Abstract
The chapter outlines how Foucault’s take on power and politics advances beyond traditional parameters in political and democratic theory in which power is typically seen as a type of domination and hence opposed to truth and freedom, just as politics is seen as the prerogative of elites. Focus is centred on how the later Foucault slides away from his earlier emphasis on power as productive submission, and moves towards viewing power as a dispositional concept of being able to act, which can be employed by both repressive and facilitating political technologies. This change of focus links up with his efforts of analysing the autonomy of political practice in general and critical engagement, government and parrhesia in particular.
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Notes
Morriss 1987: 13, 17, 19. Giddens (1979: 92, see also 88–94) is onto the same thing although he holds that power does entail domination: ‘power is a relational concept, but only operates as such through the utilization of transformative capacity as generated by structures of domination’.
HS1: 93. See also his elaboration of ‘the strategical model’ in part IV, ch. 2. A similar statement can be found in DP: 215.
Foucault’s intellectual and political interest for the prison dates back to 1971 where he played a leading role in forming ‘Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons’ (GIP). As an object of study, the prison combined his key interest, ‘for it would involve not just archives, but also political actions that would lead to his direct engagement with social movements that were to shake up the penal system’ (Eribon 1991: 217). Deleuze (1986: 32) shortly alludes to Foucault’s timely invention of his new approach to power in his review of Discipline and Punish: ‘Et quand Foucault revient en 1975 à une publication théorique, il nous semble le premier à inventer cette nouvelle conception du pouvoir, que l’on cherchait sans savoir la trouver ni l’énoncer.’ He moreover lists five assumptions about the novelty of Foucault’s approach to power (32–8). See also Miller 1994: 222–3; Wolin 2010: 289–90, 296.
See, for example, Dews 1986: 97–100; Fine 1979: 91–4; 1984: 189–202; Jameson 1998: 105–8; Jessop 1987: 77, 79, 81–2; 2011: 64; Keat 1986; Neocleous 1996: 79–83; Philp 1983: 43–8; Poulantzas 1978: 77–80, 146–53; Wickham 1986: 156–7, 163–8.
HS1: 157; PST: 137–8. For a discussion of ‘the plebeian aspect’, see also Ransom 1997: 117–33.
NGH: 150. Note also his comments in DP: 222 that ‘[t]he “Enlightenment”, which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines’. See also SMD: 26–7.
There is a parallel between this approach to power and his later distinction between morals and ethics: just as his analytics of power aims to free itself from the legal code and grasp how power relations actually work, so his concern for ethics is a way to create a critical distance to the moral code, which prescribes what is legitimate and what is not in order to get at how people actually live their lives in relation to moral codes.
SP: 226; ESF: 283, 292, 299. Laclau and Mouffe (1985: 105) were on to the same thing when they spoke of ‘elements’ and ‘moments’ in discourses, which were two ends of a continuum ranging from unfixity to fixity of signification. This couplet has an affinity to Laclau’s later distinction inspired by Husserl (Laclau 1990: 33–6) of ‘reactivation’, which signals dislocation, and ‘sedimentation’, which is business as usual. Two differences between them should be mentioned. First, Laclau and Mouffe make a distinction between domination and oppression, but it is not of kind but of reception: the latter is the experience of the former as intolerable. Foucault, by contrast, does not differ between them and holds that the very fact of ending up in a state of domination is oppressive irrespective of how people perceive or react to such a state. Second, whereas Laclau equates sedimentation with the social, which is not, by definition, political, Foucault sees the social as political, since it is constituted by the technologies and techniques of governmentality. This is among other things a difference between defining ‘the political’ in terms of antagonism and authority, respectively.
Power is, as I have already mentioned, a ‘dispositional concept’ (Morris 1987: 19; 2006). See also Patton (1989) for his distinction between the two locutions of power: ‘to’ and ‘over’.
Power is, as I have already mentioned, a ‘dispositional concept’ (Morris 1987: 19; 2006). See also Patton (1989) for his distinction between the two locutions of power: ‘to’ and ‘over’.
ESF: 283–4. For a discussion of this phrase see Oksala 2005: 188–92.
Foucault does not phrase it in those terms, but his approach to power is surprisingly similar as we are dealing with a will that is curbed by power and puts up resistance. SP: 221; Clifford 2001: 138–9.
SCA: 294. This might well be the case, yet people’s perceptions of what constitute constraints differ, so it is not clear where the threshold of the ‘truly intolerable’ begins.
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© 2014 Torben Bech Dyrberg
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Dyrberg, T.B. (2014). Power: From Productive Submission and Domination to Transformative Capacity. In: Foucault on the Politics of Parrhesia. Palgrave Pivot, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137368355_2
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