Michel Foucault

Key Concepts

Dianna Taylor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780367476311
• eBook ISBN: 9781317492047
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Michel Foucault was one of the twentieth century's most influential and provocative thinkers. His work on freedom, subjectivity, and power is now central to thinking across an extraordinarily wide range of disciplines, including philosophy, history, education, psychology, politics, anthropology, sociology, and criminology. "Michel Foucault: Key Concepts" explores Foucault's central ideas, such as disciplinary power, biopower, bodies, spirituality, and practices of the self. Each essay focuses on a specific concept, analyzing its meaning and uses across Foucault's work, highlighting its connection to other concepts, and emphasizing its potential applications. Together, the chapters provide the main co-ordinates to map Foucault's work. But more than a guide to the work, "Michel Foucault: Key Concepts" introduces readers to Foucault's thinking, equipping them with a set of tools that can facilitate and enhance further study.

PART I Power

ONE Foucault's theory of power

Richard A. Lynch

DOI: 10.4324/9781315711478-1

An important step in understanding Foucault’s broader projects is to understand his view of power.¹ Foucault’s analyses of power are simultaneously articulated at two levels, the empirical and the theoretical. The first level is constituted by a detailed examination of historically specific modes of power and how these modes emerged out of earlier forms. Hence, he identifies modern forms of power, such as the closely related modes he termed “disciplinary power” and “biopower”, and earlier, premodern forms such as “sovereign power”. Indeed, much of his work on power is devoted to the task of articulating the emergence of later modes of power from earlier ones, and his analyses of disciplinary power in particular have been especially useful for subsequent scholars.

Three very simple examples can illustrate these forms of power. First, imagine a pyramid, with a king at the top, his ministers in the middle and the king’s subjects (the people) at the bottom. If the king issues an edict, then his ministers will execute the order, imposing it upon the king’s subjects. Traditionally, power has been understood as “being at the top of the pyramid”; and that was all that it was understood to be. But Foucault expands (indeed, totally reconceives) what constitutes power, and shows how this traditional view can be situated within a fuller understanding. He observed that in actual fact, power arises in all kinds of relationships, and can be built up from the bottom of a pyramid (or any structure). Thus, an academic transcript, the record of a student’s courses and performance, becomes an instrument of power (how many times have you been told that “this will go on your permanent record”?), but begins from observation at the bottom of the pyramid, not from an edict from the top. Each and every student has a transcript, and this record of their performance, the fact that each one is observed (and not that the school has a principal), is what influences students’ behaviour. The academic transcript is an instrument of disciplinary power: it serves to make a student regulate or discipline her own performance and behaviour. Similarly, observing which groups in the population are most likely to contract a disease (such as lung cancer) can lead to a discovery of its causes (cigarette smoking, or asbestos exposure). Like academic transcripts, this third kind of power – in this case to save lives, by eliminating asbestos or smoke inhalation – does not require a “top of the pyramid” to function. But unlike an academic transcript, this kind of power does not directly address particular individuals, but rather groups of people and populations as a whole. This third example is an illustration of what Foucault calls “biopower”.

The second level of Foucault’s analyses (the “theoretical” level) transcends historical particularities and is common to the diverse modes of power that Foucault has described. It is at this level that we can grasp the most general and fundamental features of power and its operation, and so we would do well to approach Foucault’s work from this theoretical perspective.

Foucault’s most explicit thinking about power developed in the 1970s, particularly in two published works, Discipline and Punish (1975) and La Volonté de Savoir (1976, translated as The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction), as well as his courses at the Collège de France between 1974 and 1979. We will focus upon his most condensed and generalized presentation of power, Part Four of La Volonté de Savoir, to accomplish three tasks. First, we will be able to grasp why Foucault’s analyses can be called a “theory” of power. Second, we will identify the mistaken theories of power that his analysis is meant to supplant: the theories against which he is arguing. Third, we will be able to articulate the basic characteristics of power according to Foucault’s theory: a network of force relations throughout society, relations that are characterized by resistance and which interact by means of local tactics and larger strategies. Since these characteristics serve to describe not only modern forms of power such as disciplinary power, but also earlier forms, they represent the substance of Foucault’s theory of power.

A “theory” of power

What we can call a “theory” of power emerges from Foucault’s mid-1970s analyses of psychiatry, the prison and sexuality. This theory is not restricted to descriptions of one empirical period or “regime”, but describes certain general characteristics of power and its operation, across historical epochs and periods.

Foucault disliked the term “theory”. He noted in La Volonté de Savoir that “The aim of the inquiries that will follow is to move less toward a ‘theory’ of power than toward an ‘analytics’ of power …” (1990a: 82; we will soon see how this sentence ends). Foucault emphasized analysis over theory in part because he was reluctant to make any claim to a permanent or complete understanding of the world in which we live. In his 1976 Collège de France course, Foucault explained at least part of his distrust for theory: “the question ‘What is power?’ is obviously a theoretical question that would provide an answer to everything, which is just what I don’t want to do” (2006a: 13). It is only in so far as theories can be used “untheoretically” in this sense – that is, without claiming to answer everything – that they can be valuable. Nevertheless, he did refer to his own project as a theory: his task “is a question of forming a different grid of historical decipherment by starting from a different theory of power” (1990a: 90–91, emphasis added).² For Foucault, then, the term “theory” must be used with caution; we should embrace theory only in the sense of “a theoretical production that does not need a visa from some common regime to establish its validity” (ibid.: 6).

With this terminological caution in mind, I shall use the term “theory” in an experimental sense: a theory is a hypothesis to organize diverse data, but also to be tested and revised or abandoned in light of that data. That a theory aims to be more general than a description of a single historical period or epoch is an essential part of its value and usefulness for our understanding of the phenomena it encompasses, and it is for these reasons that the term remains a useful term with respect to Foucault’s analyses of power. Such a theory does not “answer everything”; its warrant comes from the empirical data that it organizes and that supports it, and it is subject to revision.

Foucault’s theory of power suggests that power is omnipresent, that is, power can be found in all social interactions. As he put this in 1977, “it seems to me that power is ‘always already there’, that one is never ‘outside’ it” (1980e: 141). That power is omnipresent – that is, that power is co-extensive with the field of social relations; that power is interwoven with and revealed in other kinds of social relations – does not mean that power functions as a trap or cage, only that it is present in all of our social relations, even our most intimate and egalitarian.³ Nor is Foucault saying that all relations reduce to, or consist of nothing other than, power relations.⁴ Power does not “consolidate everything” or “embrace everything” or “answer everything”; power alone may not be adequate to explain all, or every aspect of, social relations. So Foucault’s theoretical task (and the conclusion of the sentence we left earlier) is to work “toward an ‘analytics’ of power: that is, toward a definition of the specific domain formed by relations of power, and toward a determination of the instruments that will make possible its analysis” (1990a: 82).

How not to understand power

Foucault first distinguishes his own theory from three mistaken, inadequate or misleading conceptions of power (each of which corresponds to a tradition or school of social thought, as I note below in brackets).

[T]he word power is apt to lead to a number of misunderstandings – misunderstandings with respect to its nature, its form, and its unity. By power, I do not mean “Power” as a group of institutions and mechanisms that ensure the subservience of the citizens of a given state [such as characterize many liberal analyses]. By power, I do not mean, either, a mode of subjugation which, in contrast to violence, has the form of the rule [typical of psychoanalytic approaches]. Finally, I do not have in mind a general system of domination exerted by one group over another [i.e. class oppression], a system whose effects, through successive derivations, pervade the entire social body [as in many Marxist views].

(1990a: 92)

Foucault’s worry is not that these analyses are entirely useless, but that they often mischaracterize an accidental feature of power in a particular context as an essential characteristic of power in general. So each of these forms of power (sovereignty, law, domination) may in fact be present in certain contexts as terminal forms, but none are fundamental. And Foucault’s first task in understanding power is therefore to develop a new method – based on a richer theory – that begins with the basic molecules of power relations and then builds to more complex forms.

The analysis, made in terms of power, must not assume that the sovereignty of the state [liberal], the form of the law [psychoanalytic], or the over-all unity of a domination [Marxist] are given at the outset; rather, these are only the terminal forms power takes.

(Ibid., my comments in brackets)

The most important misconception is what Foucault terms a “juridico-discursive” understanding of power. This misconception, “deeply rooted in the history of the West”, is common to many “political analyses of power” (ibid.: 83) and approaches to sexuality. His argument is that this misconception, so generally accepted, has functioned as a mask by which much of the actual operation of power is obscured, thereby making many of the actual mechanisms of power tolerable (ibid.: 86).

According to this “juridico-discursive” theory, power has five principal characteristics: first, power always operates negatively, that is, by means of interdictions. Second, power always takes the form of a rule or law. This entails a binary system of permitted and forbidden, legal and illegal. These two characteristics together constitute the third: power operates through a cycle of prohibition, a law of interdiction. Hence (and fourth), this power manifests in three forms of prohibition – “affirming that such a thing is not permitted, preventing it from being said, denying that it exists” (ibid.: 84) – which reveal a logic of censorship. Fifth and finally, the apparatus of this power is universal and uniform in its mode of operation:

From top to bottom, in its over-all decisions and its capillary interventions alike, whatever the devices or institutions on which it relies, it acts in a uniform and comprehensive manner; it operates according to the simple and endlessly reproduced mechanism of law, taboo, and censorship.

(Ibid.)

Notice how Foucault has characterized this uniformity, “in its overall decisions and its capillary interventions alike”. Implicit in this characterization is a distinction between macro-structures (the “over-all decisions”) and micro-practices (“capillary interventions”): a distinction that will be very important in the development of Foucault’s own understanding of power. Recall our opening illustrations: a transcript would be a “capillary intervention”, whereas epidemiological studies of cancer rates reflect macro-patterns. Foucault’s analysis begins at the micro-level (in Discipline and Punish, for example) and is modified as it encompasses the macro-1 evel (especially in the 1978 and 1979 Collège de France courses).⁵ That this distinction is not made in the “juridico-discursive” view is just another indication of how it differs from Foucault’s own analysis, and how it is mistaken about, and masks, the actual operation of power.

Why does Foucault term this view a “juridico-discursive” representation of power? First, it is juridical because it is modelled upon law, upon prohibition: “it is a power [more precisely a representation of power] whose model is essentially juridical, centered on nothing more than the statement of the law and the operation of taboos” (ibid.: 85). But as Foucault makes clear, the actual operation of power cannot be reduced to one model – the law, the state, or domination – but instead functions in a variety of forms and with varying means or techniques.

Second, according to this view, power is essentially discursive: its prohibitions are tied together with what one can say as much as what one can do; in this way restrictions on language should also function as restrictions upon reality and action – this is the heart of the “logic of censorship” (ibid.: 84). While this view emphasizes discourse as the primary arena in which power’s effects manifest, Foucault notes that discourses are related to power in much more complicated ways than this view would suggest: “Discourses are not once and for all subservient to power or raised up against it … discourse can be both an instrument and an effect of power, but also a hindrance, a stumbling-block, a point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategy” (ibid.: 100–101).

Let us consider another example to illustrate this “juridico-discursive” view of power: is what you are wearing today an effect of power relations? If you picked your clothes to conform to a dress code (skirts must fall below the knee, no profanity on T-shirts, etc.), then your choices can be explained by a “juridico-discursive” account: a prohibitory, discursive law specified what you could or could not wear. Within those rules, on that view, your choices were presumably made without external interference. But when we look more closely, this view is not correct: a number of other, “capillary” (your friends) and “macro” (fashion) as well as extra-legal power relations have almost certainly shaped your choices of what to wear. Foucault’s own theory of power is meant to replace these “juridico-discursive” accounts:

It is this image that we must break free of, that is, of the theoretical privilege of law and sovereignty, if we wish to analyze power within the concrete and historical framework of its operation. We must construct an analytics of power that no longer takes law as a model and a code.

(Ibid.: 90)

A Foucauldian view of power

It is time now for us to turn to this constructive task, and begin to articulate Foucault’s own positive understanding of power. Foucault’s self-described task is to use empirical analyses to discover a new theory of power, which will in turn provide a new framework for (and the hypotheses to be tested in) subsequent historical analyses (Foucault 1990a: 90–91). He begins:

It seems to me that power must be understood in the first instance as [1] the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organization; as [2] the process which, through ceaseless struggles and confrontations, transforms, strengthens, or reverses them; as [3] the support which these force relations find in one another, thus forming a chain or a system, or on the contrary, the disjunctions and contradictions which isolate them from one another; and lastly, as [4] the strategies in which they take effect, whose general design or institutional crystallization is embodied in the state apparatus, in the formulation of the law, in the various social hegemonies.

(Ibid.: 92–3, my numerals)

There is much to unpack in this sentence. The bracketed numbers indicate four principal aspects of Foucault’s initial definition. We have a set of “force relations”, processes by which these relations are transformed, systems or disjunctions that are constituted by the interplay of these force relations, and larger strategies (or “terminal forms”) with general and institutional characteristics that emerge from these relations, processes and systems. He begins at the micro-level, looking at local relations of force rather than at the macro-level of hegemonies and states, which can only be fully understood as functions of the local relations. In other words, Foucault begins with individuals’ behaviours and interactions (“local relations” like academic transcripts, or choices of what to wear), to se...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Key Concepts
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Contributors
• Introduction: Power, freedom and subjectivity—Dianna Taylor
• PART I: POWER
• PART II: FREEDOM
• PART III: SUBJECTIVITY
• Chronology
• Bibliography
• Index