African Sun Media
SUN PReSS
Chapter Title: Mainly on The First Volume of Foucault’s History of sexuality; Le volonté
de savoir (The will to knowledge)
Book Title: Following Foucault
Book Subtitle: The Trail of the Fox
Book Author(s): Evelin Lindner, Howard Richards and Catherine Odora Hoppers
Book Editor(s): Howard Richards
Published by: African Sun Media, SUN PReSS. (2018)
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv1nzg0kf.20
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms
This book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercialNoDerivatives
4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). To view a copy of this license,
visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
African Sun Media, SUN PReSS are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and
extend access to Following Foucault
This content downloaded from 86.49.251.249 on Mon, 21 Oct 2024 09:51:48 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
219
LECTURE FOURTEEN
Mainly on The First Volume of Foucault’s History of
sexuality; Le volonté de savoir (The will to knowledge)
Unlike those who saw social democracy as a compromise between capitalism and
communism, and who then saw its decline as a consequence of the fall of communism,
because once the threat of communism ended, capitalism no longer needed to
compromise, I hold that social democracy declined because it was incompatible
with the basic rules of the game of capitalism. In other words it is the basic cultural
structures of the modern world (Richards and Swanger, 2006). Unlike those who
believe that history has demonstrated the superiority of capitalist democracy (for
example, Fukuyama, 1992), I hold that history has demonstrated the desirability of
social democracy (see, for example, Wilkinson, 2005), although not – at least not yet
– its feasibility.
Unlike those who see the task of increasing labour’s share of the social product as
primarily one of forging a powerful alliance of the majorities against the privileged
minorities (for example, Laclau and Mouffe, 2001), I see the task as primarily one
of transforming the basic structures of the modern world, and, therefore, the rules
that govern capital accumulation (for example, Richards, 1995; 2007). I do not see
the interests of the privileged minorities as opposed to eliminating poverty or to
achieving ecological sustainability, nor do I see their interests as incompatible with
strengthening ethical norms in a world-system now driven not so much by the egoism
of a privileged few, as by the implacable logic of accumulation.
To some degree, unlike those who take a pessimistic view of the economic future of
the majority of humanity, as labour inevitably loses what little bargaining power it
still retains, while capital roams the globe in search of jurisdictions that offer lower
costs and higher profits (for example, Winters, 1996), I am moderately optimistic
about the prospects for local development and a pluralistic economics of solidarity
(Coraggio, 2004; 2004a). But we will not get far in constructing an economy that
includes the excluded without understanding the rules that award Ricardian rents,
far in excess of the opportunity cost of capital to a privileged few, while excluding
those who find no buyers for what they have to sell, from the economy. Here it is
to be noted that the basic constitutive rules of the system make inevitable a chronic
weakness of effective demand at the same time that they make inevitable Ricardian
windfalls (Keynes, 1936, updated in Krugman, 2008, interpreted in Hoppers and
Richards 2012 and in Richards and Swanger, 2006). They also make it inevitable that
This content downloaded from 86.49.251.249 on Mon, 21 Oct 2024 09:51:48 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Following Foucault - The Trail of the Fox220
the only alternative to a regime of accumulation (say the Fordist/Keynesian regime
right after World War II; see Harvey, 1989) is some other regime of accumulation
(such as a neoliberal one, perhaps now to be supereded by that of a developmental
state). To break free of the systemic imperatives that run our lives, to end what Marx
called the pre-history of humanity and begin history properly so called, when the
open society that Karl Popper, advocated and the experimental society John Dewey
advocated, will be possible because it will be possible to make rational decisions and
carry them out, we must study constitutive rules. We must change them.
To transform the basic cultural structures of the modern world, to escape from the
systemic imperatives of capitalism that have now assumed the form of globalisation, I
recommend less power-talk, more rule-talk, more caring human relationships (which,
I believe, we can systematically nurture today better than in former times because of
advances in psychology and applied ethics).
At first glance, it might appear that Michel Foucault lived on some other planet
where people worried about different issues, asked different questions, and therefore
necessarily got different answers. At second glance, it appears that if we are speaking
of the classic Foucault, if we are speaking of the best-known Foucault, if we are
speaking of the author of Surveiller et Punir (Foucault, 1975) (Discipline and Punish),
of the author of the first volume of a never-completed six volumes on the history of
sexuality, La Volonté du Savoir (Foucault, 1976) (The Will to Knowledge), of Foucault’s
lectures at the Collège de France, in the academic year 1975–1976, that were
transcribed and later published as Il Faut Défendre la Societé (Foucault,1997) (Society
Must be Defended), of the Foucault who wrote a history of the birth of the prison,
who saw the society we live in as a carceral society, as one large jail penetrated
everywhere by disciplinary power and by its corollary normalisation; then, in at least
in one respect, we are not talking about a Foucault who lived on some other planet,
but rather of one who lived on the same planet at the same time, but chose to talk
about it differently. In the later of the two books published in Foucault’s lifetime,
La Volonté du Savoir (1976), Foucault writes the word “power” (pouvoir) 359 times in
211 pages, not even counting numerous sentences, in which dispositif du pouvoir, or
mécanisme du pouvoir, or technique du pouvoir, appareil du pouvoir, or strategie du
pouvoir, is expressed in shorthand as dispositif, mécanisme, technique, appareil, or
strategie – invoking pouvoir as a shadow word that the reader reads even though the
writer has not written it. Each of Foucault’s three 1975–1976 books systematically
attacks juridical thinking that associates power with law and with rules. On second
glance, it would seem likely that, if Foucault were alive today, he would regard my
recommendation to do less power-talk and more rule-talk not as an irrelevant answer
to questions that do not interest him, but rather as relevant but wrong.
This content downloaded from 86.49.251.249 on Mon, 21 Oct 2024 09:51:48 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Lecture Fourteen 221
I will now consider more passages where Foucault goes into greater depth on the
meaning of the power perspective he used to construct his concept of normalisation
in Discipline and Punish. Foucault provides, in a section of La Volonté du Savoir, a
detailed explanation of exactly what he does and does not mean when he writes the
word “power” (Foucault, 1976: 121–135). I will soon quote from it a passage that can
be called a “definition” of “power”. But before examining Foucault’s formal definition
of the word I will first look at how he uses it in the first half of La Volonté de Savoir.
“Power” occurs 188 times in the 120 pages that precede its definition.
Power makes its first appearance on page 12. It surely would have appeared earlier,
if so many of the initial pages of the book had not been left blank. On page 12, the
reader is told that, since the classical age (the 17th
and 18th
centuries), power in the
form of repression has been thought to be the fundamental link connecting power
with pleasure and with knowledge (Foucault, 1976: 11–12).
This word “power”, which will prove to be so key, is not introduced at first with any
particular fanfare, and legitimately so. It is not surprising to find the word “power”
in any text, whether woven by Foucault or woven by someone else. “Power” like
any other word carries conventional baggage presumed to be familiar to writer and
reader. I would nevertheless add that, in this particular case, that of “power”, quite
apart from the creative use Foucault will make of this particular well-known noun,
the conventional baggage it carries is itself unusual.
“Power”, along with its near-synonym “force” (and its mathematisation as impact
of a functionally dependent variable), is a word among words. It is modernity’s
characteristic root metaphor (Richards, 1995; Husserl, 1937). It was the pivot of the
paradigm shift from medieval scholasticism to early modern European philosophy.
It was (I claim) the pivot of what Richard Rorty describes as the project of the early
modern thinkers to create a secular public discourse, independent of theology (see
Rorty, 1980). What will be surprising is Foucault’s hyper-modernity; the sheer
magnitude of the cargo of coal he brings to Newcastle; his proposed philosophical
super-saturation of a culture that was already saturated with power-talk even before
Michel Foucault put pen to paper (see, for example, Heidegger, 1938).
In attributing to “power” a central meaning in modern worldviews, I mean to include
(that is, to count as more modern and less traditional) along with “power” terms with
similar meanings, notably “force” and the Latin “vis” (vis being the protagonist of the
tale told by Isaac Newton in his Principia Mathematica); and I mean to exclude cases
where a word like “power” is employed but its meaning is more mythical, magical,
or personal (for example, St. Paul’s allusions to “the powers”, see Freudenthal, 1982).
This content downloaded from 86.49.251.249 on Mon, 21 Oct 2024 09:51:48 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Following Foucault - The Trail of the Fox222
On page 12, the reader sort of learns, but does not really learn, that repression is
what connects power with pleasure and knowledge. Foucault is writing in oratio
obliqua. He is outlining not his own views, but the Marxist repressive hypothesis of
Herbert Marcuse and Wilhelm Reich, which makes the Victorian repression of natural
sexuality the companion and the consequence of the repression of the proletariat by
the bourgeoisie. Although he refers to their ideas here, he does not mention Marcuse
or Reich by name, but he does name them in the contemporaneous, but posthumously
published Collège de France lectures (Foucault, 1997). One can describe the general
aim of La Volonté du Savoir by saying that it is to refute the repressive hypothesis,
not in the sense of proving it to be false, but in the sense of showing it to be part
and parcel of a defective worldview (“worldview” is a term I chose, not one Foucault
would have chosen). The defective worldview, to be aufgehoben, is, as Dreyfus and
Rabinow put it, one that simply takes it for granted that there are subjects, desires,
and interdictions, and that these explain history and society (Dreyfus and Rabinow,
1986: 114). I think the Hegelian term aufgehoben is appropriate here, since rather
than denying that there are subjects, desires, and interdictions, Foucault is proposing,
what I am calling an allegedly better and more comprehensive worldview, in which
subjects, desires, and interdictions are talked about and seen in the light of storiesabout-power,
“genealogies”, tracing their origins.
The saturation of his text with power-talk makes it evident from the get-go that
power-talk will be Foucault’s proposed better worldview’s constituting discourse. It
is sometimes difficult to tell whether a given instance of power-talk in the book is
Foucault speaking in his own voice, or whether the speaker is the seductive voice of
the misleading and inadequate repressive hypothesis, or whether – a third possibility
that Foucault discusses at length – the speaker expresses a juridical rules-talk
representation of power.
Power appears a second time on the same page in the course of describing what the
advocates of the repressive hypothesis want. They want transgression of the laws,
the lifting of prohibitions, the restoration of pleasure in reality. In sum, they want
“a whole new economy in the mechanisms of power” (Foucault, 1976: 12). Power,
therefore, has mechanisms. Or mechanisms have power. There are some mechanisms
that are “of power”. Since we know from the Collège lectures that Foucault construes
power as a relation and not as a substance, we must be careful, while noting that
power and mechanism are somehow connected and associated, not to interpret
power as a substance, one of whose qualities or accidents is mechanism.
On the next page, it appears that one thing the repressive hypothesis does is to
formulate, in terms of repression, the relationships of sex and power (Foucault,
1976:  13). Therefore, whatever else power may be, it is something that has relationships
This content downloaded from 86.49.251.249 on Mon, 21 Oct 2024 09:51:48 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Lecture Fourteen 223
with sex. More remarkably (Foucault is still speaking in oratio obliqua), the speakers
who dare to talk about repression, who dare to talk about the forbidden subject, by
the very fact of violating prohibitions (prohibitions about what it is allowed to talk
about) as well as by the fact of advocating violating prohibitions, enjoy the pleasure
of placing themselves to a certain extent “outside power” (Foucault, 1976: 13). They
are speaking “against the powers” (Foucault, 1976: 14). The charms of the repressive
hypothesis are such that anybody who denies it – anybody who says the relationship
of power to sex is not repression – has to compete on unfavourable terms with
the discursive interest of its proponents in enjoying the pleasures of transgression
(Foucault, 1976: 15–16).
Foucault’s question, then, is not why people are repressed, but rather why they so
passionately say they are repressed. Why do they speak of abuse of power as a sort of
sin against sex (Foucault, 1976: 17)? Why do they identify power with repression, and
especially with the repression of useless energies, intense pleasures, and irregular
behaviours?OnthenextpageFoucaultintroducesthephrase,“theintrinsicmechanisms
of power” (Foucault, 1976: 18). I am unable to discern whether this phrase here is in
oratio obliqua or in his own voice. In any case, he soon ratifies “mechanics of power”,
as spoken in his own voice, in the course of doubting whether power’s “mechanics”
are really repression. Is prohibition and repression really the form in which power
is generally exercised? Foucault’s answer to his own question will be negative. In
the course of asking it, he alludes to his view that “power” is something that is
“exercised”. Power is exercised rather than possessed (Foucault, 1975: 35). It is not the
privilege of a dominant class, but rather the effect of a “set of strategic positions”. He
will continue to speak of power as exercised (for example, Foucault, 1976: 21, 45, 57)
without specifying any person, any institution, any social class, or any group that
is doing the exercising. The “intrinsic mechanisms of power” exercise themselves.
Foucault frequently uses the French reflexive form of the verb: power “s’exerce” (for
example, Foucault, 1976: 18, 21, 45, 57).
Above, I described Foucault’s general aim in the book as showing that the repressive
hypothesis was part of a defective worldview and proposing a better worldview.
Now I can rephrase my interpretation of Foucault’s general aim in Foucault’s own
words: the general aim is “to determine, in its functioning and in its rationale, the
regime of power-knowledge-pleasure that sustains discourse about human sexuality
in our culture” (Foucault, 1976: 19). Foucault will not talk about a social class or
any group of people wielding power, but rather about power itself, “penetrating and
controlling daily pleasure” (Foucault, 1976: 20). The polymorphous techniques of
power determine the production of discourse and its (power’s) effects of power lead
to formulating what is taken to be the truth about sex. He will defend his way of
talking as superior to the Freudo-Marxism of the repressive hypothesis and also, as
This content downloaded from 86.49.251.249 on Mon, 21 Oct 2024 09:51:48 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Following Foucault - The Trail of the Fox224
superior to a related way of talking about power and law that he will call juridicaldiscursive.
This is what I had in mind in the last lecture when I said, that in 1976,
Foucault withdrew the “maybe” of 1975 that conceded that perhaps something, indeed
a lot, could be said in favour of making the abstract juridical forms of exchange a
main model for understanding modern society (see Foucault, 1976: 109). Foucault says
later, in a section called “Enjeu” (“what is at stake”), that the mistakes he is correcting
are not just about sex; they are also about political analyses of power, and are, in
general, deeply rooted in the history of the West.
The repressive hypothesis will not be refuted in the sense of being shown to be
false. It will be shown to be a limited description of certain local tactics of power.
Foucault will place it in a larger context, in which power and discourse are produced
(Foucault, 1976: 21).
On the same page, page 21, Foucault introduces the key idea we have seen already in
Discipline and Punish of mise en discours, putting in discourse, and then in apposition
to mise en discours, he writes technique du pouvoir, technique of power. Putting in
discourse is a technique of power. “Technique of power” is virtually interchangeable
with mechanism of power, dispositif of power, strategies of power, tactics of power,
apparatus of power. When he needs to choose a general term to cover all these ways
of saying more or less the same thing, Foucault tends to choose “mechanisms of
power” (for example, Foucault, 1976: 45). The most notable “mechanism” is mise en
discours. In the last lecture we had a foretaste of mise en discours in the examinations
that created files where individuals were documented.
These rather abstract appearances of power, in the first pages of La Volonté de Savoir,
become concrete when Foucault discusses, once again, the practice of confession in
the Middle Ages and later (Foucault, 1976: 26–30, 78–94). Everything about sex had
to be mise en discours. The father confessor had to know about the positions of the
partners, their attitudes, who touched whom and how, the exact moment of pleasure,
thoughts, desires, imaginary pleasures; all the movements of the soul, of the will, of
the understanding; all the words, all the actions, all the dreams. Traditional penitence
imposed the infinite task of saying over and over again, as often as possible, both to
oneself and to another, everything about pleasure. Desire had to become discourse
(Foucault, 1976: 30).
The Marquis de Sade, and the anonymous 19th
century English libertine who devoted
eleven volumes titled My Secret Life to describing his sexual pleasures, were “governed
by the same prescription” (Foucault, 1976: 31). Tell all. Scandalous writings, too, were
part of the “grand process of mise en discours of sex” (Foucault, 1976: 32).
This content downloaded from 86.49.251.249 on Mon, 21 Oct 2024 09:51:48 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Lecture Fourteen 225
But the techniques of power that penetrated and, at the same time, incited pleasure
by verbalising it, might have remained matters of Christian spirituality and private
sexual practice if the extension of mechanisms of power had not become a matter of
public interest (Foucault, 1976: 33). Here, Foucault names a specific “mechanism of
power”. It is “population” (Foucault, 1976: 35).
It is the word “population”; the very idea of population; it is population-talk that is
a mechanism of power. “Population” constitutes an economic and political problem.
It is manpower. It is a matter of attaining equilibrium between population’s growth
and the available resources. It is population-richesse (Foucault, 1976: 35–36). It is not
society; it is not a set of individual bodies. “It is the notion of ‘population’”, a notion
that provides a rationale for an extension of power that Foucault calls “bio-power”
(Foucault, 1997: 218). Talking about population is a strategy of power that leads to
making the sexual conduct of the population both an object of analysis and a target
of intervention (Foucault, 1976: 37). That sexual conduct should be controlled is
independent of whether the policy is pro-natalist or anti-natalist. In either case there
are numbers to be calculated and optimised. There is an intensification of pouvoirs
and a multiplication of discourses in which the population becomes more known, and
at the same time, more disciplined.
From the 18th
century onward, even the sex life of children and adolescents becomes
an enjeu, penetrated by innumerable institutional dispositifs and discursive strategies
(Foucault, 1976: 42). Although they are diverse, the dispositifs and strategies have
in common that they are constraining, contraignants (Foucault, 1976: 45). They are
coercive, coercitives (ibid.: 47). They are not outside power or against power; they are,
themselves, exercises of power and means of its exercise. From the single imperative
that commands everybody to make of her or his sexuality a permanent object of
discourse, amplified to the level of the population, there grow multiple mechanisms
of power in the fields of pedagogy, of medicine, and of justice (ibid.: 45). But, contrary
to the repressive hypothesis, power did not annul pleasure, nor did pleasure annul
power. From the 18th
century forward, the mechanisms of power produced a certain
amount of prohibition, but they also incited and excited. By producing a whole science
of sex in which perversions were classified as botanists classify plants (Foucault,
1976: 71–98), they gave each a name and a social status. They produced profitable
specialties in such fields as medicine, psychiatry, pornography, and prostitution. On
page 66, the word “power” appears as the name of something that extends itself, and
which, by extending itself, proliferates sexualities (Foucault, 1976: 66).
On page 108 Foucault considers a possible objection. He accuses himself, or imagines a
reader accusing him, of having confused repression and law, as if they were equivalent
ideas. This is a far-fetched objection, since Foucault has neither stated nor implied
This content downloaded from 86.49.251.249 on Mon, 21 Oct 2024 09:51:48 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Following Foucault - The Trail of the Fox226
any such equivalence. Far-fetched or not, it gives Foucault an opportunity to make a
gracious transition to a critique of what he calls a juridical-discursive representation
of power, that is to say: to a critique of errors concerning the relationship of power
to law that he has accused himself of falling into or seeming to fall into.
Foucault outlines what he takes to be some of the principal features of a juridicaldiscursive
view of power (Foucault, 1976: 110–112). Like the repressive hypothesis it
is negative. Power can only say no (ibid.: 110). On this view that Foucault articulates
but does not agree with there is a general form of power: it is the law. The law is
the voice of power. “Il parle, et c’est la règle” (ibid.: 110) (“Power speaks, and it is
the rule”). It is the same in the state and in the family; the same for a prince, a father,
or a judge. According to this mistaken view, power mainly punishes transgressions.
On one side, there is the power that legislates; on the other side, obedience: the
subject obeys the monarch, the child obeys the parent, the citizen obeys the state, and
the disciple obeys the master (ibid.: 112).
Foucault next asks why people so easily accept a juridical-discursive conception of
power (Foucault, 1976: 113). His first answer to his question is a move that, in Charles
Taylor’s view, is an admission revealing a weakness in Foucault’s case. The answer
is: the juridical-discursive view, which views power as, at once, law and repression,
which overlooks the fact that desires are themselves products of power, allows people
to think they are free. Their desires are their own before the law, to some extent,
represses them. The law performs the legitimate function of placing some limits on
everybody’sfreedom.Inthisway,powerbecomesacceptable.Ifpowerwerecompletely
cynical, if it did not take the general form of tracing limits to liberty, then, in our
modern western societies, power would not be acceptable (Foucault, 1976:  113–114).
Taylor takes the view that Foucault’s account of the power of humanitarian ideals
cannot be true, because he underestimates the historical influence of humanitarian
ideals. Power is not power, that is, it does not succeed in imposing itself, unless it
compromises with humanitarian ideals in order to be accepted. I think the difference
between Foucault and Taylor, here, is that for Foucault, the humanitarian ideals are
themselves dispositifs of power, while for Taylor, they are gatekeepers without whose
blessing power is not legitimate, and therefore, to a considerable extent not viable
(see Taylor, 1985: 163–166).
Foucault then provides an historical explanation of why a juridical-discursive power
seems natural to us. Our modern societies (of course he thinks of France first), are
the successors of the monarchies of the classical age. Pace theories of law, which
would assert that the law is and always has been whatever the sovereign says it
is, the so-called absolute monarchies of the West, were, in fact, legal monarchies.
Law constituted them. Their power was built on top of a series of forms of power
This content downloaded from 86.49.251.249 on Mon, 21 Oct 2024 09:51:48 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Lecture Fourteen 227
that already existed before them, such as the possession of arms. Arms-related
power extracted the agricultural surplus as rent from those who cultivated the land.
Monarchy gradually dominated aristocracy as it established order and hierarchy
among pre-existing powers. The law (we learn from the Collège lectures that Foucault
has in mind Roman law) was not just an ideological weapon, skilfully wielded by the
monarchs. Law was the mode of their appearance on the stage of history and the
form of their acceptability (Foucault, 1976: 115). Since the Middle Ages, in western
societies, the exercise of power has always been formulated in law. So far, I almost
agree with Foucault and Foucault almost agrees with Taylor. We see the same facts
and, to some extent, we interpret them the same way.
Foucault then goes on to say that it is an error to take, at face value, the republican
propaganda of the 17th
to 19th
centuries, that associates royalty always with non-law,
with caprice, with abuse, with exceptions, with government that is de facto and not
de jure. It is an error that forgets the fundamental historical fact that the western
monarchies were constructed as legal systems. The royal mechanisms of power
functioned as forms of law. The republican critique demanded the rule of law without
the rule of the monarch. It did not question the underlying principles that law ought
to be the form of power, and that power should always be exercised in the form of
law (Foucault, 1976: 116).
It was not until the 19th
century (Marx, of course, being the most famous example)
that a more radical critique appeared: real power was something above and beyond
the rules of law; and indeed, the rules of law themselves were a form of violence
exercised for the profit of some at the expense of others. But even this more radical
critique at bottom conceived of power as in essence something that ought to be
exercised (even when in the societies criticised it was not exercised) according to
fundamental principles of right (droit) (Foucault, 1976: 117). Here Foucault implies
that his own Nietzschean critique is more radical than the radical humanist critiques
of the 19th
and 20th
centuries. It turns out, that although for a moment it seemed that I
would agree with Foucault because he had changed his mind, in the end he continues
to see rules and laws as techniques of power, not as something other than power.
Foucault goes on to say that the West is still haunted by the ghost of the juridical
monarchy. Its collective mind is still inhabited by power in the form of law. But
today law represents power’s practice less and less. Today it becomes more and more
evident that law is what it always was. In practice it is every day clearer that power
functions today not as law (droit) but as technique (Foucault, 1976: 118). Instead of law
(loi), power relies on normalisation (ibid.). Instead of relying on punishment mainly
administered by the state, power proliferates in networks of control penetrating
all institutions.
This content downloaded from 86.49.251.249 on Mon, 21 Oct 2024 09:51:48 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Following Foucault - The Trail of the Fox228
The task that Foucault then assigns himself is to build an analytic of power in its
concrete procedures – one that no longer represents power as law (Foucault, 1976:
119). It is to think “sex without law and power without king” (Foucault, 1976: 120).
It is, at this juncture in La Volonté du Savoir, with these cards on the table, or to vary
the metaphor with these balls in the air, that Foucault decides to devote ten pages
to explaining what he, Foucault, does and does not mean by “power”. He does not
mean by the term a set of institutions that guarantees the subjection of the citisens to
the state (Foucault, 1976: 121). He does not mean that form of subjection that, unlike
violence, takes the form of rules. In general he does not mean by “power” a system
by which some group or entity dominates others. An analysis in terms of power
should not postulate the sovereignty of the state. On the contrary, the sovereignty of
the state should emerge, if at all, as a conclusion, as a terminal form, of the analysis
(ibid.). Forms of law and domination should also be explained as conclusions of the
analysis, not presupposed at its beginning (ibid.).
What Foucault does mean by “power” is quite a mouthful: It is “the multiplicity of
relations of force (rapports de force) that are immanent to the domain where they
exercise themselves or are exercised (s’exercent), and which are constitutive of their
organization; the game (jeu) that by way of struggles and confrontations incessantly
transforms them, reinforces them, reverses them; the supports that the relations of
force have with each other, so that they form a chain or a system, or, on the contrary,
the slippages, the contradictions, that separate some from others; the strategies
by which they take effect, and of which the general design is the institutional
crystallization which takes form as the state apparatus, as the formulation of the law,
as social hegemonies” (Foucault, 1976: 121–122).
This is a long definition but it has a short kernel: relations of force. At this point,
Foucault ought to confess something he never confesses, namely that the omnipresent
generality of “power” naming relations of force in his discourse cannot be reconciled
with his and Deleuze’s nominalistic methodology of “dispersion” (Digeser, 1992:
986). The rest of the definition mainly talks about what the relations of force do.
If we ask, “As opposed to what?”, that is, “What other way of looking at power
is rapports de force supposed to be an alternative to?” We will find an answer in
Foucault’s lecture at the Collège de France on 7 January 1976: power is not mainly
about the maintenance of economic relationships (Foucault, 1997: 15). If we go on to
ask what Foucault means by “force”, we will find that he does not elaborate on it in
any special or unusual way (Philp, 1983). We are left with the ordinary meanings of
the term without any special senses peculiar to Foucault. What are, however, peculiar
to Foucault, are his accounts of how strategic relationships of force are stabilised in
institutions, reinforcing one another in ways that make institutions very difficult to
change (for example, Foucault, 1982: 742).
This content downloaded from 86.49.251.249 on Mon, 21 Oct 2024 09:51:48 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Lecture Fourteen 229
Although we may feel that we learn more about what Foucault means by ¨power”
studying his actual use of the word and its surrogates than by a definition that ends
up calling power “force”, it is in any event pretty clear that, for Foucault, power is
not many things other scholars have deemed to be central to explanation in the social
sciences. Foucault’s “power” is not Margaret Mead’s “customs” or “mores” (Mead,
1942). It is not Karl Marx’s Verhältnisse (relations, as in “relations of production”). It
is not Emile Durkheim or Adam Smith’s “division of labour”. It is not Max Weber’s
Verstehen (Weber, 1981). Foucault has made a reasonably intelligible proposal to study
society differently from the ways that others have studied it. He recommends doing a
lot more power-talk than most scholars do. In the next lecture, I will consider reasons
one might adduce for and against following Foucault’s lead. I will be evaluating his
recommendation and, for the most part, declining to accept it.
This content downloaded from 86.49.251.249 on Mon, 21 Oct 2024 09:51:48 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
231
A COMMENT ON LECTURE
FOURTEEN
Evelin Lindner
Foucault’s remarks on legitimate government, in La Volonté de Savoir bring home to
me the deep meaning of what Catherine Odora Hoppers has been saying to us about
second-level indigenisation.
Foucault makes the very important point that the so-called enlightened despots of
what he calls the classical age in Europe were not really despots. They were legal
monarchs. They were authorised by law to be sovereign rulers. They were obligated
by law to respect and maintain a legal order. Their legitimacy and their power
depended on a legal framework that existed before their birth and would continue
after their death.
I know I am not doing justice to the subtlety of either Foucault’s or Charles Taylor’s
or anyone else’s analysis of the relationships between law and power, either in
general or in the France of the 17th
and 18th
centuries that Foucault mainly discusses.
But, unless I am missing something, whatever the subtleties may be, and even if, in
some sense, in the last analysis law is nothing but a dispositif of power, the monarchs
of early modern Europe had the right to sit on their thrones because they were the
legal successors of the monarchs who preceded them. They were expected to respect
the legal rights of their subjects and they mainly did. When they needed more money
than they could rise by taxes, they had to borrow money from its owners like anyone
else. As Foucault says, we should not believe the republican propaganda of the
revolutionary period that depicted royal rule as a system where kings and queens did
whatever they personally chose to do.
One of the main points you, dear Catherine, make in the book that you wrote
with our esteemed Howard, is that the mostly Roman legal framework of modern
European society is quite different from what law has been in most of the world’s
indigenous cultures (Hoppers and Richards, 2012). Roman legal principles fostered an
individualism that can be traced back to the absolute power within his little realm
of the Pater familias. The meaning of “emancipation” was in Rome, and down to our
own times still continues to be, modelled on the notions of getting out from under
the “hand” (manus) of the Pater familias and becoming, like him, autonomous and
free. Property, dominium, was first identified with war winnings (Vogel, 1948). It was
what was dominated by the Pater familias, and then by whomever stood in his shoes.
This content downloaded from 86.49.251.249 on Mon, 21 Oct 2024 09:51:48 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Following Foucault - The Trail of the Fox232
Rome stands out like a sore thumb in the array of the world’s early legal traditions. In
most of them, law is closer to folk customs, to religion, to the wisdom of elders, and
to communal processes of reaching consensus.
Foucault underlines the point that the characteristically Western legal framework
did not appear suddenly at the time of the French Revolution. It was not imposed
on the rest of society by a triumphant bourgeoisie. Even though the leaders of the
new order sometimes portrayed themselves as establishing the rule of law, where
formerly, there had been only arbitrary rule by kings, in reality the roots of the
western legal order were far older and deeper.
Foucault and other authors trace the Western tradition forward from its beginnings.
Our contemporary democratic governments are no freer to change the basic structures
of society than the French kings were in the 17th
century (Renner, 1904; Richards and
Swanger, 2006). In democratic constitutions, for example, in the Constitution of the
European Union, it is usually made explicit that basic rights provide the framework
for government. They are not created by government. In Sweden, there was the
famous Saltsjöbaden Agreement of 1938, in which business and labour jointly agreed
to work within the existing order.
Foucault’s study of the deep roots of legitimacy in the West can help us to appreciate
the deep significance of Catherine’s call for second-level indigenisation. Wherever
the West conquered, it did not just impose its science. It did not just demote the
knowledge the Africans already had to the status of unreason. It did more than
bring capitalism and Christianity to Africa. It also brought a concept of legitimate
government. Like the kings of France in the 17th
century, the Africans, too, were
obliged to live within the confines of a legal framework inherited mostly from Rome.
The connection between Foucault´s remarks on the history of legality in France
and Catherine’s call for second-level indigenisation partly explains why we chose
the title, Following Foucault, for our book. When we think in terms of second-level
indigenisation, we are going back to the roots of the roots. We are remembering that, in
many parts of Africa, and also on other continents there were, and in many cases still
are, cultures where individualism is not built into society’s basic constitutive rules.
In Discipline and Punish and in La Volonté de Savoir Foucault analysed power’s recent
metamorphoses in the Western tradition. Power is coming to rely less and less on
society’s basic legal framework and more and more on disciplinary normalisation
in typical contemporary Western institutions such as schools, hospitals, businesses,
prisons and barracks.
This content downloaded from 86.49.251.249 on Mon, 21 Oct 2024 09:51:48 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
A comment on Lecture Fourteen 233
He does not go where you, dear Catherine, go, back to the early times when Roman
and then European institutions differentiated themselves from the typical institutions
of the rest of the world, only to return many centuries later as institutions imposed
on the rest of the world, by conquest.
This content downloaded from 86.49.251.249 on Mon, 21 Oct 2024 09:51:48 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms