The Signature of Power

Sovereignty, Governmentality and Biopolitics

Mitchell Dean

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781446293188
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

"When it comes to ?power?, it can often feel as if everyone is talking about it, yet no one appears to have given it any thought. Well, not quite. In this original and timely book, Mitchell Dean provides a characteristically thoughtful and incisive analysis that aims to renovate the concept of power through an understanding of its signature and how it works. Through a thorough and intelligent engagement with the work of Foucault, Schmitt, and Agamben, their lacuna and failings, Dean pieces together a clear and precise account of sovereignty, governmentality, and bio-politics, which has much to commend it."
- Paul Du Gay, Copenhagen Business School "Dean's erudite and relentlessly critical reading of Foucault, Schmitt and Agamben extracts from these authors new insights about the signature of power... Immensely valuable and a major contribution to social and political thought."
- William Walters, Carleton University Mitchell Dean revitalizedthe study of 'governmentality' with his bestselling book of the same title. His new book on power is a landmark work. It combines an extraordinary breadth of perspective with pinpoint accuracy about what power means for us today. For students it provides sharp readings of the main approaches in the field. On this level, it operates as a foundational work in the study of power. It builds on this to reframe the concept of power, offering original and exceptionally fruitful reading. It throws new light onto the importance of biopolitics, sovereignty and governmentality. Mitchell Dean has established himself as a master of governmentality. This new book will do the same for how we conceptualize and use power. Mitchell Dean is Professor of Public Governance at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark and Professor of Sociology at the University of Newcastle, Australia.

1

INTRODUCING THE SIGNATURE OF POWER

1.1The concept of power has long been central not only to the social and political sciences but also in everyday language and discussion. We often assume that we know what we mean when we use the term and that it helps us describe the world in which we live. Yet, today there are some influential thinkers who will claim that ‘power’ cannot explain anything and that therefore it is a relatively useless concept. In doing so, they reject a longstanding reason for the study of power: to offer a critique of society, its institutions and practices and even its ways of reasoning and forms of knowledge. Explicitly or implicitly, such critique implies that there are alternative ways of doing things. Perhaps this involves overcoming or overturning power, or more simply, particularly in the case of the complex history of liberalism, making sure its exercise is legitimate. This means asking certain types of question. How can power be made accountable and transparent? How can power be made safe from its inherent dangers? How can we guard against the corruption inherent in it, for as Lord Action wrote in 1887, and every schoolchild now learns: ‘[p]ower tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely’ (Dalberg-Acton, 1907: 504). These kinds of question about the appropriate, safe and legitimate use of power are normative ones. They concern the ‘ought’ of power, rather than power as an actuality or operation.

Our starting point is more analytical than normative. An analytics of power is less interested in the normative questions of how power should be exercised than the establishment of perspectives and concepts that help us understand how power relations operate. This distinction, of course, is far from clear-cut and every description of power implies an ethos or orientation. Looked at in a certain way, every analytical, descriptive or diagnostic statement about power contains within it a normative evaluation of the phenomenon under discussion. If we say, for example, that in contemporary liberal-democracies, ‘sovereign forms of power have been replaced by complex networks of governance’, or that ‘a biopolitics of the population has been replaced by a more grassroots vital politics’, we appear to be offering an analysis. Yet each of these contains a normative element that could endorse current social and political arrangements over past ones. However, that does not mean that we should refrain from attempting to develop an analytically oriented set of concepts.

This book seeks to combine that rigorous approach to concept and method with an ethos that might appear contrary to it. It wants to maintain a sense of the essential mystery of power as a set of concepts and practices, that power is not as obvious as we think it or as passé as some contemporary thinkers maintain. It asks the reader to journey into some obscure and arcane topics and stories in the service of understanding this term.

But first, what is power? In many languages there is more than one term for what is meant by the English word ‘power’. Thus in German Kraft and Macht, and in French, puissance and pouvoir, broadly contrast the force of something with the capacity to do something. In this sense they allow us to distinguish between the power of the President’s speech, that is, of its rhetoric, logic, and arguments, and his power as Commander-in-Chief of the United States’ military. Despite this situation, each of these languages has a key equivalent in the scientific discussion of power: Macht in German, pouvoir in French and potere in Italian. In the romance languages, these same words serve as a noun for power and a verb for ‘can’, thus underlying the closeness of the relationship between power and capacity, ability or potentiality. Centrally, in these three languages, Macht, pouvoir and potere, are the terms one uses to express the case when someone has power over someone else.

This is a commonplace observation but it allows us to make a point that is far from trivial: the concept of power is located in a dense field of distinctions and relations with many other terms. In English, there is authority, domination, legitimacy, jurisdiction, violence, government, coercion, control, capability, capacity, ability, force, and so on. In this respect, we can agree with a point made by Mark Haugaard (2010) that it is not enough to recognize, as we have since at least Steven Lukes (1974), that power is ‘an essentially contested concept’ (Gallie, 1956). We must also accept that there is no essence to the concept of power beyond its contested uses. Haugaard instead, following Wittgenstein, permits only a set of ‘family resemblances’ between uses and concepts of the term.

This view provides us with two starting points. The first is the simple one that the study of power should be broad in its themes, its topics and its perspectives, and be prepared to accept that the exploration of the concept of power might lead us to the most unexpected of places. This book takes up that challenge in its approach and its structure. The second is that to propose that there is no essence of power is not to say that there is no discernable structure or architecture to these ‘family relations’ that obtain between concepts of power. So we start from the presupposition that it is possible to chart, to map, or to make a diagram of, the ways in which various senses, concepts, ideas and even theories of power exist in relation to one another. This, as the reader will discover, is captured by the idea of ‘signature’ in this book’s title.

The initial horizon for the present investigation of concepts of power was to contribute to an understanding of its conceptualization and ultimately to both its ‘genealogy’ (the study of the conditions of emergence of organized practices and ways of thinking), and its ‘analytics’ (the key questions that might be asked of how power operates in any given situation). By the end of this book, this starting point will lead us not only to endorse the genealogy of the arts of government and an analytics of power, as Michel Foucault called them, but to a number of other projects: a political archaeology of glory, a historical sociology of sovereignty and an analytics of sovereign practices, a political morphology of the event and an analytics of publicity. These projects are a part of a research program about power that emerges when one considers not only the work of Foucault, which we will do, but that of two other thinkers, both controversial to different degrees – Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben. In addition, many other thinkers are considered here, often with lines of descent from Max Weber, and the book will address themes and areas not usually found in books on the concept of power. These include Christian theological arguments about the Trinitarian ‘economy’, order and providence and the study of religious and political rituals and symbols. They also include organizing terms and debates, such as secularization, rationalization, and legitimation, that address the novelty or otherwise of the present, including its forms of power, in relation to the past. Importantly the book focuses on three concepts that have occupied much of the recent discussion about different forms, types, zones, or clusters of relations of power: sovereignty, government (or governmentality), and biopolitics. Rather than seek to define them at the outset, or how we might approach them, we shall let them emerge from the work under discussion.

The investigation proper begins with the next chapter. The main point of this introductory chapter is to provide and illustrate the key that will help us explore this mysterious terrain and that will allow us to begin to examine the structure of these ‘family resemblances’. We will call this the signature of power, notwithstanding that the use of the term ‘signature’ here is far more limited than that of its most renowned recent exponent, Agamben. This introductory chapter is a preparation for a journey, not the journey itself. It situates the journey in the much wider geography and identifies the ‘signature’ as a kind of passport that allows us to move freely from one territory to another. Just as getting one’s passport is not as exciting as the places it allows you to visit, but is essential if you wish to do so, the demonstration and definition of the signature of power is nowhere near as interesting as the exploration it allows.

Concepts of power

1.2For the lay person, it is hardly necessary to pause and consider the notion of power. Power is quite self-evidently the preserve of the powerful, is exercised over those with less power or the powerless, and ensures that those who hold it get their way in most situations and typically gain substantial material or other rewards. This definition of course is tautological and would please neither logicians nor social and political scientists. Yet when the most famous of sociologists, Max Weber, formulated a definition of power in the early years of the twentieth century he did so with something similar to this view of power in mind:

‘Power’ is the probability that one actor within a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his own will despite resistance, regardless of the basis on which that probability rests. (1968: 53)

Since then this definition of the form of power has been repeated and refined many times, most eminently by Robert Dahl and Steven Lukes. Dahl, writing in McCarthyite America, translated something like this into the alphabetical terms that would kick off ‘the community power debate’ with what he saw as a ‘bedrock idea of power’:

A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something B would not otherwise do. (1957: 202–3)

Continuing in the same vein, Steven Lukes, in a discussion which both completed that debate and inaugurated much of the recent discussion of power, stated:

The absolutely basic common core to, or primitive notion lying behind, all talk of power is the notion that A in some way affects B … in a non-trivial or significant manner. (1974: 24)

In recent years, these definitions of power are less the building blocks of a theory of power than the point from which that theory departs. While all three suggest a situation of two or more actors in which one realizes its aims or will at the expense of others, we see a shift from Weber’s notion of power as probability, and hence as a capacity or even potentiality, to Dahl’s concept of power as something possessed, although his own formulae are expressed as probabilities. This idea of power as possessed has been called into question, most famously by Foucault (1979: 94), and all three quotes could be read as implying a ‘zero-sum’ conception of power in which the exercise of power by one actor subtracts from the power, or even the freedom, of other actors.

In so far as all three imply an asymmetrical relationship between more than one actor, they could be viewed as instances of power as ‘power over’, itself occasionally identified with domination. However, Weber’s definition of power also contains the fundamental notion of the capacity of an actor to carry out his own will. In this sense, Weber’s definition encompasses an even more basic sense of the word power as capacity. This idea of power as ‘power to’, or the capacity of actors to achieve their purposes, can be found in the canonical figure of the English state-theorist of the seventeenth century, Thomas Hobbes: ‘The Power of a Man is his present means to obtain some future apparent Good’ (1996: 62). We have already, then, departed from the everyday view of power with which we started. Power is not simply the power of one actor (individual, institution, etc.) over another or others, but, even more fundamentally, the capacity to achieve some desired end. We can thus distinguish between power into ‘power over’ and ‘power to’.

Barry Hindess (1996) has argued that ‘power to’ and ‘power over’ are each variants of a notion of power as a kind of quantitative capacity to realize an actor’s will, and so part of a single conception of power. This conception, he insists, can be contrasted with the other major conception or discourse of power in the West, power as right, or legitimate power. This conception of power usually appears in relation to what Hindess calls sovereign power, ‘the power that is thought to be exercised by the rule of the state or by its (central) government’ (1996: 12). This kind of power for Hindess is most clearly exemplified in the work of a later English political theorist, John Locke, with his notion of political power both as the right to make laws and the capacity to enforce them (Hindess, 1996: 52). Power as right is hence a concern with the legitimacy of political power, which Locke and the framers of the American Declaration of Independence viewed as residing in the decision of the people themselves (p. 53). In Locke’s case, the crucial question, ‘Who decides?’, is answered with the ‘people’. However, as John Dunn and Quentin Skinner have both pointed out, Locke provided an account of the origins of legitimate government, not every occasion of the exercise of political power by it (Dunn, 1969: 141–7; Skinner, 1998: 27, n. 84).

With Max Weber, this question of power as right, or what he calls legitimate domination is less a feature which may or may not reside in the relationship of people to their government, and more the sociologically specifiable conditions which secure the compliance of subjects to most, if not all, the commands of the ruler. Unlike Locke, legitimacy is secured on different grounds, including legal, charismatic and traditional ones (Weber, 1968: 215). However, in modern types of administration, legitimacy for Weber bears a striking similarity to Locke’s notion of political power as the right to make and enforce laws in that it is based on rational grounds ‘resting on a belief in the legality of enacted rule and the rules of those elevated to authority under such rules to issue commands’. In many twentieth-century variants of liberalism and in notions of ‘good governance’, the domination of the state is held to be legitimate to the extent to which it corresponds to the ‘rule of law’.

Another antinomy thus displaces that between ‘power to’ and ‘power over’. This is power as capacity (including power to and power over) and power as right or legitimate power (itself including the effective capacity of law enforcement). Even those who start from ‘power over’ find themselves drawn to the problem of legitimacy of power. Thus Lukes famously asks, in relation to what he calls the ‘third dimension of power’:

Is not the supreme and most insidious example of power to prevent people, to whatever degree, from having grievances by shaping their perceptions, cognitions and preferences in such a way that they accept their role in the existing order of things, either because they can see or imagine no alternative to it, or because they see it as natural and unchangeable, or because they see it as divinely ordained and beneficial? (1974: 24)

Lukes’s third dimension of power clearly rests upon the idea of power as right. The idea that power so shapes people’s consciousness that they are not in a position to know, let alone air, their grievances, implies a ‘radical’ view of power. Lukes thus presupposes an ideal of a community of morally autonomous individuals who would be capable of giving consent to the exercise of political and social power, had they not been prevented by its ‘supreme and insidious’ exercise. Lukes therefore holds not only a conception of power as ‘power over’ but as legitimate or illegitimate as the case may be. While power as the capacity to realize one’s will is usually thought to imply an analytical or empirical approach concerned to describe how power is exercised, power as right implies an ideal of how power ought to be exercised, and is thus at the basis of many normative conceptions of power.

The idea of a community of morally autonomous subjects who freely consent to the binding commands of sovereign political authority runs through much moral and political philosophy with Locke as a key exemplar. It is found in twentieth-century critical theory, such as that of Herbert Marcuse’s critique of one-dimensional man and Jürgen Habermas’s specification of the conditions for an ideal speech situation, and in the Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci’s view of hegemony. In the latter, the rule of the bourgeoisie in advanced capitalist societies is based on both coercion and consent, but consent is given by those who do not know it is in their interests to overthrow the system of capitalist production. This is of course very similar to Lukes’s view. Alongside the distinction between power over and power to, and between power as capacity and power as right, we have empirical (or analytical) and normative conceptions of power. The defining characteristic of critical theory, and most of what is called political theory, may be that, however it is analysed, power is approached from such a normative point of view.

We are beginning to get a sense of where the signature of power might lie but we shall first explore two or three more instances of this phenomenon.

1.3Another distinction is often drawn between conflictual and consensual views of power. The former emphasizes the sense in which power is exercised at the expense of or in relation to another party and focuses on power over or domination. The latter, by contrast, emphasizes what might be called ‘power with’, a kind of collective version of power to. In the case of the ancient distinction between potentia and potestas, as taken up by Spinoza, the former represents an original constitutive force. The formation of the state is no longer a foregoing of certain aspects of humans’ power in the constitution of the sovereign but remains grounded in the collective power of the multitude (Saar, 2010). Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000) have recently invoked the multitude as a kind of constitutive power that is created by and acts as a counterforce to the forms of power characteristic of the global Empire. While there are a large number of twentieth-century thinkers, including Talcott Parsons, who adopt a consensual view of power, it is Hannah Arendt who most clearly states that:

Power is always, as we would say, a power potential and not an unchangeable, measurable and reliable entity like force or strength. While strength is the natural quality of an individual seen in isolation, power springs up between men when they act together and vanishes the moment they disperse. (1998: 20...