Michel Foucault is
one of the most important figures in critical theory. His theories deal with the
concepts of power, knowledge and discourse, and he has had a profound influence
in post-structuralist, post-modernist, feminist, post-Marxist and post-colonial
thought.
The following is
an excerpt from Sara Mills’ popular book on Michel Foucault. She is Research
Professor at Sheffield Hallam University. She has published on feminism,
post-colonial theory and linguistics and is the author of Discourse, a highly
successful volume in Routledge’s New Critical Idiom series.
And yes, as
usual, this is just a ‘teaser’ or an ‘appetizer’ for you that would ‘tempt you’
into reading the wonderful book by Sara Mills. Happy Reading :-)
So here goes…
Power and Institutions
Foucault’s work
is largely concerned with the relation between social structures and
institutions and the individual.
Throughout his
career, in works such as The History of
Sexuality (1978), Power/Knowledge (1980),
The Birth of the Clinic (1973) and Discipline and Punish (1977), he focused
on the analysis of the effects of various institutions on groups of people and
the role that those people play in affirming or resisting those effects.
Central to this concern with institutions is his analysis of power. His work is
very critical of the notion that power is something which a group of people or
an institution possess and that power is only concerned with oppressing and
constraining. What his work tries to do is move thinking about power beyond
this view of power as repression of the powerless by the powerful to an
examination of the way that power operates within everyday relations between
people and institutions. Rather than simply viewing power in a negative way, as
constraining and repressing, he argues, particularly in The History of Sexuality, Vol. I (1978), that even at their most
constraining, oppressive measures are in fact productive, giving rise to new
forms of behaviour rather than simply closing down or censoring certain forms
of behaviour.
Foucault, unlike
many earlier Marxist theorists, is less concerned with focusing on oppression,
but rather in foregrounding resistance to power. Much of this work has provoked
a critical debate among critical theorists and political theorists, as the exact
mechanics of resistance to power relations is not necessarily clearly mapped
out in Foucault’s accounts, but his work has, nevertheless, occasioned a very
favourable response from a number of feminists and other critical theorists who
have found in his work a way of thinking about the forms of power relations
between men and women which do not fit neatly into the types of relations
conventionally described within theorisations of power which tend to focus on
the role of the State, ideology or patriarchy (Thornborrow 2002).
Power Relations
Power is often
conceptualised as the capacity of powerful agents to realise their will over
the will of powerless people, and the ability to force them to do things which
they do not wish to do. Power is also often seen as a possession – something
which is held onto by those in power and which those who are powerless try to
wrest from their control. Foucault criticises this view, arguing in The History of Sexuality, Vol. I (1978)
that power is something which is performed, something more like a strategy than
a possession.
Foucault puts it
in the following way in Power/Knowledge:
‘Power must be analysed as something which circulates, or as something which
only functions in the form of a chain . . . Power is employed and exercised
through a netlike organisation . . . Individuals are the vehicles of power, not
its points of application’ (Foucault 1980: 98). There are several important
points to note here: first that power is conceptualised as a chain or as a net,
that is a system of relations spread throughout the society, rather than simply
as a set of relations between the oppressed and the oppressor. And, second,
individuals should not be seen simply as the recipients of power, but as the
‘place’ where power is enacted and the place where it is resisted. Thus, his
theorising of power forces us to reconceptualise not only power itself but also
the role that individuals play in power relations – whether they are simply
subjected to oppression or whether they actively play a role in the form of
their relations with others and with institutions.
Indeed, he argues
that power is a set of relations which are dispersed throughout society rather
than being located within particular institutions such as the State or the
government; in an interview entitled ‘Critical theory/intellectual theory’ he
states: ‘I am not referring to Power with a capital P, dominating and imposing
its rationality upon the totality of the social body. In fact, there are power
relations. They are multiple; they have different forms, they can be in play in
family relations, or within an institution, or an administration’ (Foucault
1988c: 38). Because he is portraying power here as a major force in all
relations within society, he seems to have been influenced by the work of Louis
Althusser, his teacher at the École Normale, who focuses his analysis of power
more on what he terms Ideological State Apparatuses (that is, the family, the
Church, the educational system) rather than the Repressive State Apparatuses, (that
is, the legal system, the army and the police) (Althusser 1984).
Foucault’s view
of power is directly counter to the conventional Marxist or early feminist
model of power which sees power simply as a form of oppression or repression,
what Foucault terms the ‘repressive hypothesis’. Instead, he sees power as also
at the same time productive, something which brings about forms of behaviour
and events rather than simply curtailing freedom and constraining individuals.
Power and Resistance
In Volume I of The History of Sexuality, Foucault
states that ‘where there is power there is resistance.’ This is an important
and problematic statement for many reasons. It is productive in that it allows
us to consider the relationship between those in struggles over power as not
simply reducible to a master–slave relation, or an oppressor–victim
relationship. In order for there to be a relation where power is exercised,
there has to be someone who resists. Foucault goes so far as to argue that
where there is no resistance it is not, in effect, a power relation.
Well, this is the
book for you -
Mills, Sara. Michel Foucault. New York: Routledge
Critical Thinkers. 2003. Print.
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