writes, ‘because Foucault has no basis for distinguishing, for example, forms of power that involve domination and those that do not, he appears to endorse a one-sided, wholesale rejection of modernity as such… Clearly, what Foucault needs, and needs desperately, are normative criteria for distinguishing acceptable from unacceptable forms of power’.

But for Foucault this is exactly the point. There are no ‘universal normative criteria for distinguishing acceptable from unacceptable forms of power’.

What works for one group may not for others. Because the social and political use of power is the product of human goals and desires that continually shift and change, and critique of power must be specific to those groups and that time.

Foucault writes, ‘one is dealing with mobile and transitory points of resistance, producing cleavages in a society that shift about, fracturing unities and effecting regroupings, furrowing across individuals themselves… Just as the network of power relations ends by forming a dense web that passes through apparatuses and institutions, without being exactly localized in them, so too the swarm of points of resistance traverses social stratifications and individual unities’.

In many ways, Foucault is simply trying to describe social and political power as scientists have done for power in physics. But it’s a difficult task, and one that we’re only just beginning to understand.

Sources

Michel Foucault, The Subject and Power

Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population

Paul Patton, Foucault’s Subject of Power

Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews (Truth and Power)

Joseph Rouse, Power/Knowledge (in The Cambridge Companion to Foucault)