On Tue, 25 Jun, Darlene Sybert wrote:
>
> It is in HoS that Foucault says while we still have not cut
> off the head of the king,.i.e, juridical representation is still at work,
> new mechanisms of power are not reducible to the representation of law.
> Instead, power mechanisms since the 18th century have gradually taken
> charge of men as living bodies. And this power operates in terms of
> normalization instead of law, in terms of control instead of
> punishment...
> but his conclusion is that, regardless of all this, we retain an image of
> power that equates it with law and "right." But what Foucault does in
> the next few pages is describe power as a multiplicity of forces that are
> both intentional and non-subjective. Power corrupts because of something
> inherent in "power" not becuase of something inherent in the subject:
> something insidious
> Foucault's best expression of this autonomy of power is in HoS,
> I think,
> "But this does not mean that it results from the choice or decision of
> an individual subject; let us not look for the headquarters that presides
> over its rationality; neither the caste which governs, nor the groups
> which
> control the state apparatus, nor those who make the most important
> economic decisions direct the entire network of power that functions in a
> society (and makes it function); the rationality of power is
> characterized
> by tactics that are often quite explicit at the restricted level where
> they are inscribed (the local cynicism of power), tactics which,
> becoming connected to one another , attracting and propagating one
> another, but finding their base of support and their condition elsewhere,
> end by forming comprehensive systems: the logic is perfectly clear, the
> aims decipherable, and yet it is often the case that no one is there to
> have invented them, and few who can be said to have formulated them: an
> implicit characteristic of the great anonymous, almost unspoken
> strategies which coordinate the loquacious tactics whose "inventors" or
> decisionmakers are often without hypocrisy" (95).
>
> Of course, one reason I am impressed is because that is such a
> beautiful sentence. Faulkner is "way outclassed," as my students say.
>
I think that HoS is the perfect place to look at this complicated relationship
between disciplinary and juridical power, precisely because Foucault's treatment
of relations of power proves much more nuanced in this later work. I think that
he is also more careful here not to make the "general" statements that Michael
Donnelly refers to (or maybe it's just that the general statements he does make
seem less glaring than those from D&P). Moreover, in HoS Foucault also
demonstrates the importance of discourse that some (critics and defenders alike)
had argued Foucault left behind after AK. For example, "It is in discourse that
power and knowledge are joined together. ...Discourses are not once and for all
subservient to power or raised up against it" (HoS, pp. 100-101, just a few
pages after the quote above).
None of this is said in order to grant some sort of privileging to HoS; rather,
it seems necessary to re-emphasize the connections between Foucault's earliest
and his latest works--and the position of D&P in between them.
Sam Chambers
University of Minnesota
>
> It is in HoS that Foucault says while we still have not cut
> off the head of the king,.i.e, juridical representation is still at work,
> new mechanisms of power are not reducible to the representation of law.
> Instead, power mechanisms since the 18th century have gradually taken
> charge of men as living bodies. And this power operates in terms of
> normalization instead of law, in terms of control instead of
> punishment...
> but his conclusion is that, regardless of all this, we retain an image of
> power that equates it with law and "right." But what Foucault does in
> the next few pages is describe power as a multiplicity of forces that are
> both intentional and non-subjective. Power corrupts because of something
> inherent in "power" not becuase of something inherent in the subject:
> something insidious
> Foucault's best expression of this autonomy of power is in HoS,
> I think,
> "But this does not mean that it results from the choice or decision of
> an individual subject; let us not look for the headquarters that presides
> over its rationality; neither the caste which governs, nor the groups
> which
> control the state apparatus, nor those who make the most important
> economic decisions direct the entire network of power that functions in a
> society (and makes it function); the rationality of power is
> characterized
> by tactics that are often quite explicit at the restricted level where
> they are inscribed (the local cynicism of power), tactics which,
> becoming connected to one another , attracting and propagating one
> another, but finding their base of support and their condition elsewhere,
> end by forming comprehensive systems: the logic is perfectly clear, the
> aims decipherable, and yet it is often the case that no one is there to
> have invented them, and few who can be said to have formulated them: an
> implicit characteristic of the great anonymous, almost unspoken
> strategies which coordinate the loquacious tactics whose "inventors" or
> decisionmakers are often without hypocrisy" (95).
>
> Of course, one reason I am impressed is because that is such a
> beautiful sentence. Faulkner is "way outclassed," as my students say.
>
I think that HoS is the perfect place to look at this complicated relationship
between disciplinary and juridical power, precisely because Foucault's treatment
of relations of power proves much more nuanced in this later work. I think that
he is also more careful here not to make the "general" statements that Michael
Donnelly refers to (or maybe it's just that the general statements he does make
seem less glaring than those from D&P). Moreover, in HoS Foucault also
demonstrates the importance of discourse that some (critics and defenders alike)
had argued Foucault left behind after AK. For example, "It is in discourse that
power and knowledge are joined together. ...Discourses are not once and for all
subservient to power or raised up against it" (HoS, pp. 100-101, just a few
pages after the quote above).
None of this is said in order to grant some sort of privileging to HoS; rather,
it seems necessary to re-emphasize the connections between Foucault's earliest
and his latest works--and the position of D&P in between them.
Sam Chambers
University of Minnesota