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 same for all political experiences? How can one admit hegemony of capitalism without collapsing all other logics to its dominant logic of reducing all value into exchange value? Can we escape Hegelian totalization underpinning 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 parenting disciplines such as political sciences and sociology turn to other sub-disciplines, the synthetic aspirations of political sociological project for accounting for dynamic and recursive relations between state and society by developing a framework that interrelates cultural, economical and political processes in a global fashion is left unattended.

“The ‘melding and blending of state and society’” makes tracing of these interactions difficult as typical analytical distinctions do not hold. It is in this context Foucault’s work on power offered a chance to ask the question of political in new ways. He conceptualized power’s operation through formation of subjectivity, through disciplinary institutions, as well as its expansion through governmental networks. Foucault excavated historical processes whereby the political rationality of the sovereignty, i.e. interest in maintaining one’s rule, married with life-sciences.

Theorization of this cross-fertilization produces a paradigm-shift for understanding political sociological phenomena inside and outside of institutional demarcation of the field. Particularity of instruments through which the ruler come 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 Marxian interest in analyzing materially set possibilities and limitations over social life that compress the conflicts emerging out of historically given organization of social life into the polarity of class-conflict, in Foucault (1982) subjectivities will proliferate alongside multiplicity of knowledge-regimes often showing common axes of domination across class divides or ambiguous status of practices of subject-formation.

Then, 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. This move while opening up new fertile grounds for political analysis to understand power dynamics immanent to civil society, in education, medicine, hierarchical organizations of many sorts; it is also problematic in its displacement of the question of representative democracy that authorizes legal-system as well as monopoly of violence. In fact, Foucault (1975/1995) often will make the point of moving away from legalistic conception and authorization of power as he will find mechanics montaged to the legal apparatus to have heterogenous if not completely separate logic and history. In his work the confluence and dissonance of democratic and scientific procedures of authorizations will not be treated as modern political problematic par excellence. While the state and democratic bodies produce its own organic intellectuals and experts, the epistemology of the scientist will be irreducible to definition of state’s self and interest. How will the democratic population articulate its interests? Is the procedural mechanisms sufficient to understand it? If the elected representatives lean on scientific modes of representation (state of economy, anthropological, sociological and historical determination of culture) to produce the voice of the people, where does the power really lie?

Here, in this turn towards law to knowledge in the generation of relation of power, Foucault is influenced by Nietzsche’s analysis of meaning of punishment in his Genealogy of Morals. Nietzsche opposing derivation of punishment from a single-principle as he shows how the practice is marked by a series of historical transformations that make it overlayed expressing multiple social logics inscribed on 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 as a heterogenous or prime constellation eschewing eroding into homogenous categorization. Here, prime refers to co-existing qualities of determinateness and incompleteness to prime numbers. It both acknowledges possibility of knowledge and its limits. For Foucault, disciplinary power as it operates in prison’s panoptic and as it operates in medical gaze are differentiated by the specificity of apparatuses deployed and objectives set while sharing 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 state’s supposed monopoly over the legitimate use of violence as disciplinary institutions will mark and shape the body in subtle forms of violence which will be covered with reformist and humanist clothes. Violence is not necessarily absorbed and civilized (Elias, 1939/2000) but proliferate through sciences. Rejecting the Hobbesian view of state that fully absorbs 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 teleological historicity of early political philosophy that one dimensional development from immersion into nature towards higher technological and cultural sophistication where 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 economical activity is 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 specifity to (re-)gain the ability to move within relations and conditions by it —in short, an interest in staying creative. Different degrees and kinds of power develops by overcoming limits which first require determination of these limits —a move towards closure as condition of possibility of reaching a new open ground. Thus, conversely, his analysis opens up the possibility of observing state-effects in the social texture in general as wide as in material assemblages of medical institutions and in ancient manuals on marriage.

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 that materializes through the nation-state. In Rousseau’s idea of “social contract”, there is a logical justification of the idea of nation-state. Through 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 such as calculations. For him, social is not given a priori but an ad hoc supplement to 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.

Materialism of power

Thus, in Foucault, state is not grounded in population as its legitimizing authority, it is grounded in population as its condition of possibility in terms of economical and biological variables. The health of the population sustains the state not its participation in governance. In the separation of sovereignty from its medieval and religious sources and reestablishing with 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 philosophical and historical premises of political sociology, his complicated conceptualization of power plays an important role as he renders the founding premise of the discipline as an inquiry into the relation between sate and society as historically and technologically specific, therefore a temporally finite question. 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, rates of diseases lay bare dynamic material ground of the state apparatus which in idea preserves its time-less seed while constantly resurveying the ground it can stay alive.

Subjectivity and power

From historical materialism, especially through the influence of Louis Althusser, Foucault keeps the question of formation of subjectivity. But through the influence of Nietzsche, the relations of power take precedence over subject-centric approach. If Marx unified the problem of desire into a concept of class-interest, 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 either dominant or exploited class. Often times, people with wealth are willing to develop alliances with the working class in opposition to the interests of their class background. Conversely, members of the working class express forms of consciousness that do not immediately align with a revolutionary logic of class emancipation. At different contexts, 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 the power not only in terms of repressive mechanics of force but also in terms of generative logic of desire where subjects willingly participate into the relations of power that might subordinate their interest to that of the dominant groups ?

Then, political organization of class society may not be just a matter of repressing alternative political imaginaries. Dominant economic powers are able to generate desires lenient for more eventless reproduction of the economic structure. Then, what are the mechanisms of such political work? And more philosophically, at what levels 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? Thus, theory of power turns towards entanglements of political rationality with the body and emotional processes through which intersubjective dynamics are formed.

Structuralist theory and post-structuralist departure

At the beginning of 20th century, linguist Saussure proposed a theory of language which radically disconnected 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, therefore has meaning even without the performance of the speaking subject (1916/1959).

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 theological understanding of word as word of God. In the space opened by the deconstruction of the strict determination of word, the space of literature, the play of difference and writing will operate.

His theory of language will profoundly the impact 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 archive of historical experience of a nation (Vico, 1744/2002; Said, 2004). Myth is any presupposed given 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 glue that holds together traditional religious messages; other interpreters (Barthes, 1967) of Saussure’s profound framework for making of signification will argue that oppositions running through language are never stabilized and through metonymic chains, linguistic structure, in effect, is forever sliding without reaching a ground that would stop infinite regression. Deconstructive writers names this “experience of literature” —as use of language would have 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—however its hold may seem immutable and natural. Deconstruction will work towards critical examination and creative play with supposed origins, and post-structuralism will attempt to overcome closed-system of signification by reference dynamic ontologies such as will to power and events. All the elements of politics will be transformed by their engagement.

Giving priority to effectivity of structure, in this thinking subjects are effects of structures which are processual and metastable.  While seemingly minimizing if not discarding possibility of spontaneous, autonomous and free action of individual subject and therefore effectively eliminating the truly political question of action; structuralist theories of subject indeed lays bare constitutive oppositions around which subject comes into being. Structuralist grids will create the condition of possibility of attacking them -man and women, West and East, citizen and immigrant. By describing binaries and contrasts that shape the playing field of the subjects; 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 not only forcefully captured by the market that dictates the wages and thereby conditions of survival. One begins not by pure view of exact nature of conflicting class dynamics, one begins 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 receivers reinterpretation and re-evaluation. Capitalism survives because it produces it tells its own story, and thereby, its political, economic and cultural institutions shape the desire, hope and fear of all its contemporaries.

Espousing Gramsci’s idea of hegemony, Althusser conceptualizes the relation between classes in two inseparable steps. There is simultaneous repressive and ideological capture. What’s enforced is also naturalized. The body of the worker, the site of not only labor but also of desire, then, becomes 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 in within an anti-humanist methodological paradigm. With Althusser’s psychological structuralism, cultural material such as what’s taught in schools (any relationship of instruction the age of AI), what’s preached in the church (here church should be conceived figuratively), and what’s shown in theaters (media of all kinds) become primary political arenas where ideology operates on the subject.

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

Foucault, as his student, will elaborate on Althusser’s thinking on subjectivity. While direct references to historical materialism, or more immediately Marxism will be removed insofar as Foucault will reject systematic character of Marxist thought and its totalization of historical experience; he will nevertheless will preserve the main vectors of philosophic investigation including an interest in describing historicity of forms of social relations. Instead of synchronous relationship between technology and mode of production, political technologies such as disciplinary power will evolve and have a process of determination exceeding a 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 in criminal justice system, medical system, education system and economy. In short, wherever modern relations needed to invent new subjectivities disciplinary power with its focus on fine details of bodily learning will be taken up.

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

For instance, one can speak of commercialization of health-care under capitalist economy whereby patients are increasingly seen as customers and health increasingly becomes a product. Yet, intelligibility of particular power relations established around patients are not reducible to economic processes of value maximization. The ways in which one become 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, Foucault opens up new grounds for disability studies, gender studies, race studies, media studies, science and technology studies. Foucault calls this axis of analysis power/knowledge. There is an inseparable link where each of these elements–knowledge and power—presupposes the other. 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 hoped to be achieved through biological body/flesh and sometimes through technology and environment at large. It will be searched in the affirmation of hitherto foreclosed and disavowed differences. Yet, in every framing, the constitutive trace 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.  The 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 fields.

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