Understanding Power Power is one of the central concepts of political philosophy. On the last episode, we discussed Deleuze’s concept of the society of control, an attempt to analyze one of the ways that power, including hegemonic state power, acts to affect people. Affection, if we recall, is the application of intensities from a body that corresponds to the augmentation or diminution of a body’s ability to act. In short, in political philosophy, we think of power as a force, from one body, that changes, directs, or influences another body’s ability to act. Deleuze Deleuze’s theory of power was one which sought to analyze power through societies of control, to find out the ways in which Foucault’s earlier theory of disciplinary societies had escaped from enclosures and moved into the everyday world. Deleuze’s theory on control societies is just one conception of power found in postmodern discourse, but there are others. Foucault, who Deleuze’s Postscript on the Society of Control is responding to, eventually moves on from the idea of disciplinary societies, seeing changes in it himself. OLD POWER As we discussed last time, social and political power are thought of as transfers of energies, or affections of bodies on other bodies. Police have the power to stop you, regulations have the power to guide you, social rules have the power to persuade you. We know that power exists, but we also realize that power is a difficult thing to hold and utilize. Just as we saw with Deleuze, Foucault also saw that power was not simply oppressive, it was also productive. This meant that power existed in a neutral sense, as something which could be seized and used, rather than possessed essentially by any given body. Foucault’s goal To create a history of the different modes of power by which, in Western culture, human beings are made into subjects. This is Foucault’s central focus, and it is consistent throughout his entire philosophy. He deals with modes of objectification and seeks to discover how human beings are transformed into subjects, or identities. The question of course is, what does he mean by this? What is the subject? Some postmodern theorists, namely Deleuze, contest the idea of the individual, preferring to use the term dividual to explain the human being who exists between multiple modes of control, particularly the disciplinary kind, which exists in enclosed spaces, and the controlling kind which exists between spaces. Foucault centers his subject around the human mind. Foucault laments that the human mind has become increasingly objectified while retaining its subjectivity at the same time. He gives the example of language, something which has a natural origin, but which has become, since the introduction of the disciplinary Western society, increasingly categorized, organized, conceptualized, quantified, and qualified. Syntaxes have been refined, spellings have been adjusted, dictionaries have become increasingly a source of reliable meaning, etc etc etc. The ability and behavior, in this case language, of human beings has itself become increasingly objectified. Psychology has penetrated even deeper, seeing to classify and type different kinds of people by the differences between how their minds behave against the medical and social norms of society. Eventually, human beings themselves become objects of study one way or another. The results of all study is information, and information is compelling. We seek new information in order to understand the world around us. But because information has such power over us, the objectification of human beings results in their further subjectification. We teach children in school based on particularly narrow standards. Even as adults, institutions only teach us particular ways of doing things. Economics is taught in particular ways, biology and psychology too. As information succeeds in compelling and spreading, it becomes hegemonic. We believe that the information which we are taught today is always better, always an advancement, always more rational and more scientific. Foucault argues that rationality, and the word rational, are dangerous ideas: “We must analyze specific rationalities, rather than always invoking the progress of rationalization in general” His point is, if we understand that there are near innumerable amounts of ways to approach situations, analyze data, project outcomes, then we should question what exactly justifies one particular way of doing things over other ways. Biopower Foucault’s understanding of power comes from The Enlightenment, something which I discuss on the previous episode. As societies create new kinds of technologies, both scientific and social, they already begin to create a new form of power which, by the time of the Enlightenment, was already developing at full speed. Whereas old sovereign power was based around taking life, we see now that social and political power also promise the ability to give life. What is different about this power is that it does not derive from the juridical power of the state, but independently as things like government, management, bureaucracy and administration. He cites this new power in action, talking about “management of prices, maximization of profits, new methodologies of medical treatment, disciplining of social delinquency, and planning and executing epidemic controls. In all of these cases, Foucault sees a new kind of power arising. This is not simply the power of law, or state-power, but also something which Foucault calls biopower, the power to produce subjects. He sees that it is heavily based around biology, sexuality, morality, ethics, behavior, and social control. This power does not seek to command, or destroy, or take, but rather to encourage new kinds of thoughts and desires in people. Foucault recognizes two kinds of behaviors which are happening 1) Information is given out, dispersed by institutions (increasingly removed from enclosed structures) which possess hegemony over human beings. This information sets the kinds of ideas which are socially permitted and acceptable. 2) This information is relayed in a particular way which encourages the acquisition of particular ideas and encourages them to be seen as effective, authoritative, convincing, and unquestionable. This activity can be seen enforced in the grading system in schools when students answers questions incorrectly and are graded down. This doesn’t seek to talk about matters of fact, but about questions of standards and norms. Students being marked down in essays because of divergent ideas or not applying particular definitions to words. Foucault says, “The activity which ensures apprenticeship and the acquisition of aptitudes or types of behavior is developed there by a means of a whole ensemble of regulated communications like lessons, tests, orders, marks of value like stations or ranks based on levels of compliance and knowledge. It is maintained by a series of power processes that include enclosures, surveillance, reward and punishment, and pyramidal hierarchies”. Teachers retain the power to mark tests correctly or incorrectly. Grades and aptitude, as students are told, are then used by prospective employers to evaluate future performance. The construction of a permanent record occurs. Foucault tells us that biopower should not be thought of like sovereign power, but like something that has the power to create the possibilities for future action. This begins to mirror Deleuze’s societies of control, an essay which Deleuze published after Foucault’s death. The teacher possesses a different kind of power from the King. At no point is the student threatened with a gun, rather the student becomes faced with a whole ensemble of power relations relating to their present condition and future possibilities and opportunities. The total structure of all possible actions becomes clear, as well as the total possible constraints. Whereas juridical power is destructive, it takes, biopower is productive. Institutions like government, the police, the military continue to exercise their powers to take within society, but now biopower exerts itself also through these institutions. Think of the rigorous training in the military, tactical exercises and militarization of police. Biopower is exercised in moments like this, where there are checks, supervisions, corrections. However, biopower also seeks to create preventative measures by directing and guiding individual human beings down predictable paths. Studies of crime rates lead to attempts to predict and prevent crime. Efficiency commands decision-making here: What is the best way to hold a rifle, the best answer to this question, the best workers for a particular task. Human beings are objectified themselves as tools of a larger productive effort. All of these phenomena of objectification have the effect of creating norms and standards by which human beings should be measured. Foucault then makes another point, a norm or standard is only possible in reference to a group, a category, a type, or a population. Modern governmentality, which I discuss on the last episode as the rationalizing tendency, emerges at the same time as our understanding of populations does. Ultimately, the sovereign, which in this case has completely diffused from the Hobbesian form, in order to maximize social order and maintain itself, asks, “What sort of populations are to be encouraged?” Sovereignty is exercised over specific territories. Territories have populations. Populations, being made of individual people, have desires and productive capacities that are important to the maintenance of the sovereign. Power, as biopower, is utilized as a way to thread all of these things into one operating entity. Societies of discipline, then, use biopower as a technology that, through the creation of subjects out of human beings through the dissemination and control of knowledge, ultimately maintains hegemony of the sovereign. A criticism: If power, knowledge, and the subject are so intimately intertwined to a sociopolitical regime, then there can be no such thing as a particular knowledge independent of these regimes. This means that any liberating movement, in the name of a particular truth, could be nothing more than a switch in sociopolitical regimes. Foucault doesn’t distinguish from kinds of power, and seems to merely call the expression of any power domination. He appears then to reject power entirely, and therefore the rejection of modernity as such. To this, one can offer a quote from Foucault, and perhaps see that these criticisms are exactly the problems Foucault is attempting to point out: “There are no universal, normative criteria from distinguishing acceptable from unacceptable power. What works for one group may not for another, what is utilitarian for one group may not be for the individual. Because, ultimately, the social and political use of power is the product of human goals and desires that are continually shifting and changing.” Foucault does not, in this text, reject the notion of truth, which is major misconception many take with him, rather he points out the futility of the application of such a concept.