Michel Foucault: Power and struggle
Deborah Cook examines the work of a thinker who issued ‘a powerful warning against blind submission to the will of authorities’
Michel Foucault’s early life was marked decisively by the Second World War. Asked by an interviewer in 1978 why he decided to become a philosopher, Foucault replied: “We did not know when I was ten or eleven whether we would become German or remain French. We did not know whether we would die or not in the bombing”. By the time he was sixteen, Foucault “knew only one thing”: that school life would provide him with “an environment protected from exterior threats”. To this, Foucault added that knowledge “functions as a protection of individual existence and as a comprehension of the exterior world”. Knowledge is “a means of surviving by understanding”.
In 1946 Foucault gained admission to the École Normale Supérieure. Awarded a degree in psychopathology in 1952, he worked for two years with psychiatric patients at the Hôpital Sainte-Anne in Paris, where he continued to study psychology. During this time he also helped to translate Ludwig Binswanger’s Traum und Existenz – for which he wrote a long introduction. In 1953 and 1954, Foucault taught psychology at the University of Lille, and published his first books: a book on mental illness and a short work tracing the history of psychology from 1850 to 1950. Occupying the position of director of the Maison de France in Uppsala in the mid-1950s, he began research for a history of madness in the West that would become his primary thesis at the Sorbonne.
After spending a year at the University of Warsaw, where he was tasked with re-opening the university’s Centre of French Civilization, Foucault served briefly as director of the French Institute in Hamburg. He accepted a position as lecturer in psychology at the University of Clermont-Ferrand in 1960, and received his doctorate from the Sorbonne in 1961. His Folie et déraison was also published in 1961, and the publication of Naissance de la clinique and Raymond Roussel followed two years later. And by 1966, with the extraordinary success of Les mots et les choses, Foucault had become a leading intellectual in France. In September of that same year, he left France to teach at the University of Tunis, then returning in 1968 to take up the position of Professor of Philosophy at the University of Vincennes. In 1969, L’archéologie du savoir appeared.
In 1970 Foucault was awarded a prestigious chair at the Collège de France. Every year thereafter until his death in 1984 (with the exception of a sabbatical year), Foucault gave lectures on themes connected to his research. Among the earlier lectures (all of which are translated into English), “Penal Theories and Institutions” (1971–72), “The Punitive Society” (1972–73), “Psychiatric Power” (1973–74), and “Abnormal” (1974–75) are related to research that led to the publication of Surveiller et punir in 1975. From 1975 to 1978, Foucault gave lectures on pastoral power, biopower and the genealogy of the Western state. Some of the material for these lectures was incorporated into the first volume of L’Histoire de la sexualité (1976); other material is related to themes that are treated in the many essays and articles that Foucault wrote in the late 1970s. Foucault’s later lectures – “On the Government of the Living” (1979–80), “The Hermeneutics of the Subject” (1981–82), and “The Government of Self and Others” (1982–84) – served, in part, as research material for the final three volumes of L’Histoire de la sexualité.
The lectures reveal the various themes and preoccupations in Foucault’s work in the 1970s and 80s; they also help to contextualize many of the changes in his thought. Still, it is difficult to characterize Foucault’s work. He often denied that he was a theorist, by which he meant someone who works within an overarching system. Describing himself as an experimenter, Foucault frequently underscored the tentative and fragmentary nature of his research. His work is also anti-systematic in the sense that it explores the logic of specific mechanisms, technologies and strategies of power. This exploration requires that close attention be paid to historical conditions whose singularity defies subsumption under a universal history. But Foucault’s antipathy towards systematic thought also meant that he enthusiastically pursued new directions in his research (his later study of care of the self in ancient Greece and Hellenistic Rome is a case in point), and he readily acknowledged the disparities between his earlier and later work.
Foucault’s books and lectures are highly original histories that centre on power relations, including the struggles that have been waged, and that continue to be waged, against prevailing forms of power by individuals and groups in different sites. In other words, Foucault’s view of history highlights the antagonisms, conflicts and struggles that rend it, and for this reason, Foucault openly acknowledged his debt to Karl Marx. However, rather than examining the economic forces that have shaped Western history, Foucault studied power relations in both institutional settings and the modern state. As he noted in interviews, his interest in power was grounded in his experiences of the Second World War: it was the twin threats of fascism and Stalinism that led Foucault to focus on power relations and on the types of knowledge that these relations invariably spawned.
What, then, are power relations? Adopting a view of power that owes much to Friedrich Nietzsche, Foucault contends that power relations consist in a play of forces in which one force relates to another by attempting to bring it under its influence or control (from benign activities, such as teaching someone how to do something, to more malign activities involving coercion). When one force proves weaker than the other, the stronger force will be able to direct its conduct “in a fairly constant manner and with reasonable certainty”. By extension, the stronger force will also shape the identity of the weaker force. However, since power is exercised everywhere, Foucault insisted that struggle, too, is ubiquitous. Society consists in “a perpetual and multiform struggle” because “power relations necessarily incite, constantly call for and open up the possibility of resistance”.
Despite his claims about the ubiquity of power and struggle, Foucault rejected the criticism that he reduces everything to power. In fact, power relations by no means explain all historical phenomena; power is not an ultimate explanatory principle because other forces (including economic ones) have shaped history as well, and in some cases, power relations are not decisive. Furthermore, power is not omnipotent. Far from it: Foucault argued that the deployment of “so many power relations, so many systems of control, so many forms of surveillance” only demonstrates how weak power is. He also denied that prevailing forms of power determine individuals “all the way down”. Since such forces selectively shape certain capacities, drives and forces, while ignoring others, individuals may enjoy a greater or lesser margin of manoeuvre with respect to them. In fact, Foucault said that he was “dumbfounded” that some readers saw in his histories “the affirmation of a determinism from which one cannot escape”.
In the context of studying power relations, Foucault also examined “the dynastics of knowledge, the relation that exists between the major types of discourse observable in a culture and the historical conditions, economic conditions, and political conditions of their appearance and formation”. Specifically, some of his histories focus on the historical problems to which the invention of new concepts and the recasting of old ones respond. For example, in his genealogy of sexuality, Foucault remarked that the modern concept of sex emerged when the biopolitical state began to regulate and manage the population at the turn of the nineteenth century. At this time, sex became a central concern in many disciplines (including biology and medicine); these disciplines constructed around sex “an immense apparatus for producing truth”, turning “the truth of sex” into “something fundamental”, because sex allegedly defines our core identity.
In direct response to biopolitical attempts to control our sexual lives, struggles have been waged; these invoke the “‘right’ to life, to one’s body, to health, to happiness, to the satisfaction of needs”. Foucault was critical of the pernicious effects of such power: he criticized power’s subjection of individuals, along with the forms of subjectivity that subjection engenders. In particular, he was concerned that power relations today tend to produce submissive individuals who blindly obey authority figures. More generally, Foucault claims that Western history has known three types of struggle: struggles against ethnic, social and religious domination, struggles against “forms of exploitation that separate individuals from what they produce”, and struggles “against that which ties the individual to himself and subjects him to others in this way (struggles against subjection, against forms of subjectivity and submission)”. one type of struggle may appear in an isolated form during a particular historical period, but types may also be mixed. Even when mixed, however, one type often predominates, and today struggles against subjection predominate.
The primary goal of struggles against subjection is to enhance the individual’s autonomy. Foucault explicitly declared himself a champion of autonomy in the Kantian sense of self-legislation and self-determination. He also said that, to achieve autonomy, the asymmetrical relations between institutions (including the state) and individuals must be transformed. Calling the transformation of these relations “enlightenment”, Foucault argued that “what Aufklärung has to do, and is in the process of doing, is precisely to redistribute the relationships between government of self and government of others”. In his studies of resistance, Foucault detected a persistent question: “How not to be governed like that, by that, in the name of these principles, in view of such objectives and by means of such methods, not like that, not for that, not by them?” More to the point, Foucault aligned himself with those who ask this question when he said that a central question in his own work is how we can avoid being governed so much.
What forms do power relations take in order to foster submissiveness? To answer this question, one needs to take a closer look at Foucault’s genealogy of modern power relations. For Foucault traced the two types of power on which his work is primarily focused – disciplinary power and biopower – back to a form of power which he named “pastoral power”. In lectures and essays, Foucault argued that power relations in the modern age are rooted in practices and techniques that were developed by the early Christian Church in its concerted attempts to govern the souls of individuals. (Parenthetically, Foucault also sought to demonstrate that the development of capitalism itself owed a great deal to pastoral practices.)
In a process that was “absolutely unique in history”, Foucault wrote, a religious community constituted itself as a church. From its inception, the Christian Church was an institution that aimed “to govern men in their daily life on the grounds of leading them to eternal life”. Yet, apart from governing individuals, the Church sought to govern on a grander scale: not simply “on the scale of a definite group … but of the whole of humanity”. Omnes et singulatim: the Church attempted to govern both the conduct of the Christian flock as a whole and the conduct of each individual sheep. To fulfil this task of governing all and each, the Church borrowed a number of practices (including self-examination and ascetic practices) that originated in ancient Greece and Rome. Although these practices were designed to foster the autonomy of individuals, the Church transformed them as it delegated the power to govern conduct to priests.
In fact, the Christian Church transformed these practices to such an extent that, rather than promoting autonomy, they served instead to inculcate submissiveness. on Foucault’s view, one of the primary goals of the pastoral practices and techniques that were adopted by biopower and disciplinary power is the promotion of blind and unquestioning obedience in those who are subjected to them. But disciplinary power and biopower also reveal their roots in the Christian pastorate to the extent that they encourage self-abnegation or self-renunciation. According to Foucault, Western individuals have inherited “the tradition of Christian morality which makes self-renunciation the condition for salvation”.
In contrast to those who promoted self-government in ancient Greece, the Christian pastorate insisted on compliance with spiritual directors. Comparing the pastor to “a doctor who has to take responsibility for each soul and for the sickness of each soul”, Foucault adds that the pastor demands “complete subordination” from individuals. With the pastorate, obedience effectively becomes an end in itself: “One obeys in order to be obedient, in order to arrive at a state of obedience”. This obedience to authority figures must be accompanied by meekness and humility. Being humble effectively means “knowing that any will of one’s own is a bad will”. According to Foucault, “if there is an end to obedience, it is a state of obedience defined by the definitive and complete renunciation of one’s will”. In other words, “in pastoral power … we have a mode of individualization that not only does not take place by way of affirmation of the self, but one that entails destruction of the self”.
Yet, for Foucault, one of the more important practices deployed by the Christian Church in its government of souls had no counterpart in the classical care of the self that was invented in Greece. This was the practice of confession, or of truth-telling: revealing to another the truth about oneself. Foucault also claims that confession introduced a “fundamentally secular model, namely the judicial model, into the usual pastoral practice”. Originally a judicial practice, then, confession would eventually become an obligatory sacrament for all Christians. But Foucault also insisted on the importance of this practice up to the present day.
Seeking to foster obedience, priests and pastors turned confession into a practice “by which a certain secret inner truth of the hidden soul becomes the element through which the pastor’s power is exercised, by which obedience is practiced, by which the relationship of complete obedience is assured, and through which … the economy of merits and faults passes”. In fact, Foucault claims that the examination of conscience in Christian confession was “absolutely innovative” in this respect. The pastorate is “one of the decisive moments in the history of power in Western societies” because it was the first form of power to constitute a subject “who is subjected in continuous networks of obedience, and … subjectified [subjectivé] through the compulsory extraction of truth”.
Pastoral power remained separate from political power for many centuries. After the Reformation, however, Foucault argues that there was a gradual “transition from the pastoral of souls to the political government of men”. Commenting on this transition, he notes that a “profound reorganization of pastoral power” occurred when the pastoral art of governing individuals was introduced “into politics, at the end of the sixteenth and in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries”. Although the state would modify the older pastoral arts of governing the conduct of individuals, it would only do so by turning Christian arts of government into “a calculated and reflected practice”. It was this that marked “the threshold of the modern state”.
Disciplinary power, which is exercised in modern institutions (including schools, hospitals and the army), and the biopower wielded by the modern state are both firmly rooted in pastoral power. As Foucault’s genealogy of the state shows, the state began to deploy pastoral techniques with a view to governing the population as a whole. Government by the state extended from the population’s “biological rootedness through the species up to the surface that gives one a hold provided by the public”. Of course, the pastoral arts of government adopted by the state and disciplinary institutions no longer pretended to lead “people to their salvation in the next world”. Rather, they tried to ensure their salvation in this one. Secular salvation concerns “health, well-being (that is, sufficient wealth, standard of living), security, [and] protection against accidents”.
In short, pastoral techniques were modified by Western states and institutions once the influence of the Christian Church began to wane (with the advent of what Foucault calls the “degovernmentalization of the cosmos”). The authority of pastors or priests, which was based on the special access they were thought to have to a higher power, was replaced by a new type of authority founded on expertise. In this transition, the “officials of pastoral power increased”; these now include police, teachers, social welfare agencies and physicians. Further, just as pastoral power sought to govern all and each, knowledge of human beings in the modern age would revolve “around two roles: one globalizing and quantitative, concerning the population; the other, analytical, concerning the individual”. With this knowledge, pastoral power “suddenly spread out into the whole social body”.
I have already remarked that the historical transition from pastoral power to disciplinary power and biopower allowed secular and scientific authority to displace religious authority. Nevertheless, once the state and its institutional accomplices became “responsible for, entrusted with, and assigned new tasks of conducting souls”, they made use of a modified version of the practice of confession. In the West, confession now consists in baring one’s soul to a scientific priesthood – to physicians, psychologists, and others – with a view to curing physical, psychological and other ills. In fact, since disciplinary power and biopower merely modified pastoral practices and techniques, Foucault says that pastoral power “has not yet experienced the process of profound revolution that would have definitively dispelled it from history”.
In its modern form, “the pastorate is deployed to a great extent through medical knowledge, institutions, and practices”. Developing a theme that was only latent in History of Madness, Foucault claims that medicine is “one of the great powers that have been heirs to the pastorate”. Medicine reveals its links to pastoral practices when it subjects individuals to perpetual examination and surveillance with the aim of fostering adaptation and conformity to the norms that inform it. In fact, in Birth of the Clinic, Foucault noted that the social sciences (which disciplinary institutions spawned) borrow their own norms from medicine. A decade later, he remarked that, with its quasi-medical norms, disciplinary institutions create “a kind of hierarchy of more or less able individuals, a hierarchy of those who obey a certain norm and those who deviate from it, of those who can be corrected and those who cannot, of those whom one can correct with a certain technique and those for whom other means of correction must be used”.
Foucault’s views about the oppressive nature of power in the West help to explain the emancipatory dimension of his work, its concern for autonomy or – as Kant put it in “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment” – its goal of releasing individuals from the tutelage of guardians. His concerns about disciplinary power and biopower also help to explain why he spent the last years of his life studying ancient Greece and Hellenistic Rome. Given the pervasiveness of pastoral power and its successors, Foucault believed that individuals in the West have been “constituted through practices of subjection”, rather than “in a more autonomous way, through practices of liberation, of liberty, as in Antiquity”. Much like Nietzsche, Foucault also stressed our “in-depth Christianization”. He tried to expose Christianity’s more problematic practices and to find effective ways to combat their effects of submissiveness and obedience.
Foucault studied practices in ancient Greece and Hellenistic Rome that turned the self back on itself in a critical and self-reflective way, even as they fostered a culture of the self and an art of living that aimed to strengthen the autonomy of individuals with respect to historical conditions and events. In so doing, he explored how we might counter the “art”, rooted in pastoral power, “of conducting, directing, leading, guiding, taking in hand, and manipulating people, an art of monitoring them and urging them on step by step, an art with the function of taking charge of people collectively and individually throughout their lives and at every moment of their existence”. Still, Foucault did not propose that Greek practices be adopted telles quelles; he simply showed that practices that promoted autonomy had been devised in the past, and he suggested that new ones could be invented to enable individuals to govern themselves better.
Following Kant, Foucault criticized the practices that impede maturity, issuing a powerful warning against blind submission to the will of authorities. With Kant, he also insisted that the subject has a “right to question truth concerning its power effects and to question power about its discourses of truth”. Indeed, Foucault notes that his view of critique resembles Kant’s idea of enlightenment: both involve “the art of voluntary inservitude, of reflective indocility”. For Foucault, moreover, philosophy as a whole exemplifies this art. The history of philosophy is a history of parrěsia, of the courageous practice of speaking truth to power.
By the end of his regrettably short life, then, Foucault recognized that he belonged to the tradition of critical philosophy that runs from Kant and Hegel “to the Frankfurt School, passing through Nietzsche, Max Weber and so on”. As a critical thinker, he promoted maturity by encouraging his readers to engage in sustained – critical and self-critical – reflection on the historical conditions that have made them what they are. For by understanding how they are entangled in these conditions, readers might be able to rise above them and resist them. And, for Foucault, whatever freedom we can meaningfully be said to possess consists in resistance to prevailing forms of power.
Deborah Cook is professor of Philosophy at the University of Windsor.