Michel Foucault and the Pullulations of Power
Herzog, Don
Don Herzog MICHEL FOUCAULT AND THE PULLULATIONS OF POWER Power is all around, no need to waste it. I first encountered Michel Foucault my sophomore year in college, in a European intellectual...
...Sigh...
...Conservatives and libertarians regularly insist on a fundamental dividing line between state and private action...
...Once we accept such a contrast, the limited state, or even anarchism, beckons...
...He had no choice...
...Now, it seems undeniable that a foreman exercises power over an assembly-line worker, an office manager over the office workers...
...Foucault thinks the same is true of the human world...
...It's not that I exercise power over you, but rather that power structures the relationship between us, in ways affecting both of us...
...I would certainly like to see a good argument for it...
...I was, no doubt, very much the object of an uncomfortably palpable and almost frivolous exercise of power...
...Here as elsewhere, Foucault wants to dismantle the humanist idea that knowledge is the enemy of power, and enlightenment will set us free...
...The ruthless rationalizing efforts of such entrepreneurs, and later those sharing their psychology if not their religious beliefs, forced other businessmen, whether Protestant or not, terribly diligent or not, to join in the incessant practice of double-entry bookkeeping and all the rest of capitalist rationality...
...We are very good at cloaking domination in the respectful garb of authority...
...I'd like to borrow an example from Max Weber to make the point...
...Chalk up two more hours and another quart...
...Power IKnowledge, I must note, is a somewhat flimsy "book," an episodic collection of interviews and essays...
...Power is more diffuse, more interactive...
...But it will have . . . to do...
...I was rudely surprised...
...Should I wish, as I do, to suggest that Foucault is worth reading, I had better step back a pace or two...
...The truth is unbearable, and will unleash our dread passions...
...Surely we ought to start by recognizing its prevalence...
...Or conversely, they may exercise power by acting unpredictably and so forcing decision-makers to take their vagaries into account...
...but it is all too dreary...
...It is appallingly easy to poke holes in the arguments which purport to justify their authority (just as it is appallingly seldom one encounters arguments against them...
...Otherwise they were driven out of business...
...One of the many ties Foucault wants to establish between power and knowledge is that power is used to compel us to produce "true discourses" about ourselves, in confession, psychoanalysis, and disciplinary mechanisms involving examinations of all sorts...
...The point, I think, is well taken...
...It beckoned invitingly over lazy afternoon coffee and sedulous evening pinball...
...Von Mises became increasingly puzzling...
...Arguably, we shouldn't delve into these subjects...
...To start with, we have to forget the omnicompetent figure bending us to his will...
...But there is, so far as I know, no good theory of power...
...Foucault is at his best here in challenging some of the more tiresome pieties of the Left-that, say, repression is the theoretical key to understanding what's wrong with sex and politics alike...
...But in "Two Lectures," Foucault traces, somewhat obscurely of course, his own concerns...
...Even a slave may contour his master's behavior, by obeying readily after being beaten instead of branded, or by sulking...
...Fou-cault's prose wandered on aimlessly: Mere sentences described dizzying spirals, leaving pullulating subordinate clauses in their wake...
...Unaccountably missing from Foucault's thinking about power is the special place authority holds in buttressing power relationships...
...Politics, they claim, is the stuff of coercion, the exercise of power...
...In France," he offered disdainfully, "one would not introduce the writings of Foucault...
...One could imagine (though here, I fear, we depart exotically from contemporary American society) a whole society of reluctant capitalists, each of whom would love to meander through economic life with far less rigor, no one of whom can afford to take the risk...
...We tend to cast power as lying in the hands of some all-powerful figure-the state, the boss, the teacher, the parent- who proceeds to prevent helpless underlings from doing what they want to...
...I urge those still reading and interested to skip this collection...
...I remembered that my high school classrooms were not the most liberating places known to humankind...
...Foucault is of the opinion they should skip the charade and start the shooting...
...and while his contributions leave us still somewhat short of a full-fledged theory of power, they are valuable...
...Those on the Left either misunderstand or underestimate market institutions, and should, once educated, see the error of their ways...
...It obviously warranted straightaway consignment to the bowels of some musty used bookstore crammed with works only a paper mill might purchase...
...The book was utterly mysterious...
...We need then also to understand the social and psychological mechanisms of authority, the ways in which people come to accept domination as legitimate...
...In political theory," Foucault has written, "we have not yet cut off the head of the king...
...Worse yet, the state, feeding on increased activity, grows hungrier for still more power...
...This dubious piece of science fiction testifies, I suppose, to the endurance of certain ideas and the concerns of the French intellectual Left...
...I learned that one obeyed the owner and manager without question, hoped not to be caught in the crossfire of their remarkably frequent disagreements, and stood always ready for an unjustifiable volley of abuse from the owner (or, worse yet, his odiously fat son...
...I don't mean to defend his account here, but should anything like it be correct, we have an example of power without gain or conscious exercise...
...Finally, for Foucault power is everywhere...
...We are obliged to obey them all...
...If the power-free world of libertarian thought is a fiction, well, it's a valuable fiction...
...But above all I'd recommend History of Sexuality, volume 1, almost all about power...
...But the world of free agents cooperating voluntaristically, on Foucault's view, would have to be a myth, itself a piece of "knowledge" twisting our understanding and actions...
...But we need to take seriously the idea that society is shot through with power, that power is an essential ingredient in social interaction, that it structures roles and behavior in all spheres of life...
...The book, the professor intoned, was wretchedly translated, an unspeakable abridgment-an abortion...
...Even the family, nurtured by generations of diligent conservative applause, was tainted by power, sometimes blunt, generally masked, always present...
...Only the veneer of sentiment, tradition, and manners prevents the struggle for power from engulfing everything...
...Well, a patina of Menckenesque prose may help here too...
...Bacon saw knowledge of the physical world as the means of power...
...I first encountered Michel Foucault my sophomore year in college, in a European intellectual history class...
...We engineered fabulously complex plots to escape French and study hall...
...Foucault's approach is to see what the Gulag doesybr Soviet society, how it fits in...
...Power is rather often a constructive force...
...Surely only the unyielding abominations of abridgment and translation stood between my sophomoric self and the transforming intellectual experience which would anchor my inchoate reveries...
...There are stray insights in the' literature of political science...
...Foucault wishes to complicate our understanding of power...
...There are even certain rituals-wearing ties, say -which must be adhered to, though we may find it impossible to assign responsibility for the rule...
...Tl>e eager young man, functionally illiterate in French, sighed too...
...Blithely unconcerned with the previous contours of my life, it pulled me away from the piano and even curtailed my hours of sleep...
...Uh, Don, why don't you, uh, move all the boxes in the back, uh, a little closer to the wall.'' Two hours later, I had expended perhaps a quart of sweat and moved all the boxes...
...And so we might be led to extend this putatively political understanding of power to social domains, in ways which wouldn't illuminate matters...
...Power in the competition of the marketplace is built into the logic of profit and loss, right along with economic rationality...
...The Protestant entrepreneurs died out...
...mar the boxes, which might then be spurned by customers...
...The manager, a harried, bespectacled fellow with an unerring eye for the flagging worker, barked out the most incomprehensible orders...
...The professor, an emphatically obscure fellow with a mystagogical penchant for lending dramatic emphasis to conjunctions and prepositions, made it clear, I suppose, that this Foucault was shamefully unknown in America...
...yet we still have to play the game, though it has no meaning for any of us...
...The boxes, I gathered by riveting my attention on the occasional coherent phrases bubbling up from the black fury of this energetically obese capitalist, were too close to the wall, and the dripping water from the leaks in the roof might run down the wall, and-aha...
...Eureka...
...Or so we believe...
...I dare not try to describe the acrobatic feats of the paragraphs...
...He insists, rightly I think, that it is irrelevant to argue that Marxist texts have been ignored, or to look for causes of the Gulag "as a sort of disease or abcess, an infection, degeneration or involution," or to say that the Gulag represents a false socialism, or that it is everywhere and so is not a special problem...
...I had been reading Ludwig von Mises' Human Action, and was prepared to meet free individuals...
...Most of the pieces in between seem rather ho-hum, at best...
...Here as elsewhere, the whispering bearers of grim truths make their own power plays, encouraging the rest of us to be silent and accede to their terms...
...We forged passes, victimized substitute teachers, and transferred unimaginable quantities of hostility, fear, and boredom into soccer during gym...
...Such power may be defensible (though it may not be...
...and Discipline and Punish...
...The book ends with an exegesis of Foucault by the editor, a piece often as baffling as the writing of the master himself...
...thought this eager young man I am told is an earlier incarnation of myself...
...The grim truth of the matter is simple: The truth is not always useful...
...And so we need to sound out the conceptual contours of power, to develop a theory of power showing just what power is, how it is gained, lost, used, abused...
...A world that may well be ours...
...To invoke another rusty category Foucault indicts, we might call it ideology...
...Weber bitterly attacked the "iron cage" this historical process caught us in...
...The book commences, incredibly, with a thirty-five page discussion with some Maoists, on whether the people should employ people's courts after the revolution to try their oppressors...
...Politics always threatens to swallow up the voluntaristic dealings of individuals, so beneficial, so inherently praiseworthy...
...And in "Powers and Strategies," he offers some biting strictures on understanding the Gulag...
...Repression, Foucault argues in the opening volume of his History of Sexuality, is too simplistic a category to capture anything of the richness and complexity of power as it actually operates in the world...
...My teachers were intent on maintaining some semblance of order so they could teach us a smattering of math, science, and American excep-tionalism-or did they teach to maintain order...
...Surely this was the stuff of genius...
...outside politics, free individuals come to voluntary arrangements redounding to their mutual benefit...
...The state, as political theorists of all stripes have reminded us, claims the right of life and death...
...The heroically Burkean response is available...
...In the hands of some theorists-Tocqueville, say, or Hayek-the picture is painted in a ' subtle, elegant way, and attains no little compelling rigor...
...The owner, meanwhile, came storming through the double doors and erupted...
...A touch (or even a healthy dose) of mystification is a valuable thing...
...We should, they go on, be especially wary of proposals to augment state power, however worthy the ends may seem, for the means necessarily invoked on their behalf are vicious...
...It may well be that state power is different from that of other institutions...
...Stul-tifera Navis,'' proclaimed the first chapter...
...My French is still quite clumsy, but the translation, I find now, is quite good...
...There are no privileged domains in society where people confront each other in relationships unmediated by power...
...A bit perversely, Foucault insists that we may find power without anyone exercising it, even power whose exercise serves no one...
...The world as rendered by Foucault here is threatening, methodical, ruthless, even nightmarish...
...The low men on the bureaucratic totem pole may exercise power over those on top by following all the rules and so forcing the organization to grind to a halt...
...And Foucault prepared the abridgment...
...I/he was delighted to discover we would read Madness and Civilization, a study of the creation of the "mentally ill...
...The state, the capitalist, the teacher, all rule by right...
...If transitory essays inspire you, read Cornell University Press's collection, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, which is more philosophical and more sustained...
...Weber argued that early Protestants saw in worldly asceticism a magnificent opportunity to serve the Lord and deal with the unfathomable loneliness of Calvinist predestination...
...The book was puzzling...
...Ever ploughing mounting business receipts back into business, lest he be corrupted, the successful Protestant entrepreneur attained knowledge of the unknowable: His success was a sign that he was one of the elect...
...I suddenly found it difficult to think of a social institution not permeated by power...
...and we have to forget him in politics as well as society...
...I simply don't know why Foucault is pursuing power and ignoring authority, any more than I know how he managed to write a study of prisons (Discipline and Punish) without ever probing the retributive theory of punishment...
...But while I have read a good deal more Foucault, his prose still wanders, and I still lose myself in unblushingly oblique metaphors...
...Yet the book exercised some phantom attraction...
...Yet we cling to the aura of legitimacy so stubbornly that many will deny even that there is power here at all...
...A world that one might well brush off as an unpleasant phantasm...
...We have to forget too the stereotypically Freudian conception of power as always repressive, denying, saying no...
...work is no longer a calling...
...I want here simply to set out some of Foucault's insights...
...Now, granted political power is different, more dramatic...
...Such knowledge may then serve to reinforce the hold of power...
...I was, no doubt, free in the marketplace-free to join the ranks of the unemployed, free to let myself be ordered around in some other job by another owner, manager, foreman, or petty dictator...
...Although, comments Foucault, "it has to be posed for every socialist country, insofar as none of these since 1917 has managed to function without a more-or-less developed Gulag system...
...I confess that I'm not sure what to make of this hard truth...
...Who would embrace Tocqueville's nightmare of an all-powerful, paternalistic state, ministering skillfully to the needs of isolated individuals incapable of ennobling joint action...
...The point is not that all of us share some wonderfully egalitarian allotment of power, but that even the apparently meek and helpless- the prisoner, the institutionalized "mentally ill," the child-exercise power...
...I first questioned these views while working one summer as a stockboy in a swimming pool store...
Vol. 14 • July 1981 • No. 7
