Colin Seger

W(h)ither Social Change

IDCE 30242
Dr. Asher
5/16/11
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← Foucault and Resistance Within Power/Knowledge:
← A review of the literature
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The consideration of Foucault’s insight into power is an endeavor that is steeped in

complexity. Terms such as ‘disciplinary space' and ‘subject’ must be considered in their intended

context and not in colloquial or everyday parlance. The organization and systematization

inherent to the social sciences and much of modern institutional behavior are similarly necessary

to contextualize in a certain manner, in one sense liberating for the identification of individuality,

in another for their judgment of the individual against a normalized framework.

The goal of this paper is to paint a picture of the complexity of Foucault’s

power/knowledge relationship in order to make plain some of the recurring themes, as well as to

create a basis for the exploration of possible paths to resistance in social arrangements that

perpetuate modes of inequality. A firm grounding in Foucault and the various interpretations of

his work is necessary to complete this task. Though a thorough examination of Foucault’s works

could be called for, a subset of his writings and a large sampling of those who have studied and

written on his ideas is justified, and indeed necessary, to make plain power/knowledge and

possible forms of resistance from a larger and more varied body of work.

Rouse, Joseph. 2005. “Power/Knowledge”. In The Cambridge Companion to

Foucault. Edited by Gary Gutting. Cambridge University Press.

Foucault’s work on power as an output of the modernist and Western occupation with

social science is set in vivid detail by Joseph Rouse. Foucault outlined his theory of power

through his inquiry into the changing nature of the human sciences. Rouse takes up what others
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would call ‘early Foucault’ and his outline of practices of “discipline surveillance and constraint”

(p. 95). ‘Early Foucault’ initially based his insight into power/knowledge on the consequences of

a new power structure that could no longer rely on the spectacle of discipline in the public sphere

The new “disciplinary space” opened up by the social sciences worked not as a unilateral

force grounded in the legitimacy of the sovereign, but rather, it operated by making the subject

more visible and knowable to the arbiters of the social sciences. The “science” of the social

sciences made explicit the knowable subject by creating metrics where humans could be

evaluated along a set of criteria that could be compared against others (p. 95). “Presences and

absences” of behavior were consequently codified and normalized in order to shape how the

subject operated in the social realm (p. 95).

The retooling of the social sciences as a result of enlightenment thinking sought to bring

all aspects of behavior under the gaze of the social scientist. In turn, when a certain behavior

was known, further refinement through observation, discipline and restraint, was attained

through a repeat of this regime of codification. Knowledge, derived from the social sciences,

was implemented in the control of human beings through the application of norms generated

from social science inquiry. Behavior could thusly be judged as normal or abnormal making a

range of behavior unacceptable or undesirable. This entailed a form of power that was coercive

towards meeting the norm and not applied from above.

This new form of power, given the quasi famous moniker of power/knowledge, expressed

through creation of knowable behavior was:

instituted initially as means of control or neutralization of dangerous social

elements, and evolved into techniques for enhancing the utility and productivity
of those subjected to them. They were also initially cultivated within isolated
institutions (most-notably prisons, hospitals, army camps, schools, and factories),
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but then were gradually adapted into techniques that could be applied in various
other contexts. (p.96)

For Foucault, these techniques, made possible by the enlightenment project and gleaned from the

social sciences for individuating and evaluating the subject, were imported into the control of the

subject through the changing modality of power. A subject was no longer a ‘subject’ of a divine

king (p. 95). Nor could they be considered one of a ‘people’ with little or no individuation.

Instead, the technical term ‘population’ became viable for the expression of problematics, also

uncovered by the social sciences, that demanded more specificity.

The creation of an aggregation of knowable subjects into a knowable public was not

undertaken purely for unilateral subjugation and control. Instead, the creation of norms as a

disciplining practice in the social sciences became, in itself, a system against which others could

be judged, dissected and quantified. Within this frame, populations were disciplined through

normalized judgment and rendered docile and moldable along the lines of a normal statistical

mean that could simultaneously provide homogeneity against that mean while providing

individualizing marks by identifying gaps, stratification and difference (p. 98).

Foucault, Michel. 1982. The Subject and Power. Critical Inquiry 8 (4):777-795.

Foucault recognized that the study of power was not one of historically grounded theory

or uncovering a methodology of the exercise of power. Previous incantations of the subject, as

expressed through the subjectivity inherent in the social contract, gave rise to legal models

concerned with the just use and moral rightness of the use of power by a sovereign. Other

models of power, concerned with the institution of the newly minted social arrangement

emergent from the Westphalian nation-state, indeed called into question the validity of the social
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arrangement of the state itself and consequently actions of unilateral power conducted in its

name or by it (p. 778).

For Foucault, the focus of his inquiry “has not been to analyze the phenomena of power,

nor to elaborate the foundations of such an analysis” (p. 777). Instead, his goal has been to

uncover what he describes as modes under which “human beings are made subjects” (p. 777).

Through the historical inquiry into the subjectivity of human beings in a western cultural context,

Foucault comes to uncover different modes of power left un-conceived by statist and legal

conceptions of power. The power that Foucault describes grounds itself in the objectification

inherent in the modes of inquiry that “try to give themselves the status of sciences...” (p. 777).

Further insight into the objectivising totality of the subject is documented in the “dividing

practices” Foucault sees in the subject itself. The ‘practices’ happen in two ways. First, the

subject, through the power/knowledge created by social science, is divided internally between

different conceptions of the self. The second facet of dividing practices is the division between

subjects. Dichotomies amongst and between individuals are well documented by Foucault in

previous inquiries; “the mad and the sane, the sick and the healthy, the criminals and the ‘good

boys’” to name a few (p. 778).

For Foucault, power was not a tangible that could be observed by studying its

manifestation in those who held it. A certain preconceived notion and necessary objectification

of the term ‘power’ is necessary in order to create models of how it is exercised in an

oppositional and vested way. Foucault argued that power could only be analyzed through its

historical context. Studying decisions and the push and pull of oppositional and friendly forces

of historical relations could in fact lead to an analytics and understanding of power as it

circulated through societies.

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Creating an economy of power relations within his study of subjectivity necessitated the

consideration of struggles against power and authority. However, taking oppositions created by

the division between subjects, the power of men over women for example, in the discourse of

social sciences cannot be conceived of as mere anti-authority struggles (p. 780). Foucault

recognized that power and struggle were linked in ways that were not merely oppositional.

Intimate links across nations and peoples fixated instead on the scope and focus of power

amongst individual practices, the power over the body of an individual as held by a doctor for

instance (p.780). The struggle against power was also found to be “immediate” in that struggles

were directed toward closer threats without expectations of finding “a solution to their problem

at a future date (that is, liberations, revolutions, end of class struggle)” (p. 780). In this, Foucault

found that revolutions could be ideological in nature but were based in an inequality in the scope

or focus of power relations.

Contemplating the practice of the social sciences, Foucault found that these ‘sciences’

were also questioning the status of the individual both by asserting the right to be different as

well as the right to belong to a community, a movement or any other social organization. Power,

and the intimacy of knowledge to its usage, is also a contestation or struggle against power. If,

as Foucault suggests, power is knowledge of “competence and qualification” then struggles

against it are struggles not against truth or an objective reality that is created from social science,

but instead, they are struggles against “secrecy, deformation, and mystifying representations

imposed on people” (p. 781). Lastly, struggles within the Foucaultian sense of power “are a

refusal of these abstractions, of economic and ideological state violence, which ignore who we

are individually, and also a refusal of a scientific or administrative inquisition which determines
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who one is” (p. 781). In essence, the question of how power and struggle are linked, is the

question of who we are.

Morris, Brian. 1996. Western Conceptions of the Individual. Oxford: Berg.

Original edition, 1991.

Decidedly less enthusiastic about the insight Foucault has provided is Brian Morris,

devoting just four and a half pages to “Power and the human Subject” in a book entitled

“Western Conceptions of the Individual.” Morris faithfully reproduces the scope of the

Foucaultian approach and the implications for the individual through liberal usage of other

theorizers on Foucault. The globalized theorizing of other concepts of power are taken into

account while the Foucaultian perspective is allowed to breathe in the air of its value as a critique

of scientificity inherent in other concepts of power.

The “scientific discourse” for Morris is rightly a summary of Foucault’s break with

Althusser, the Frankfort school, and their distinction of things, into an arena of possibility framed

through the context of power/knowledge (p. 439). Marxist conceptions of power as vested in the

state as well as Frankfort School concepts of power as a knowable thing are thusly

problematized. Power is not to be tamed according to Morris‘ reading of Foucault. Instead the

study of the “techniques and tactics of domination” is the purview of Foucault’s inquiry (p. 439).

This new “disciplinary technology” which emerges from Foucault’s inquiry into the

Prison are found to be manifest in workshops, schools and hospitals as well as other social

arrangements. Another facet of this notion of power is that it is resolutely not in the hands of any

one person (p. 439). Conversely, power not manifest as a tangible thing and not held by any

individual can only operate through an organization of networks that is concomitant with the
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process of Western industrialization and economic organization. Morris quotes Foucault on this

point:

When I think of power, I think of its capillary form of existence, of the extent of
which power seeps into the very grain of individuals, reaches right into their
bodies, permeates their gestures, their posture, what they say, how they learn to
live and work with other people. (p. 439-440)

Power for Foucault permeates the very living substance of the individual and effects all or nearly

all facets of their creation of reality and physical space.

Though power permeates the modern Western individual, Morris notes that in Foucault’s

later work he does not imply that the individual is created from the effects of the

power/knowledge circulation (p. 440). The later work of Foucault focuses on the individualizing

nature of power/knowledge and how individuals turn themselves into subjects. The totalizing

and individualizing power that coerces and is accepted by the individual in their own

metacognitive and physical creation is traced to the model of the good pastor in Western

Christianity (p.440-441).

Hartmann, John. 2003. Power and Resistance in the Later Foucault. In 3rd
Annual Meeting of the Foucault Circle. John Carroll University,
Cleveland, OH.

Recounting the turn from studying power circulation to how the subject creates

themselves is John Hartmann. In Hartmann’s recounting of Foucault’s shift of focus, power

exists in an antagonistic symbiosis with resistance. However, resistance as a set of techniques

for the re-action or negation of power is problematic for a positive resistance in the Foucaultian

sense of the term. As ‘resistance’ is not conceived of as external to ‘power’ the potentiality of a

positive reaction against a pervasive behavior changing subjectivity is problematic at best (p. 3).
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Hartmann, through his reading of Foucault’s works, implies that the Foucaultian multiplicity of

nodes where power circulates:

...leads to a conception of resistance in which it is the possibility of reversal

within specific force relations, the contestation of specific objects and impositions
of power on subjects, that is fundamental to the creative possibilities for
resistance within power. The problem in this rendering of power and resistance is
that resistance becomes entirely reactive in this model, or merely a reacting-to
power and not a positive action on its own terms. (p. 3-4)

Reactive assertions against power are therefore of concern to the totalizing and individualizing

sense of governmentality that Foucault creates in his earlier thought.

To reconcile the negative resistance Foucault needed to conceive of a resistive technique

that would not occupy the same negative symbiosis with power. Three guiding principles seem

to be considered of importance for Foucault’s ‘transition’ to a genealogical discussion of critical

resistance and governmentality. First and possibly most important, Foucault uses what Hartmann

describes as the “idea of a non-fascistic way of life” (p. 4). Second, Foucault traces the roots of

his biopolitical analysis further into antiquity. Third, Foucault draws on Kant to outline a “model

of critique as limit-attitude” while contrasting these Kantian concepts against the Socratic

provocation of “truth-telling” (p. 5). Through these insights, Hartmann invokes a difference of

thought in Foucault between The History of Sexuality Vol. I and Volumes II and III. In the

latter works Foucault recounts the role of “recalcitrant flesh resistant to the word of God” as part

of the principle differences in mechanisms for the control of the self inherent between the Roman

and Christian eras (p. 6).

The depth of Christian subjectivity has implications for the technology of the state. It is

not a radical change in subjectivity. Instead, Foucault asserts, the change is in the mechanisms

and techniques used to enforce that subjectivization of populations. Furthermore, it uncovers a:

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...particularly insidious alliance between the emergence of governmentality and

the Christian pastoral which results in the police becoming the specific
technology of the State. In policing all aspects of life, the police, as instrument of
the State, comes to take over the role of pastoring to a population or flock. (p. 7)

Subjectivity in the Christian era therefore is a fundamentally different set of power relations than

could be found in the Hellenic and Roman periods.

The period between The History of Sexuality Vol. I and the second and third

volumes marks a break within Foucault’s own line of thinking. However, the break opens up a

realm of possibility for resistance towards the forms of power that have arisen from the pastoral

turn. More importantly this resistance is positive and involves a structuring of techniques of the

self that allow the subject to positively resist the technology of the State and its governmentality

(p. 8-9).

Hartmann outlines the change in an essay Foucault wrote in between The History of

Sexuality Vol. I and Volumes II and III:

In other words, the analysis of power in “The Subject and Power,” through the
emphasis on the effect of action upon action, also serves to highlight the positive
manner in which the subject is able to act upon his or herself, or the relation of
oneself to oneself. While Foucault does not abandon the idea of force relations
outlined in Volume I, he does complicate and recast it – if power functions
through the structuration of a field of possible actions, resistance to power should
not only be understood in terms of agonistic force relations, but in terms of a
creative traversing of the field of possible action. Resistance – positive resistance
– is no longer merely reversal, but consists in a subject’s becoming-autonomous
within a structured set of institutions and practices through immanent critique. (p.
10)

The subject, in Foucault’s later work, within the constraints of domination and subjugation has

access to positive resistance against governmentality through locating and examining boundaries

of domination. Power, as a system that adapts and constricts with each movement of the subject,

can be resisted against when possible movement is considered through critique outside of the

limits dictated by circulating power.

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Dreyfus, Hubert L. and Paul Rabinow. 1983. Michel Foucault: Beyond

Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Second ed. Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press.

Incorporating the increased complexity of the later Foucault, Dreyfus and Rabinow’s

recounting of the Foucaultian concept of power is careful in representing the philosopher’s

insight into the circulating idea of power. Primarily, Foucault was diligent in pointing out that

his ideas did not amount to a theory (p.184). Neither was it an ahistorical or objective recounting

of history. Instead:

“Foucault’s aim is to isolate, identify and analyze the web of unequal

relationships set up by political technologies which underlies and undercuts the
theoretical equality posited by the law and political philosophers. Bio-power
escapes from the representation of power as law and advances under its
protection. Its “rationality” is not captured by the political languages we still
speak. To understand power in its materiality, its day to day operation, we must
go to the level of the micropractices, the political technologies in which our
practices are formed.” (p. 185)

Resulting from this understanding of political technologies and their effects on the body, a

number of conclusions can be drawn.

The first conclusion drawn from the micropractices of political technology that Foucault

uncovers is that power is not solely the exercised or potential power wielded by a political

institution. Instead, power is a productive force that moves from the top down as well as from

the bottom up. It finds its productive power in the collective goal assigned or created by an

institution, society or group. Political technologies employed cannot be identified with a specific

institution, however, finding localizations within institutions can and does tend to compel the

creation of further productive actions of political technologies across institutions and between

them (p.185).
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The inter-structural nature of power leads to a second insight for understanding the

Foucaultian essence of power. “Power is a general matrix of force relations at a given time in a

given society” (p. 186). Foucault’s study of the prison is an example of a matrix (the prison)

with a specific society (prisoners and guards) in a shared, if unequal, surveillance and

disciplining function. His third insight comes on the heels of this relationship. Domination of

one individual over another, or many others, is not denied to exist. But even in the most

intentional or unequal of hierarchical relationships both the master and slave are encapsulated in

an operation of defining the ‘self’ through the relations formed amongst and between them.

Autocolonization, a term that Dreyfus and Rabinow use to describe this process, is the essence of

power relations leaving neither party untouched in any encounter with power (p. 186).

The processes involved in the internal reorganization of the subject do not happen in a

vacuum, nor are they directly intended to change the subject in such a manner. This forth dictum

that Foucault uncovers is important for his analytics of power relations: the intelligibility that he

uncovers in his studies, which would otherwise be obscured by the everyday decision making

that takes place in institutions and societies. Termed a “local cynicism of power”, the political

act of making a decision is in itself an attempt to remove personal or secret motivations from

decisions (p. 187). At this level, specific acts, contestations and positional maneuvering is

generally straightforward within the political decision making process and is intelligible through

interpretation. However, and most importantly, this process does not imply an intelligible subject

of shared belief amongst and between political actors that can be abstracted and studied. Dreyfus

and Rabinow quote Foucault’s famous proclamation that power relations are “intentional and

non-subjective” (p. 187)

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The fifth and final insight into power that Foucault offers addresses the rift that is opened

by power possessing an inherent intentionality and no final purpose. The answer, for Foucault,

was in the practice of decision making in the local cynicism of power. When decision makers

within a local cynicism of power encountered “specific obstacles, conditions and resistances” a

sort of historical internal logic emerged through the process of autocolonization and the

volitional engagement of discussion and a certain pragmatism towards solutions (p. 187).

Any certain directionality implied from this process is not an inherently stable

functionalism nor an historical equilibrium. Inequality has existed and does exist. A lack of

directionality pointed at a final purpose and only arising as a consequence “from petty

calculations, clashes of wills, meshing of minor interests” cannot lend itself to a theory that

requires a certain belief about directionality and certainly a final purpose (p. 188). In this regard,

Foucault has problematized theories of power and much of the descriptive ability of social

science theorists who rely on them.

Conclusion

The new study of power/knowledge is indeed a complex tangle of ideas. However, the

inquiry of Foucault and those who have studied him have rightly called into question the

paradigmatic conceptions of the individual and the role circulating power has in conditioning and

affecting ones own subjectivity. But in this objectifying and individualizing process, as it most

certainly cannot be called a theory, the ground work for an analytical inquiry into the resistance

against the way power has formed is laid out through the contestation, through confrontation and

familiarization, with the various ways that power has manifested in conceptions of self held by

an individual.
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Works Cited

Dreyfus, Hubert L. and Paul Rabinow. 1983. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism
and Hermeneutics. Second ed. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Foucault, Michel. 1982. The Subject and Power. Critical Inquiry 8 (4):777-795.

Hartmann, John. 2003. Power and Resistance in the Later Foucault. In 3rd Annual Meeting of the
Foucault Circle. John Carroll University, Cleveland, OH.

Morris, Brian. 1996. Western Conceptions of the Individual. Oxford: Berg. Original
edition, 1991.

Rouse, Joseph. 2005. “Power/Knowledge”. In The Cambridge Companion to

Foucault. Edited by Gary Gutting. Cambridge University Press.