[lbo-talk] Re: Foucault & Chmsky

bitch bitch at pulpculture.org
Fri Dec 8 14:23:41 PST 2006


At 04:34 PM 12/8/2006, Ted Winslow wrote:
>Doug Henwood wrote:
>
>>>
>>>"There are no relations of power without resistance."
>>>Michel Foucault, in Colin Gordeon (ed.).
>>>Power/Knowledge - Selected Interviews and Other
>>>Wiritings 1972-1977, Brighton: Harvester Press (1980),
>>>p. 142
>>
>>Doesn't that mean it takes two to tango - there's no issue of a
>>power relation unless there's resistance?

It would depend, yes? Foucault talked about the move from a society where domination was obvious, where punishment was meted out publicly, where we could 'see' power in the form of the king to a society where power is diffuse, not so easily 'seen' and pointed at, where there was no head to lop off, but diffuse capillaries through which power moved. Which capillary do you lop off to overthrow power? He also demarcated between power and domination. He never said that domination disappeared, however. Most of all, he rejected a binary notion of power where you either have power or you don't. [1]

At a more basic level, if one wants to derive a claim about human nature from that statement, then it makes sense to use the entire statement. Thus, it is human nature to dominate and exert power over others and it is human nature to resist that domination. Which would put Foucault squarely in, what? Hobbes' camp? Dunno, but I do think that it would be only telling part of the story to say it's human nature to resist power, thereby leaving out the "why" of power to begin with. If it wasn't 'human nature' to start the process of domination to begin with, what was it? (On that note, an older radical feminist theory, perhaps Robin Morgan's, is that male domination began when a group had to defend themselves against an outside force. To do this, they crafted certain social relations to save the group, but they ended up subordinating women. Enjoying this subordination and the power they derived from it (the power to rape and control), Morgan said, men set about to maintain that relation of power and it has been thus ever since. <-- This is why I have said that radical feminists have to revert to "accidents" of history to explain social change.)

Moreover, when one posits human nature to begin with, then you have to ask: what of those who don't appear to behave according to "human nature" -- are they not human?


>But the "the endlessly repeated play of dominations" is all there is. (ted
>quoting Foucault)

<...>

I liked Janet Halley's gloss. She's quite good:

"nor would Foucault share these feminists' subordination-theory-based figuration of liberation as an escape from or overthrow of power. To be sure, he fully acknowledge that domination of the sort MacKinnon describes does happen. But in a 1984 interview he posited that domination is something different from power relations -- something like their cessation. 'When an individual or social group succeeds in blocking a field of power relations, immobilizing them and preventing any reversability of a movement by economic, political, or military means, one is faced with what might be called a state of domination.' Such fixities are rare. The typical, typically modern, form of power is not domination but relations of power that are by definition movable; normally, almost always, 'one is dealing with mobile and transitory points of resistance, producing cleavages ina society that shift about.'

Thus Foucault hypothesized that distinctively modern power is both fixed and mobile. Roughly speaking, in his late writing, the lexically appropriate way to figure resistance to 'domination,' power in its most 'fixed' form, is 'liberation,' while 'relations of power' instead located resistance in a 'strategic situation,' in 'tactics,' and in 'practices of freedom.' But he also frequently indicated that domination itself was shot through with relations of power. Whether domination shared the character of mobile power or stood apart from it, throughout his discussion of these matters Foucault guarded himself constantly from figuring the utopian project as a yearning for 'liberation' from 'power.'

Thus though the terms resistance, struggle, and freedom have important utopian allure in F's vocabulary, he does not give them the valence they have in subordination theories committed to the prescription that confronting and overthrowing power are what the oppressed must do. Because F's lead hypothesis about power is that it is not 'on top' but everywhere, he imagines as emancipatory those projects that engage rather than oppose it. 'Between a relationship of power and a strategy of struggle there is a a reciprocal appeal, a perpetual linking and a perpetual reversal.' Foucault imagines that a 'strategy of struggle' reverses while repeating a 'relation of power'; and the appeal between them is reciprocal, so that a 'relation of power' both repels and invokes the 'strategy of struggle.' Strategy, struggle, and practices of freedom are not only not opposed to power; they are also intrinsic to it and involve one in it.

These trends in his understanding of power put Foucault in an important disagreement as well with gay-identity liberationism. His agenda for liberation maintains uncertainty, tentativeness, open-endedness, and mobility as virtues not because they are freedom itself, but because they bring resistance into a full engagement with power. Sex itself, not being repressed, is not the underdog we need to liberate. As he put it in Volume One:

'We must not place sex on the side of reality, and sexuality on that of confused ideas and illusion; sexuality is a very real historical formation; it is what gave rise to the notion of sex, as speculative element necessary to its operation.We must not think that by saying yes to sex, on says no to power; on the contrary on tracks along the course laid out by the general deployment of sexuality. It is the agency of sex that we must break away from, if we aim -- through a tactical reversal of the various mechanisms o sexuality -- to counter the grips of power with the claims of bodies, pleasures, and knowledges, in their multiplicity and their possibility of resistance. The rallying point for the counterattack against the deployment of sexuality ought not to be sex-desire, but bodies and pleasures.

Not surprisingly, then, Foucault maintained a highly ambivalent attitude toward gay male identity. Wherever gay male liberation projects appeared in highly identitarian terms -- vaunting themselves as the emerging historical form for repressed and forbidden sexual subjectivities, pushing themselves into the light, illuminating the darkness imposed by the prohibitive heterosexual law, and so on -- he detected in them a return to sexual liberation of the most dominated kind. When such projects took experimental , uncertain social forms -- sadomasochim was probably less important to him than friendship and salivary practices of self-discipline -- he detected in them the rudimentary essentials of practices of freedom. This tension has its own bibliography, and the temptation to genealogize it here is strong, but I will desist.

Janet Halley, Split Decisions, p 131-2

"You know how it is, come for the animal porn, stay for the cultural analysis." -- Michael Berube

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