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Rethinking power and
Subjectivity after Foucault
Joseph D. Lewandowski
Introduction
1For example, Habermas, in his brief expose "Taking Aim at the Heart of the
Present," claims that Foucault "perseveres under productive contradictions. Only a
complex thinking produces instructive contradictions .... [Foucault] contrasts his
critique of power with the 'analysis of truth' in such a fashion that the former becomes
deprived of the normative yardsticks that it would have to borrow from the latter." Or
again, Habermas, taking aim at Foucault's characterization of his work in his essay on
Kant's "What Is Enlightenment?," asks: "how does such a singularly affirmative
understanding of modern philosophizing, always directed to our own actuality and
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222 Joseph Lewandowski Power and Subjectivity
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Symplokë Summer 1995 223
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224 Joseph Lewandowski Power and Subjectivity
3For a useful comparative analysis of Weber and Foucault, see Gordon, pp. 293-
316. Gordon attempts to discern the "pattern of contrasts and connections between
Weber's work and Foucault's interest in governmental rationality" (311). He suggests
that "Foucault's definition of government as 'conduct of conduct' might be taken as in
tune with Weber's theme of Lebensführung" (306). Much of what Gordon says about
Foucault and governmental rationality resonates with what I will claim in this section,
e.g., that "the modern state is, for Foucault, a mechanism at once of individualization
[that is, the conditions of possibility of transforming the self into a self] and totalization
[that is, the structures of power relations that determine the scope of that
individualization]" (297). And for an analysis of Weber's relation to "postmodern"
thinking, (to which Foucault's work may or may not belong) see the introductory
chapter to Turner (1992). Turner suggests, and I tend to agree, though I cannot
develop the argument fully in the context of this paper, that "there is a tension in
Weber between a Nietzschean celebration of life against system-rationality, which at
least prefigures more contemporary uncertainties about the end of history, the end of
philosophy and the end of the social" (5). Foucault would seem to share some of this
"Nietzschean" promise of freedom echoed in something like the "philosophical laughter"
of the latter sections of The Order of Things, a text I shall treat in some detail in the
next section.
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Symplokë Summer 1995 225
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226 Joseph Lewandowski Power and Subjectivity
To be sure, Foucault has too much to say about power and too
little to say about the norms necessary for distinguishing acceptable
and unacceptable forms of power. And Fraser is certainly right to
point out that much of the confusion surrounding the analysis of
power in Foucault stems from the simple fact that Foucault calls too
many things power and leaves it at that.6 But I think we can extract
certain features of Foucault's understanding of modern power as a
specific type of decentered or "capillary" relations in contradistinction
to something like Weber's subject-centered analysis of power. It is
misleading to say, as Fraser and others do, that Foucault is
"oblivious" to Weberian theory. I would suggest that Foucault's
"oblivion" to Weberian theory remains a kind of red herring: Foucault
would see Weber's distinctions as founded upon the "recent invention"
of the modern subject - a kind of subject-centered analysis he
perceives as ill-suited to a modern world wherein the exercise of
power has itself been radically altered. Indeed, Foucault criticizes
Rusche and Kirchheimer's Punishment and Social Structures (1939)
for its failure to see power as a productive and capillary and not
simply limited to the dominatory juridical structure of society:
6Yet even here her criticism is a bit unfair: later Foucault himself admits to
ambiguities in his notion of power. "Myself, I am not sure, when I began to interest
myself in this problem of power, of having spoken very clearly about it or used the
words needed. Now I have a much clearer idea of all that. It seems to me that we must
first distinguish the relationships of power as strategic games between liberties -
strategic games that result in the fact that some people try to determine the conduct of
others - and the states of domination, which are what we ordinarily call p wer. And,
between the two, between the games of power and the states of domination, you have
governmental technologies - giving this term a very wide meaning for it is also the way
in which you govern your wife, your children, as well as the way you govern an
institution" (1988, 19). Whether this three-pronged definition of power is any clearer
than his earlier formulations, it nevertheless reflects Foucault's painful awareness of
the inadequately nuanced notion of power that marks his earlier work.
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Symplokë Summer 1995 227
(1) Power is never subject-centered: "The individual ... is not the vis-
à-vis of power; it is, I believe, one of its prime effects" (1980, 98);
"Discipline 'makes' individuals" (1977, 170). Or again: "The
individual, with its identity and characteristics, is the product of a
relation of power exercised over bodies, multiplicities, movements,
desires, forces" (1980, 74). Hence power is everywhere but, properly
speaking, subjectless - "never in anybody's hands" (1980, 98); "not
something that is acquired, seized, or shared" (1978, 94); "power has
its principle not so much in a person as in a certain concerted
distribution of bodies, surfaces, lights, gazes" (1977, 202).
(2) Power is productive and not repressive: "What makes power hold
good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it doesn't only
weigh on us as a force that says no, but that it traverses and produces
things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse. It
needs to be considered as a productive network which runs through
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228 Joseph Lewandowski Power and Subjectivity
the whole social body, much more than as a negative instance whose
function is repressive* (1980, 119).
(3) The exercise of Power (with a capital "P") does not exist in a
concentrated (sovereign) or diffused (liberal democratic) form; rather,
it is an ensemble of relations with a strictly relational character
(1978, 95). Further, this exercise of power is "not violence; nor is it a
consent which, implicitly, is renewable. It is a total structure of
actions brought to bear upon possible actions; it incites, it induces, it
seduces, it makes easier or more difficult; in the extreme it constrains
or forbids absolutely; it is nevertheless always a way of acting upon
an acting subject or acting subjects by virtue of their acting or being
capable of actions. A set of actions upon other actions" (Rabinow and
Dreyfus 220). Power "can retreat . . . reorganise its forces, invest
itself (1980, 56) and "endows itself with processes which are more or
less adjusted to the situation" (Rabinow and Dreyfus 224).
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Symplokë Summer 1995 229
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230 Joseph Lewandowski Power and Subjectivity
8Though I agree with Habermas's general claim that Foucault borrows from
modernity's philosophy of the subject in order to undermine it, and is thus involved in a
variety of performative contradictions, I think his specific claim that for Foucault
"power is that by which the subject has an effect on objects in successful actions" (1987,
274) and is therefore borrowed from the lexicon of the philosophy of the subject is
inaccurate. As I have tried to show above, Foucault seeks a notion of power that is not
bound up with the subject's capacities for instrumental action or reflection. What
Habermas does offer, and what Foucault never considers in his decentered notion of
power, is a "third" alternative to subject-centered and decentered notions of power, one
grounded in intersubjective communicative reason rather than oriented towards
success and mastery. Habermas suggests such a notion in his essay, "Hannah Arendt:
On the Concept of Power." In this analysis, power is oriented toward intersubjective
agreement, rationally motivated recognition and consensual action: "The soundness of
a consensus brought about by coercion-free communication is not measured in terms of
any kind of success except that of the claim to rational validity immanent within
speech. Even convictions formed publicly in the give and take of discussion can be
manipulated, but effective manipulation still has to take the claims of reason into
account. We allow ourselves to be persuaded by the truth of a statement, the Tightness
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Symplokê Summer 1995 231
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232 Joseph Lewandowski Power and Subjectivity
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Symplokë Summer 1995 233
In other words, the end of the end of man (that is, the end of
Nietzsche, that last man who could proclaim God's death and thereby
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234 Joseph Lewandowski Power and Subjectivity
install himself as a god) and the return of masks and laughter "marks
the threshold beyond which contemporary philosophy can begin
thinking again .... It is nothing more, and nothing less, than the
unfolding of a space in which it is once more possible to think again"
(1970, 342).
Yet in The Order of Things these formulations are, at best,
intimations: we never get a positive account of what, precisely, this
deconstructed Kantian subject can or will do, other than "think again"
in an "unfolded space" or burst out in philosophical laughter. While
Foucault adopts a deeply Nietzschean reading of the (Kantian,
modern) subject in The Order of Things, such a reading leaves him
(like Nietzsche) with a parodie play of masks and no players. One
imagines a grand ballroom, brilliantly lighted, filled with wonderful
and frightful masks, and no subjects to don them.
Or so it would seem in a text such as The Order of Things. But in
his later work, namely in his reflections upon Kant's "What Is
Enlightenment?" we find Foucault - now placing himself awkwardly
alongside Kant - struggling to give a positive account of subjectivity
and freedom, "seeking to give new impetus, as far and wide as
possible, to the undefined work of freedom" (1984, 46). In this text
the subject and "the work of freedom" are bound up with what
Foucault understands as modernity - not an historical epoch or age,
but rather as "a mode of relationship that has to be established with
oneself (1984, 41). This, Foucault thinks, parallels Kant's notion of
enlightened "maturity" in Kant's response to the question, "What Is
Enlightenment?". Foucault explicates this notion of subjectivity - a
mode of relationship with oneself - via Baudelaire's "dandy": "Modern
man, for Baudelaire, is not the man who goes off to discover himself,
his secrets and his hidden truth; he is the man who tries to invent
himself. This modernity does not 'liberate man in his own being'; it
compels him to face the task of producing himself (1984 42).
This is Foucault at his most striking and provoking: the
enlightenment goal of liberating man "in his own being," of seeing his
development through to "maturity," is replaced with the promissory
note of "maturity" as aesthetic self-making. The technology of power
relations is replaced with a technology of the self, an aesthetics of
existence. So it is not so much that Foucault calls for the "unmaking"
of man in the "counter sciences" of psychoanalysis and ethnology in
The Order of Things and leaves it at that, proffering no positive
account of subjectivity; but rather that in his earlier thinking on
subjectivity what he refuses is
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Symploke Summer 1995 235
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236 Joseph Lewandowski Power and Subjectivity
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Symplokë Summer 1995 237
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238 Joseph Lewandowski Power and Subjectivity
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Symplokê Summer 1995 239
can be free and master itself. But Foucault not only fails to explicate
this sense of agency, his genealogical analyses seem effectively to
undermine any talk of agency which is not a precipitate of
power/knowledge regimes. Who or what is left to transgress
historical limits" (Bernstein 164) and mechanisms of power? And in
much the same vein, Habermas argues that "Foucault throws
overboard that intuition that was to have been conceptualized in
terms of 'subjectivity' .... From [Foucault's] perspective, socialized
individuals can only be perceived as exemplars ... as individual
copies that are mechanically punched out" (1987, 292-293). Or, to put
the matter another way: for Foucault, power relations still affect only
bodies, though now those bodies are voluntarily self-made, but never
minds or cognitive functioning ("intuition") in ways that would be
necessary for subjects to reflect upon, refuse and decide or voluntarily
will to transgress particular regimes of power at particular historical
moments.
Another serious and related problem with the aestheticism of self-
making is that Foucault fails to give us any sense of the inter-
subjective and collective nature of social agency. For Kant, subjects
are constituted by their membership in a universally accessible group
and a peculiar use of reflectively critical, public reason; for Habermas
subjects are constituted by communicative competencies oriented
towards reaching mutual and reciprocal understanding in the
everyday give and take of life-world interaction. Yet for the later
Foucault, one becomes a subject only in establishing a relation with
one's self. The aesthetics of existence is a wholly privatized account
of subjectivity. Foucault's Baudelarian "dandyism" carries with it a
host of ethical and political aporias: To what extent is self-
constitution and mastery reconcilable with the ethical and political
ideals of liberal democracy - mutual recognition, collective decision
making and universal rights, say - that still underpin modern social
relations? How, in mastering one's self, would social actors act in
concert towards publicly agreed upon goals? And how can better and
worse techniques of the "self be collectively discerned, criticized or
rejected? It is not at all clear that the "end of man" and the renewed
emphasis on the work to be done on one's self in any way allow for the
other's autonomy and freedom.
Thus Foucault's positive account of subjectivity begs questions
about intersubjective ethics and freedom for agents that his
suggestive and aestheticized account of bodily self-making simply
cannot answer. On the one hand "the end of man" signals the
possibility of a space in which new subjectivities may emerge and, on
the other hand, that new subject has as its goals and form the
peculiarly modern notion of freedom criticized in Foucault's earlier
work: an agent that can be free and master itself. Yet if we are to
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240 Joseph Lewandowski Power and Subjectivity
take this notion of agency as a relation with one's self seriously, then
we are left with a wholly privatized and strategic account of isolated
bodies: Foucault's aesthetic individualism offers us a kind of
privatized will to power, a self-constituting subjectivity that sets o
strategic form of power (self-mastered subjects) against another fo
of productive (but faceless or "subjectless") and strategic p
relations. In Foucault's attempt to articulate a kind of aesthet
existence that is freed of certain modern notions of the subjec
never see quite how subjects may act inter subjectively with o
another. In short, we never see an adequate analysis of agency
can never quite be sure what (or who) is doing the making
resisting, what (or whom) is to be made or resisted, or how
ontology of strategic power is to be reconciled with these "new for
of strategic subjectivity that establish the selfs relation to its
Foucault contrasts his analysis of totalizing, strategic power rela
with an account of strategic subjectivity, autonomy and freedo
such a way that the aestheticized and privatized latter colla
under the weight of the ontologized former.
Conclusion
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Symplokë Summer 1995 241
are "always already there," endow and sustain themselves (1977, 177
with an adequate account of the workings of inter subjective socia
agency. In the ontologization of the former, Foucault, despite his
interest in resistances and precisely because of his notion of
autonomy as self-making, loses purchase on the latter. Foucault
wants to hold open the possibilities of bodies' resistance to power and
capacities for self-making, but one can only view this in the shadow of
the analysis of the subject as bodily effect of transcendental ("always
already") and hypostatized ("endows itself) power. And in that
shadow, the privatized autonomy and freedom forecast in
Nietzschean self-making and the Greek care of the self are eclipsed.
Under Foucault's leveling gaze, the entwinement of power and
subjectivity is reduced to and dependent upon two unclarified
strategic relations: (1) the privatized, strategic will to power of a self-
made body and (2) the totalized, strategic power network that
sustains itself.
What is wrong, then, in Foucault's critique of power and
subjectivity, is precisely this leveling quality of the analysis.
Foucault's aporias illustrate the need for an adequate account of both
seemingly autonomous or "agentless" power relations and actual
agents' capacities, however limited, not only to make themselves into
subjects, but also to understand, criticize, collectively reconfigure and
reject those power mechanisms that determine the range of
possibility of their actions. (And let us not forget that Foucault
himself was rarely a docile body.) Foucault correctly claims that
human subjects qua human subjects are produced by various types of
power; and he is similarly correct to suggest that subjectivity,
nevertheless, can never be reduced solely to power's productive
effects. That is, power is never simply an ideological instrument or
the effect of the will of a subject to say "no" or "do this"; nor is the
subject ever simply an effect of power ("where there is power, there is
resistance"). Foucault seems aware of the need to balance the two
conceptualizations; hence the tension between the ontologized
account of power and the "historical ontology of ourselves" that seeks
"to grasp the points where change is possible and desirable, and to
determine the precise form this change should take" (1984, 46). But
he never quite succeeds in holding the two in balance. And neither
leg of the analysis can stand alone. Here McCarthy's point is
absolutely salient: "the ontology of power was too reductive and one-
dimensional for that purpose; the later, multidimensional ontology
still depicts social relations as strategic and thus forces the search for
autonomy . . . onto the private path of a rapport à soi" (McCarthy 74).
It is perhaps Foucault's contribution to critically minded social
theorists to force them to see the underlying importance of rethinking
and making explicit the complex entwinement of power and
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242 Joseph Lewandowski Power and Subjectivity
BINGHAMTON UNIVERSITY
References
10I want to thank Jim Bohman for reading and commenting on an earlier dr
this essay.
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Symplokë Summer 1995 243
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