8 Power: mechanics and deep psychologies

A new grounding: theory of power

How can we develop a historical theory of political structures without assuming that this history is linear, teleological, and convergent on universal institutions that are the same for all political experiences? How can one admit the hegemony of capitalism without collapsing all other logics to its dominant logic of reducing all values  to exchange value? Can we escape the Hegelian totalization underpinning the Marxian analysis of Capital without losing an ability to abstract?

From state to power

In its classical conception, “political sociology deals with relationship between state and society” (van Deth, 2010, p. 107). Yet in their volume on Political Sociology: The State of the Art, the authors bear witness to the crisis in the discipline as the founding division between state and civil society that reverberates across other binaries such as public space and private domain has lost its explanatory force. While parent disciplines such as political science and sociology turn to other sub-disciplines, the synthetic aspirations of the political sociological project for accounting for dynamic and recursive relations between state and society by developing a framework that interrelates cultural, economic, and political processes in a global fashion is left unattended.

“The ‘melding and blending of state and society’” makes the tracing of these interactions difficult because typical analytical distinctions do not hold. It is in this context that Foucault’s work on power offered a chance to ask the question of the political in new ways. He conceptualized power’s operation through the formation of subjectivity, the functioning of disciplinary institutions, and its expansion throughout governmental networks (Galloway & Thacker, 2007) . Here, governance should be taken first as a networked-power’s effect that only partially emanate from the state classically understood to be the locus of government (Brown, 2015). Monitoring and regulation of circulation of population, commodities and ideas are conducted from multiple centers that do not neatly coincide with the nation-state and its democratically controlled legal apparatus. Finance, sciences and a series of para-military formations exceed state’s primacy in defining political order. Foucault excavated historical processes whereby the political rationality of sovereignty, i.e., the interest in maintaining one’s rule, was married with the life-sciences.

Theorization of this cross-fertilization produces a paradigm-shift for understanding political sociological phenomena both inside and outside the institutional demarcation of the field. The particularity of instruments through which the ruler comes to govern takes precedence over subjective intentionality—as the former gives texture and the latter erases the force of history (Deleuze, 2006). Psychology is subjected to materiality and not the other way around. Yet, different than the Marxian interest in materially analyzing the set possibilities and limitations of social life that compress the conflicts emerging out of the historically given organization of social life into the polarity of class-conflict, in Foucault (1982) subjectivities will proliferate alongside a multiplicity of knowledge-regimes, often revealing common axes of domination across class divides or the ambiguous status of practices of subject-formation.

Thus, Foucault’s work inherits the questions presented at the beginning of this chapter and answers them in genealogical studies of power relations. Therefore, an analytics of relations of power replaces the binary of state and society. While opening up fertile new grounds for political analysis to grapple with power dynamics immanent to civil society—e.g., in education, in medicine, and in hierarchical organizations of many sorts—this Foucauldian move is also problematic in its displacement of the question of representative democracy that authorizes both the legal-system and the state’s monopoly of violence. In fact, Foucault (1975/1995) often emphasizes his move away from legalistic conceptions and authorizations of power, instead focusing his attention on  mechanisms  montaged to the legal apparatus which he has found to have heterogenous, if not completely separate, logics and histories. In his work, the confluence and dissonance of democratic and scientific procedures of authorizations will not be treated as the modern political problematic par excellence. While the state and democratic bodies produce their own organic intellectuals and experts, the epistemology of the scientist will be irreducible to the definition of the state’s self and interest. How will the democratic population articulate its interests? Are the procedural mechanisms sufficient to understand those interests? If elected representatives lean on scientific modes of representation (the state of the economy, the anthropological, sociological, and historical determination of culture) to produce the voice of the people, where does power really lie?

Here, in this turn from law to knowledge  in the generation of relations of power, Foucault is influenced by Nietzsche’s analysis of the meaning of punishment in his Genealogy of Morals. Nietzsche opposes the derivation of punishment from a single-principle, showing how the practice is marked by a series of historical transformations whereby it becomes overlayed with the expression of multiple social logics inscribed in its operation.

“Yet a word on the origin and the purpose of punishment-two problems that are separate, or ought to be separate: unfortunately, they are usually confounded. How have previous genealogists of morals set about solving these problems? Naively, as has always been their way: they seek out some “purpose” in punishment, for example, revenge or deterrence, then guilelessly place this purpose at the beginning as causa fiendi of punishment, and-have done. The “purpose of law:’ however, is absolutely the last thing to employ in the history of the origin of law: on the contrary, there is for historiography of any kind no more important proposition than the one it took such effort to establish. but which really ought to be established now: the cause of the origin of a thing and its eventual utility, its actual employment and place in a system of purposes, lie worlds apart; whatever exists, having somehow come into being, is again and again reinterpreted to new ends, taken over, transformed, and redirected by some power superior to it; all events in the organic world are a subduing, a becoming master, and all subduing and becoming master involves a fresh interpretation, an adaptation through which any previous “meaning” and “purpose” are necessarily obscured or even obliterated. However well one has understood the utility of any physiological organ (or of a legal institution, a social custom, a political usage, a form in art or in a religious cult); this means nothing regarding its origin: however uncomfortable and disagreeable this may sound to older ears-for one had always believed that to understand the demonstrable purpose, the utility of a thing, a form, or an institution, was also to understand the reason why it originated-the eye being made for seeing. the hand being made for grasping.” (Nietzsche, 1989, p. 77)

In objecting to duality state and society, perhaps reflecting the duality of state and mind, departing from Foucault’s analytics moving close to the particularities of history, Foucauldian research will risk falling into a monism of power instead of approaching power as always a heterogenous or what we may term as a prime constellation eschewing eroding into homogenous categorization. Here, prime refers to co-existing qualities of determinateness and incompleteness that can be found in the set of prime numbers. There are as many types of power relations as dimensions (demographic, material, geographical variances) we can image.

Just as each prime number is uniquely and irreducibly positioned in the series of natural numbers, myriad power relations do not homogenize into an all-encompassing logic. They are neither necessarily oppressive nor necessarily capacitating. The idea of a network of power as a prime constellation acknowledges both the limited and particular character of each power configuration while also conceptualizing potential boundlessness of the transformative possibilities of relations of power contingent upon actual process of discovery. This use of prime numbers as both potential and limit is for instance essential for modern encryption systems whereby time/energy required for factoring a giving code ensures possibility of protected peer-to-peer communication. For Foucault, disciplinary power as it operates in the prison’s panopticon and as it operates in the medical gaze are differentiated by the specificity of apparatuses deployed and the objectives set; yet both apparatuses share a similar investment in establishing a domain of visuality where objects are brought into a relationship with power. There is no totality (Lyotard, 1984).

He will also object to the state’s supposed monopoly over the legal exercise of violence, as supposedly nonviolent disciplinary institutions will mark and shape the body in subtle forms of violence which will be covered with reformist and humanist clothes. These disciplinary institutions are irreducible to state and its field defined by constitution and statures even if they owe their existence to state. Foucault shows inner authority of disciplinary institutions that is based on their particular specific know-how (power/knowledge in Foucault’s idiom) e..g, at certain intersection of medical practice and penal code only doctors can evaluate the exercise of power by medical practioners. Hence, the critical and ambiguous role of expert-witnesses in the system of law echoing Schmitt’s formulation on sovereignty as an ability of perform exception in situ.

Violence is not necessarily absorbed and civilized (Elias, 1939/2000) but proliferates throughout the sciences. Rejecting the Hobbesian view of state that fully absorbs the violence inherent in the so-called state of nature, in Foucault, power has a decentered and networked spatiality where sciences and epistemes  in general stand in excess of law’s regulative capacities.

Power’s temporality is more dynamic and non-linear than the teleological historicity projected by early political philosophy, which conceives of power in terms of a one-dimensional development from immersion in nature towards ever-higher technological and cultural sophistication, until uncontrolled flows are eventually captured and domesticated by political rationality. Yet, with capitalism and neoliberalism, as well as in the general spirit of freedom infusing utopian political projects, the uncertain fluctuations of economic activity are neither fully free from state-intervention nor fully controlled by centralized authority.

Yet, this limitation of the analytics of law does not mean Foucault found magical capacities and freedoms untainted by state power. Power is elemental. The goal of theory is to disclose its context-specific operation thereby making its evaluation possible. Resisting power requires power as well. Therefore, there isn’t a denunciation of power as such but an interest in articulating its technical specificity in order to (re-)gain the ability to move within relations and conditions by necessarily still using power —in short, an interest in staying creative. Different degrees and kinds of power develops by overcoming limits which first require the determination of these limits —thus, a move towards understanding as the condition of possibility of reaching a new open ground i.e., creativity and change. Thus, his analysis opens up the possibility of observing governance in excess of the state in the social texture by limiting particular relations within particular assemblages such as medical institutions or ancient philosophical and priestly manuals on marriage (Foucault, 2003; 2017).

To historicize the empirical state, Foucault does not look at the transcendental schema of the general will developed by J. J. Rousseau’s that expresses the collective interest and intention of the the political body and which is materialized through the nation-state. In Rousseau’s idea of the “social contract”, there is a logical justification of the idea of the nation-state. Through the binding of individual estate-specific interests in the social contract—whereby violence against one another is suspended—a new level of sociality is achieved. For Foucault, the condition of possibility of the state is not this logical justification but performative production of the population through political technologies such as surveys, statistical measures, and regulatory indictments based on probabilistic calculations. Foucault contends that the social is not given a priori but is an ad hoc supplement to the exercise of power. Thus, his mechanics are not the procedural mechanics of representative democracy that channels individual interests into law through elections, parliamentary discussion, and legislation. Foucault traces the conditions of the state and its active life in the development of political rationality whereby state-apparatus start taking charge of the life of the population which extends beyond a limited notion of control of ideology and maximization of human and nonhuman resources and engages a multiplicity of sciences. Thus, Foucault transforms both the character of state and location of governance. On the one hand, state is conceptualized extra-legally. On the other hand, insofar as authorized knowledge-practices that affect bodies, populations and environments exceed binary of state and civil society he locates political power in the networks of power that transcend such opposition without fully displacing it to civil society and economy either as in liberal political philosophy and Marxist theory.

Materialism of power

Thus, in Foucault, the state is not grounded in the population as its legitimizing authority; it is grounded in the population as its condition of possibility in terms of economical and biological variables. The health of the population—not its participation in governance—is what sustains the state. In the separation of sovereignty from its medieval and religious sources, and its reestablishment within an indefinite temporality of history, the state becomes a self-founding idea.

“With this analysis of raison d’état we see the emergence of a historical and political temporality with specific characteristics in comparison with the temporality that dominated the thought of the Middle Ages, and even of the Renaissance, because it is an indefinite temporality, the temporality of a government that is both never- ending and conservative. Consequently, to start with, there is no problem of origin, of foundation, or of legitimacy, and no problem of dynasty either. Even Machiavelli’s problem of how to govern in view of how one acquired power – one cannot govern in the same way when one has inherited power as when one has usurped or conquered – no longer arises, or does only secondarily … Not only is there no point of origin that is pertinent for modifying the art of government, but the problem of the endpoint must not be posed, and this is undoubtedly more important. This means that the state – raison d’état and the government commanded by raison d’état – will not have to concern itself with individual salvation. It will not even have to pursue something like the end of history, either as a fulfillment or as the point at which historical time and eternity join together […] Instead, we now find ourselves in a perspective in which historical time is indefinite, in a perspective of indefinite governmentality with no foreseeable term or final aim. We are in open historicity due to the indefinite character of the political art.” (Foucault, 2007, pp. 259-260)

In Foucault’s contribution and challenge to the philosophical and historical premises of political sociology, his complicated conceptualization of power plays an important role—he renders the founding premise of the discipline as an inquiry into the relation between state and society as historically and technologically specific, therefore as a temporally finite question. The physics of power, in which quantitative research on the rates that express the dynamic state of the population—such as birth-rates, inflation, prices, crime-rates, and rates of diseases—lay bare the dynamic material ground of the state apparatus, which, in idea, preserves its time-less seed, while constantly resurveying the concrete ground from which it maintains its life.

Subjectivity and power

Drawing on historical materialism, especially through the influence of Louis Althusser, Foucault retains the question of the formation of subjectivity. But through the influence of Nietzsche, the relations of power take precedence over a subject-centric approach. If Marx unified the problem of desire into a concept of class-interest, the particular history of 20th century showed that this class-interest is quite elusive in its empirical manifestation. Interest is not homogeneous across the members of a particular class, whether that class be dominant or exploited. Oftentimes, people with wealth are willing to develop alliances with the working class in opposition to the interests that would be presumed on the basis of their class background. Conversely, members of the working class often express forms of consciousness that do not immediately align with a revolutionary logic of class emancipation or even with a reformist logic of class amelioration. In different contexts, the proletariat found their familial, customary, religious, and national identities more important than their class position.

With the problematic of subjectivity, then, the theoretical question turns towards psychological phenomena. How does a particular economic structure shape subjects of desire conducive to its reproduction? What are the emotional processes upon which ideology is built? Would it be possible to conceptualize power not only in terms of repressive mechanics of force but also in terms of generative logics of desire whereby subjects willingly participate in relations of power that might subordinate their interest to that of the dominant groups ?

If so, the political organization of class society may not be just a matter of repressing alternative political imaginaries. Dominant economic powers are able to generate relatively  lenient desires that facilitate a smoother, more eventless reproduction of the economic structure. What, then, are the mechanisms of such political work? And, more philosophically, at what levels does political ideology engage with the subject? Is it a matter of convincing through rational argumentation, or does it involve an emotional component whereby processes of attachment, identification, and separation come into play? For Foucault, the latter is central to an adequate theory of power, which thus turns towards the entanglement of political rationality with the body and with emotional processes through which intersubjective dynamics are formed.

Structuralist theory and post-structuralist departure

At the beginning of 20th century, linguist Ferdinand Saussure proposed a theory of language which radically disconnected the organization of meaning from the intention, activity, and creativity of the subject of enunciation. Saussure showed that language is organized internally through differences and oppositions, and therefore has meaning even without the performance of the speaking subject (1916/1959). In fact, subject’s understanding and operation is an effect of what’s available in the language and not vice-a-versa.

Perhaps in a move similar to decentering of the individual by class interest, Saussure lays bare a level of analysis beyond the control of subject. There is a radical de-subjectification of signification which challenges the long-held subordination of being to discursively articulated meaning stretching from theology (e.g., “at the beginning, there was word”) to even modern science (for a comment mathematical formulation as a universal and adequate language of expression for physical phenomena, see the passage below taken from the philosopher of knowledge, Edmund Husserl). Language understood as the medium of expression of human or divine will is positioned in contrast to language as internally differentiated system of signs. The space opened by the deconstruction of the strict subjective determination of word will become the stage of literary and political play of difference.

Saussure’s theory of language will profoundly impact the analysis of cultural texts, including ancient and modern myths. Here, any signification and all discourses can potentially be treated as a myth. Mythological language is not treated as an archive of the historical experience of a nation (Vico, 1744/2002; Said, 2004). Myth is any presupposed given that is devoid of critical processing. While some theorists will take the displacement of human subjectivity by independent structures of language as a return to immutability and universality-as-sameness taken as the glue that holds together traditional religious messages; other interpreters (Barthes, 1967) of Saussure’s profound framework for grasping the generation  of signification will argue that oppositions running through language are never stabilized. These thinkers argue that linguistic structure is continually modified or displaced through the play of metonymic chains: the structure of linguistic signs, in effect, is forever sliding without reaching a ground that would stop this infinite regression. Deconstructive writers name this the “experience of literature” —as the use of language would have always already  presupposed a user (Blanchot, 1955/1982; Derrida, 1981). The binaries of language may organize culture only temporarily, and even then its context would be radically indeterminate—regardless of the fact that its hold may seem immutable and natural. Deconstruction will work towards critical examination of and creative play with supposed origins, and post-structuralism will attempt to overcome the notion of a closed-system of signification by reference to dynamic ontologies such as the will to power and the irreducible, unanticipatable character of events . All the elements of politics will be transformed by their engagement. (see part IV for an extensive treatment of political ontology of events)

Giving priority to the effectivity of structure, from the standpoint of structuralism subjects are effects of structures which are processual and metastable.  While seemingly minimizing if not discarding the possibility of spontaneous, autonomous, and free action by the individual subject and therefore effectively eliminating the truly political question of action, structuralist theories of the subject indeed lay bare the constitutive oppositions around which the subject comes into being. Adequately grasping the structuralist grids within which subjects move will create the conditions of possibility for attacking them—man and women, West and East, citizen and immigrant. By describing binaries and contrasts that shape the playing field of subjects, the structuralism of Althusser, influenced by F. Saussure, A. Gramsci, C. Lévi-Strauss (1955/1973), and J. Lacan, offers a more psychologically elaborated historical materialism. Working-class subjectivity is conceived as  forcefully captured by the market that dictates the wages and thereby the conditions of survival. To adequately understand the realities of the class position of workers, one must begin not with a pure view of the exact nature of conflicting class dynamics; rather, one must begin inside language and a system of images—in unhistoricized myth. It is not that myths do not carry meaning and inner complexity. Mythological immersion is problematic because it resists its reinterpretation and re-evaluation on the part of its receivers. Capitalism survives because it produces and tells its own story—and, thereby, its political, economic, and cultural institutions shape the desires, hopes, and fears of all its contemporaries.

Espousing Gramsci’s idea of hegemony, Althusser conceptualizes the relation between classes in two inseparable steps: repressive and ideological capture occur simultaneously. What’s enforced is also naturalized. The body of the worker, the site of not only labor but also of desire, then, becomes the location where power operates. This body is not merely conceived as a source of energy, labor-power, but also as an engine of fantasy. Subjects of modernity imagine themselves in a world. Their imagination of their condition affect their relationship to the dominant class, and, more radically, to Capital, conceived within an anti-humanist methodological paradigm. With Althusser’s psychological structuralism, cultural material such as what’s taught in schools (including any relationship of instruction in the age of AI), what’s preached in the church (here church should be conceived figuratively, tentatively standing in for an infinite series of metaphysical social organization that claims to attend to mental/spiritual well-being of the individual and community), and what’s shown in theaters (extending to media of all kinds) become primary political arenas where ideology operates on the subject.

One becomes a subject through interpellation. Just as being called by one’s name is an immediate experience of relating to others as a subject, Althusser showed that the institutions of civil society, while they are not as repressive as the police and legal apparatuses of the state,  they are still imbued with a force of subject-formation. With Althusser’s psychoanalytically informed theory of subjectivity, the subject starts to be understood not only as an effect of economic relations of property ownership and the socially afforded ability to accumulate wealth, but in terms of linguistic performance and visibility. The subject is a subject of metonymically distributed language and the subject has a body that is seen in a particular light. With this rich synthesis, political theory merges with cultural theory and gains psychic elaboration and depth beyond the one-dimensional calculation of self-interest and the pure mechanics of power.

Foucault, as Althusser’s student, will further elaborate the latter’s thinking on subjectivity. While direct references to historical materialism, or more immediately to Marxism, will be removed insofar as Foucault will reject the systematic character of Marxist thought and its totalization of historical experience, he will nevertheless preserve the main vectors of philosophic investigation including an interest in describing the historicity of forms of social relations. Instead of the synchronous relationship between technology and the mode of production, political technologies such as disciplinary power will be conceived as evolving and as endowed with process of determination exceeding any particular epoch. What has emerged in monastic exercises of ascetic practices such as fasting, periodic prayer, and sexual abstinence will become tools of reform in modern power relations endemic to the criminal justice system, the medical system, the education system and the economy. In short, wherever modern relations needed to invent new subjectivities, disciplinary power with its focus on the fine details of bodily learning will be taken up.

Thus, there will still be a relationship of power, but this will not be based solely on class domination. Knowledge and technology will diagonally cross class analysis. What Foucault calls political technologies such as discipline, the panopticon, and biopolitics do not annul economic determinants but complicate them. Knowledge is not the mere expression of a worldview belonging to a historically specific class position. Foucault (1970) thinks that the very theories of political economy, including that of Marxism, are permeated by rules of thinking that are not purely derived from their object of study. In this instance, one might detect elements of Kantianism  as well as Nietzscheanism in Foucault insofar as he highlights the formative character of thought beyond its representational role in mediating what’s deemed to be objective reality.

For instance, one can speak of the commercialization of health-care under the capitalist economy whereby patients are increasingly seen as customers and health increasingly becomes a product. Yet, the intelligibility of particular power relations established around patients are not reducible to economic processes of value maximization. The ways in which one becomes a case to be examined and studied, a body to be normalized, and a subject to be rendered docile exceed the logic of capital without always contradicting it. With this intervention that marks the relationship between the will to power and the will to knowledge, the Nietzschean research of Michel Foucault opens up new grounds for theoretical and political studies of disability, gender, media, race, science and technology (Kittler, 1986/1999, Hacking, 1990, Rose, 1998; Ferguson, 2012; Eds. Clough & Willse, 2011, Puar, 2017).

Foucault calls this axis of analysis power/knowledge. This term highlights the inseparable link between these elements–knowledge and power—where each presupposes the other. The claims towards moral truth or expert knowledge are underwritten by desires for expansion of power. Discharge of power finds itself forever objectifying and intellectualizing its movement. There is no exercise of power without a rudimentary technique and there is no pure knowledge without a pragmatic grounding in reality—however elusive that reality can epistemically be. This return to the grounds of reality will sometimes be sought through the biological body/flesh and sometimes through technology and the environment at large. It will be searched in the affirmation of hitherto foreclosed and disavowed differences. Yet, in every framing of difference, the constitutive context of ideas, given in discursive, mnemonic, or even pictorial form, will haunt the way we come to the assurance of establishing contact with the ground. Medicalizing power is fundamentally different across different periods of modernity just pedagogical, militaristic and productive technologies of self. Through a fundamental historical epistemology (Dews, 1992) that works towards decentering claims of power/knowledge, the questions of agency, freedom and affirmation will not be resolved in reference to one-dimensional analytics of repression or authoritarianism. This ontological wavering will not come to a full-stop. Thus, Foucault’s research on political discourses permeating what’s otherwise viewed as neutral zones of social interaction will prove to be abundantly fruitful in generating a new series of problematizations.

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