Foucault Power

The Subject and precedent Author(s) Michel Foucault Source decisive interrogative, Vol. 8, No. 4 (Summer, 1982), pp. 777-795 Published by The University of Chicago Press Stable universal resource locator http//www. jstor. org/stable/1343197 . Accessed 26/09/2011 0749 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http//www. jstor. org/page/info/ somewhat/policies/terms. jsp JSTOR is a non-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students disc every move, use, and shape upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive.We use in exploitation technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate b atomic bod 18-assed smorgasbords of scholarship. For more(prenominal) information about JSTOR, please cont turn of events emailprotected org. The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Critical Inquiry. http//www. jstor. org The Subject a nd Power Michel Foucault wherefore contemplate Power? The Question of the Subject The ideas which I would like to discuss here represent neither a theory nor a methodology. I would like to say, rootage of both, what has been the goal of my work during the last twenty years.It has non been to break up the phenomena of bureau, nor to elaborate the foundations of much(prenominal) an analysis. My objective, p contactably, has been to create a explanation of the different sense modalitys by which, in our culture, tender-hearted organisms argon made subjects. My work has dealt with trio climates of objectification which transfigure human beings into subjects. The prototypal is the modes of inquiry which try to give themselves the status of sciences for example, the objectivizing of the let the cat out of the baging subject in grammaire commone, philology, and linguistics.Or again, in this first mode, the objectivizing of the productive subject, the subject who labors, in the analysis of wealth and of economics. Or, a third example, the objectivizing of the sheer fact of being alive in natural history or biology. In the second dowry of my work, I commence studied the objectivizing of the subject in what I sh exclusively cry dividing practices. The subject is either This essay was pen by Michel Foucault as an afterword to Michel Foucault Beyond Structuralismand Hermeneuticsby Hubert L.Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow and reprinted by arrangement with the University of Chicago Press. Why Study Power? The Question of the Subject was written in English by Foucault How Is Power Exercised? was translated from the French by Leslie Sawyer. Critical Inqury 8 (Summer 1982) , 1982 by The Uni ersity of Chicago. 0093-1896/82/0804-0006$01. 00. All rights reserved. 777 778 Michel Foucault The Subjectand Power divided inside himself or divided from differents. This parade objectivizes him. Examples argon the mad and the sane, the sick and the healthy, the criminal s and the good boys. Finally, I start want to study-it is my current work-the mien a human being turns himself into a subject. For example, I have chosen the domain of sexuality-how men have learned to neck themselves as subjects of sexuality. Thus, it is non post but the subject which is the general theme of my research. It is true that I became preferably involved with the pass of strength. It soon appe ard to me that, while the human subject is adornd in dealings of production and of signification, he is equally placed in author traffic which are actually complex.Now, it seemed to me that economic history and theory provided a good instrument for sexual intercourses of production and that linguistics and semiotics offered instruments for flush toiletvass traffic of signification but for author relations we had no tools of study. We had recourse only to paths of viewing about business office based on sub judice models, that is What indisputables abili ty? Or, we had recourse to ways of thinking about origin based on initiational models, that is What is the enounce? It was thitherfore necessary to expand the dimensions of a description of military unit if i wanted to use this definition in studying the objectivizing of the subject.Do we need a theory of antecedent? Since a theory assumes a earlier objectification, it cannot be asserted as a basis for analytical work. besides this analytical work cannot proceed without an ongoing conceptualization. And this conceptualization implies critical thought-a constant checking. The first subject to check is what I shall plow the conceptual needs. I mean that the conceptualization should not be founded on a theory of the object-the conceptualized object is not the single criterion of a good conceptualization. We have to know the historical bulge outicularises which motivate our conceptualization.We need a historical advisedness of our present circumstance. The second thing to check is the type of reality with which we are dealing. A writer in a well-knget French newspaper once expressed his surprise Why is the notion of billet raised by so many people today? Is Michel Foucault has been teaching at the College de France since 1970. His works include Madness and Civilization (1961), The have got of the Clinic (1966), Discipline and Punish (1975), and History of Sexuality (1976), the first volume of a projected five-volume study. Critical Inquiry Summer1982 779 it much(prenominal)(prenominal) an important subject?Is it so self-g overning that it can be discussed without taking into account other(a) conundrums? This writers surprise amazes me. I feel skeptical about the assumption that this question has been raised for the first measure in the twentieth century. Anyway, for us it is not only a theoretical question but a part of our experience. Id like to mention only twain pathological forms-those both diseases of function-fascism and Stalinism. One of the numerous reasons why they are, for us, so confusing is that in spite of their historical uniqueness they are not quite original. They used and extended mechanisms already present in most other societies.More than that in spite of their own internal madness, they used to a large end the ideas and the devices of our political logicality. What we need is a new providence of author relations-the word economy being used in its theoretical and practical sense. To put it in other speech since Kant, the role of philosophy is to pr purget reason from going beyond the limits of what is wedded in experience but from the equal moment-that is, since the development of the new-made tell apart and the political management of nine-the role of philosophy is likewise to keep watch over the excessive motives of political rationality, which is a rather high expectation.Every automobile trunk is aware of such banal facts. But the fact that theyre banal does not mean they dont pop ulate. What we have to do with banal facts is to discover-or try to discover-which specific and perhaps original problem is connected with them. The descent surrounded by systematization and excesses of political power is evident. And we should not need to wait for bureaucracy or concentration camps to recognize the representence of such relations. But the problem is What to do with such an evident fact? Shall we try reason? To my mind, nothing would be more sterile.First, because the domain has nothing to do with criminality or innocence. Second, because it is sense slight to refer to reason as the contrary entity to nonreason. Last, because such a trial would trap us into playing the arbitrary and boring part of either the rationalist or the irrationalist. Shall we investigate this phase of rationalism which seems to be specific to our modern culture and which originates in Aufkldrung? I think that was the approach of around of the members of the Frankfurt School. My pur pose, however, is not to start a discussion of their works, although they are most important and valuable.Rather, I would suggest another(prenominal) way of investigating the links amidst rationalization and power. It whitethorn be wise not to take as a completely the rationalization of society or of culture but to analyze such a process in several fields, each with reference to a fundamental experience madness, illness, death, crime, sexuality, and so forth. I think that the word rationalization is dangerous. What we have 780 Michel Foucault The Subjectand Power to do is analyze specific rationalities rather than always invoke the progress of rationalization in general.Even if the Aufkliirung has been a very important var. in our history and in the development of political technology, I think we have to refer to much more remote processes if we want to understand how we have been trapped in our own history. I would like to suggest another way to go further toward a new economy o f power relations, a way which is more semiempirical, more directly related to our present post, and which implies more relations mingled with theory and practice. It consists of taking the forms of resistance against different forms of power as a starting dit.To use another metaphor, it consists of using this resistance as a chemical catalyst so as to bring to light power relations, locate their position, and abide by out their point of application and the methods used. Rather than analyzing power from the point of view of its internal rationality, it consists of analyzing power relations through the antagonism of strategies. For example, to find out what our society means by sanity, perhaps we should investigate what is happening in the field of insanity. And what we mean by legality in the field of illegality.And, in order to understand what power relations are about, perhaps we should investigate the forms of resistance and attempts made to dissociate these relations. As a starting point, let us take a series of oppositions which have essential over the last few years opposition to the power of men over women, of parents over children, of abnormal psychology over the mentally ill, of medicine over the population, of administration over the ways people live. It is not enough to say that these are anti-authority disputes we must try to localise more precisely what they have in common. . They are transversal struggles that is, they are not limited to one country. Of course, they develop more easily and to a great issue in certain countries, but they are not confined to a particular political or economic form of government. 2. The aim of these struggles is the power cause as such. For example, the medical profession is not criticized primarily because it is a profit-making concern but because it do works an uncontrolled power over peoples bodies, their health, and their life and death. 3. These are spry struggles for two reasons.In such struggles people criticize instances of power which are the closest to them, those which exercise their activity on individuals. They do not look for the chief resistance but for the adjacent enemy. Nor do they expect to find a solution to their problem at a future date (that is, liberations, revolutions, end of class struggle). In comparison with a theoretical scale of explanations or a revolutionary order which polarizes the historian, they are anarchistic struggles. Critical Inquiry Summer1982 781 But these are not their most original points. The following seem to me to be more specific. . They are struggles which question the status of the individual on the one moot, they assert the right to be different, and they underline everything which makes individuals truly individual. On the other hand, they attack everything which separates the individual, breaks his links with others, splits up community life, forces the individual back on himself, and ties him to his own identity in a cons training way. These struggles are not exactly for or against the individual but rather they are struggles against the government of individualization. 5. They are an opposition to the effects of power which are linked with knowledge, competence, and qualification struggles against the privileges of knowledge. But they are as well an opposition against secrecy, deformation, and mystifying representations imposed on people. There is nothing scientistic in this (that is, a dogmatic feel in the value of scientific knowledge), but neither is it a skeptical or relativistic refusal of all verified truth. What is questioned is the way in which knowledge circulates and functions, its relations to power.In short, the regime du savoir. 6. Finally, all these present struggles revolve around the question Who are we? They are a refusal of these abstr military actions, of economic and ideological state violence, which ignore who we are individually, and also a refusal of a scientific or administ rative inquisition which determines who one is. To sum up, the main objective of these struggles is to attack not so much such or such an groundwork of power, or group, or elite, or class but rather a technique, a form of power.This form of power applies itself to immediate everyday life which categorizes the individual, marks him by his own individuality, attaches him to his own identity, imposes a law of truth on him which he must recognize and which others have to recognize in him. It is a form of power which makes individuals subjects. There are two meanings of the word subject subject to someone else by control and dependence and bind to his own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge. Both meanings suggest a form of power which subjugates and makes subject to.Generally, it can be tell that there are three types of struggles either against forms of subordination (ethnic, social, and religious) against forms of victimisation which separate individuals from what they prod uce or against that which ties the individual to himself and submits him to others in this way (struggles against subjection, against forms of subjectivity and submission). I think that in history you can find a lot of examples of these three kinds of social struggles, either isolated from each other or mixed together. But even when they are mixed, one of them, most of the succession, prevails.For instance, in the feudal societies, the struggles against the 782 Michel Foucault The Subjectand Power forms of ethnic or social mastery were prevalent, even though economic growing could have been very important among the nauseates causes. In the nineteenth century, the struggle against exploitation came into the foreground. And nowadays, the struggle against the forms of subjectionagainst the submission of subjectivity-is becoming more and more important, even though the struggles against forms of domination and exploitation have not disappeared. Quite the contrary. I suspect that it i s ot the first time that our society has been confronted with this kind of struggle. All those movements which took place in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and which had the Reformation as their main expression and moment should be analyzed as a great crisis of the Western experience of subjectivity and a revolt against the kind of religious and moral power which gave form, during the Middle Ages, to this subjectivity. The need to take a direct part in spiritual life, in the work of salvation, in the truth which lies in the Book-all that was a struggle for a new subjectivity.I know what objections can be made. We can say that all types of subjection are derived phenomena, that they are merely the consequences of other economic and social processes forces of production, class struggle, and ideological social systems which determine the form of subjectivity. It is certain that the mechanisms of subjection cannot be studied outside their relation to the mechanisms of exploit ation and domination. But they do not merely constitute the terminal of more fundamental mechanisms. They entertain complex and circular relations with other forms.The reason this kind of struggle tends to prevail in our society is due to the fact that, since the sixteenth century, a new political form of power has been continuously developing. This new political twist, as everybody knows, is the state. But most of the time, the state is envisioned as a kind of political power which ignores individuals, looking only at the interests of the totality or, I should say, of a class or a group among the citizens. Thats quite true. But Id like to underline the fact that the states power (and thats one of the reasons for its strength) is both an individualizing and a totalizing form of power.Never, I think, in the history of human societieseven in the old Chinese society-has there been such a tricky combination in the same political structures of individualization techniques and of totaliz ation procedures. This is due to the fact that the modern Western state has integrated in a new political shape an old power technique which originated in Christian institutions. We can call this power technique the pastoral power. Critical Inquiry Summer1982 783 First of all, a few words about this pastoral power.It has often been said that Christianity brought into being a code of ethics fundamentally different from that of the ancient world. Less emphasis is usually placed on the fact that it proposed and spread new power relations throughout the ancient world. Christianity is the only religion which has organized itself as a church. And as such, it postulates in rationale that certain individuals can, by their religious quality, serve others not as princes, magistrates, prophets, fortune-tellers, benefactors, educationalists, and so on but as pastors.However, this word designates a very special form of power. 1. It is a form of power whose ultimate aim is to assure individual s alvation in the next world. 2. Pastoral power is not merely a form of power which commands it must also be prepared to sacrifice itself for the life and salvation of the flock. Therefore, it is different from royal power, which demands a sacrifice from its subjects to save the throne. 3. It is a form of power which does not look after just the whole community but each individual in particular, during his entire life. 4.Finally, this form of power cannot be exercised without knowing the inside of peoples minds, without exploring their souls, without making them reveal their innermost secrets. It implies a knowledge of the conscience and an ability to direct it. This form of power is salvation lie (as opposed to political power). It is oblative (as opposed to the principle of sovereignty) it is individualizing (as opposed to legal power) it is coextensive and continuous with life it is linked with a production of truth-the truth of the individual himself.But all this is part of histo ry, you will say the pastorate has, if not disappeared, at least lost the main part of its efficiency. This is true, but I think we should distinguish in the midst of two aspects of pastoral power-between the ecclesiastical institutionalization, which has ceased or at least lost its vitality since the eighteenth century, and its function, which has spread and multiplied outside the ecclesiastical institution.An important phenomenon took place around the eighteenth century-it was a new distribution, a new organization of this kind of individualizing power. I dont think that we should consider the modern state as an entity which was developed above individuals, ignoring what they are and even their very existence, but, on the contrary, as a very sophisticated structure, in which individuals can be integrated, under one condition that this individuality would be shaped in a new form and submitted to a set of very specific patterns.In a way, we can see the state as a modern matrix of i ndividualization or a new form of pastoral power. 784 Michel Foucault The Subjectand Power A few more words about this new pastoral power. 1. We may observe a change in its objective. It was no longer a question of leading people to their salvation in the next world but rather ensuring it in this world. And in this context, the word salvation takes on different meanings health, well-being (that is, sufficient wealth, standard of living), security, security measure against accidents.A series of worldly aims took the place of the religious aims of the traditional pastorate, all the more easily because the latter, for various reasons, had followed in an accessory way a certain number of these aims we only have to think of the role of medicine and its welfare function assured for a long time by the Catholic and Protestant churches. 2. synchronicly the officials of pastoral power increased. Sometimes this form of power was exerted by state apparatus or, in any case, by a public institu tion such as the police. We should not forget that in the eighteenth century the police force was not invented only for maintaining law and order, nor for assisting governments in their struggle against their enemies, but for insure urban supplies, hygiene, health, and standards considered necessary for handicrafts and commerce. ) Sometimes the power was exercised by private ventures, welfare societies, benefactors, and generally by philanthropists. But ancient institutions, for example the family, were also mobilized at this time to take on pastoral functions. It was also exercised by complex structures such as medicine, hich included private initiatives with the sale of services on market economy principles, but which also included public institutions such as hospitals. 3. Finally, the multiplication of the aims and agents of pastoral power focused the development of knowledge of man around two roles one, globalizing and quantitative, concerning the population the other, analytic al, concerning the individual. And this implies that power of a pastoral type, which over centuries-for more than a millennium-had been linked to a defined religious institution, suddenly spread out into the whole social body it found support in a multitude of institutions.And, instead of a pastoral power and a political power, more or little linked to each other, more or less rival, there was an individualizing tactic which characterized a series of powers those of the family, medicine, psychiatry, education, and employers. At the end of the eighteenth century, Kant wrote, in a German newspaper-the Berliner Monatschrift-a short text. The title was Was heisst Aufklairung? It was for a long time, and it is still, considered a work of relatively small importance.But I cant help finding it very interesting and puzzling because it was the first time a philosopher proposed as a philosophical task to investigate not only the metaphysical system or the foundations of sci- Critical Inquir y Summer1982 785 entific knowledge but a historical event-a recent, even a contemporary event. When in 1784 Kant asked, Was heisst Aufklirung? , he meant, Whats going on just now? Whats happening to us? What is this world, this period, this precise moment in which we are living? Or in other words What are we? as Aufklidrer,as part of the Enlightenment? Compare this with the Cartesian question Who am I?I, as a unique but universal and unhistorical subject? I, for Descartes, is everyone, anywhere at any moment? But Kant asks something else What are we? in a very precise moment of history. Kants question appears as an analysis of both us and our present. I think that this aspect of philosophy took on more and more importance. Hegel, Nietzsche The other aspect of universal philosophy didnt disappear. But the task of philosophy as a critical analysis of our world is something which is more and more important. Maybe the most certain of all philosophical problems is the problem of the pre sent time and of what we are in this very moment.Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are. We have to imagine and to build up what we could be to get rid of this kind of political double over bind, which is the simultaneous individualization and totalization of modern power structures. The conclusion would be that the political, ethical, social, philosophical problem of our days is not to try to discharge the individual from the state and from the states institutions but to liberate us both from the state and from the type of individualization which is linked to the state.We have to promote new forms of subjectivity through the refusal of this kind of individuality which has been imposed on us for several centuries. How Is Power Exercised? For some people, asking questions about the how of power would limit them to describing its effects without ever relating those effects either to causes or to a radical nature. It would make this power a mysterious substance which they might hesitate to interrogate in itself, no doubt because they would prefer not to call it into question.By exploit this way, which is never explicitly justified, they seem to suspect the presence of a kind of fatalism. But does not their very distrust indicate a pre premiss that power is something which exists with three distinct qualities its origin, its basic nature, and its manifestations? If, for the time being, I grant a certain privileged position to the question of how, it is not because I would wish to eliminate the ques- 786 Michel Foucault The Subjectand Power tions of what and why. Rather, it is that I wish to present these questions in a different way better still, to know if it is legitimate to imagine a power which unites in itself a what, a why, and a how. To put it bluntly, I would say that to begin the analysis with a how is to suggest that power as such does not exist. At the very least it is to ask oneself what contents one has in mind when using this all-embracing and reifying term it is to suspect that an extremely complex configuration of realities is allowed to escape when one treads endlessly in the double question What is power? and Where does power have sex from? The little question, What happens? although flat and empirical, once scrutinized is seen to avoid accusing a metaphysics or an ontology of power of being fraudulent rather, it attempts a critical investigation into the thematics of power. How, not in the sense oJ How does it manifest itself? but By what means is it exercised? and Whathappens when individuals exert(as theysay) power over others? As far as this power is concerned, it is first necessary to distinguish that which is exerted over things and gives the ability to modify, use, consume, or destroy them-a power which stems from aptitudes directly inherent in the body or relayed by external instruments.Let us say that here it is a question of capacity. On the other hand, what cha racterizes the power we are analyzing is that it brings into play relations between individuals (or between groups). For let us not deceive ourselves if we speak of the structures or the mechanisms of power, it is only insofar as we suppose that certain persons exercise power over others. The term power designates family kinships between partners (and by that I am not thinking of a zero-sum game but plain, and for the moment staying in the most general terms, of an ensemble of actions which induce others and follow from one another).It is necessary also to distinguish power relations from familys of conversation which transmit information by means of a language, a system of signs, or any other symbolic medium. No doubt communicating is always a certain way of acting upon another person or persons. But the production and circulation of elements of meaning can have as their objective or as their consequence certain results in the neighborhood of power the latter are not simply an aspect of the former. Whether or not they pass through systems of communication, power relations have a specific nature.Power relations, human affinitys of communication, and objective capacities should not thence be confused. This is not to say that there is a question of three separate domains. Nor that there is on one hand the field of things, of perfected technique, work, and the transformation of the real on the other that of signs, communication, reciprocity, and the production of meaning and finally, that of the domination of the Critical Inquiry Summer1982 787 means of constraint, of inequality, and the action of men upon other men. It is a question of three types of relationships which in fact always overlap one another, support one another reciprocally, and use each other in return as means to an end. The application of objective capacities in their most elementary forms implies relationships of communication (whether in the form of previously acquired information o r of shared work) it is level(p) also to power relations (whether they consist of obligatory tasks, of gestures imposed by tradition or apprenticeship, of subdivisions and the more or less obligatory distribution of labor).Relationships of communication imply finalized activities (even if only the correct putting into operation of elements of meaning) and, by virtue of modifying the field of information between partners, produce effects of power. They can scarcely be dissociated from activities brought to their final term, be they those which permit the exercise of this power (such as training techniques, processes of domination, the means by which obedience is obtained) or those, which in order to develop their potential, call upon relations of power (the division of labor and the hierarchy of tasks).Of course, the coordination between these three types of relationships is neither uniform nor constant. In a given society there is no general type of equilibrium between finalized act ivities, systems of communication, and power relations. Rather, there are diverse forms, diverse places, diverse circumstances or occasions in which these interrelationships try out themselves according to a specific model.But there are also blocks in which the adjustment of abilities, the resources of communication, and power relations constitute regulated and concerted systems. Take, for example, an educational institution the disposal of its space, the meticulous regulations which govern its internal life, the different activities which are organized there, the diverse persons who live there or meet one another, each with his own function, his well-defined character-all these things constitute a block of capacitycommunication-power.The activity which ensures apprenticeship and the acquisition of aptitudes or types of behavior is developed there by means of a whole ensemble of regulated communications (lessons, questions and answers, orders, exhortations, coded signs of obedience , differentiation marks of the value of each person and of the levels of knowledge) and by the means of a whole series of power processes (enclosure, surveillance, reward and punishment, the pointed hierarchy).These blocks, in which the putting into operation of technical capacities, the game of communications, and the relationships of power are adjusted to one another according to considered formulae, con1. When Jiirgen Habermas distinguishes between domination, communication, and finalized activity, I do not think that he sees in them three separate domains but rather three transcendentals. 788 Michel Foucault The Subjectand Power titute what one might call, enlarging a little the sense of the word, disciplines. The empirical analysis of certain disciplines as they have been historically constituted presents for this very reason a certain interest. This is so because the disciplines show, first, according to artificially clear and decanted systems, the modal value in which syst ems of objective finality and systems of communication and power can be welded together.They also display different models of articulation, sometimes giving preeminence to power relations and obedience (as in those disciplines of a monastic or penitential type), sometimes to finalize activities (as in the disciplines of workshops or hospitals), sometimes to relationships of communication (as in the disciplines of apprenticeship), sometimes also to a saturation of the three types of relationship (as perhaps in military discipline, where a plethora of signs indicates, to the point of redundancy, tightly knit power relations mensurable with care to produce a certain number of technical effects).What is to be understood by the disciplining of societies in Europe since the eighteenth century is not, of course, that the individuals who are part of them become more and more obedient, nor that they set about assembling in barracks, schools, or prisons rather, that an increasingly better inv igilated process of adjustment has been sought after-more and more rational and economic-between productive activities, resources of communication, and the play of power relations.To approach the theme of power by an analysis of how is therefore to introduce several critical shifts in relation to the supposition of a fundamental power. It is to give oneself as the object of analysis power relations and not power itself-power relations which are distinct from objective abilities as well as from relations of communication. This is as much as saying that power relations can be grasped in the diversity of their logical sequence, their abilities, and their interrelationships.What constitutesthe specificnature of power? The exercise of power is not simply a relationship between partners, individual or incarnate it is a way in which certain actions modifyothers. Which is to say, of course, that something called Power, with or without a capital letter, which is assumed to exist universally in a concentrated or diffused form, does not exist. Power exists only when it is put into action, even if, of course, it is integrated into a disparate field of possibilities brought to bear upon permanent structures.This also means that power is not a function of consent. In itself it is not a renunciation of freedom, a transference of rights, the power of each and all delegated to a few (which does not prevent the possibility that consent may be a condition for the existence or the maintenance of power) the relationship of power can be the result of a prior or permanent consent, but it is not by nature the manifestation of a consensus. Critical Inquiry Summer 1982 89 Is this to say that one must seek the character proper to power relations in the violence which must have been its primitive form, its permanent secret, and its last resource, that which in the final analysis appears as its real nature when it is coerce to throw aside its mask and to show itself as it really is? In effect, what defines a relationship of power is that it is a mode of action which does not act directly and immediately on others.Instead, it acts upon their actions an action upon an action, on existing actions or on those which may arise in the present or the future. A relationship of violence acts upon a body or upon things it forces, it bends, it breaks on the wheel, it destroys, or it closes the door on all possibilities. Its opposite pole can only be passivity, and if it comes up against any resistance, it has no other option but to try to minimize it.On the other hand, a power relationship can only be articulate on the basis of two elements which are each indispensable if it is really to be a power relationship that the other (the one over whom power is exercised) be thoroughly recognized and maintained to the very end as a person who acts and that, faced with a relationship of power, a whole field of responses, reactions, results, and possible inventions may open up.Obvious ly the bringing into play of power relations does not exclude the use of violence any more than it does the obtaining of consent no doubt the exercise of power can never do without one or the other, often both at the same time. But even though consensus and violence are the instruments or the results, they do not constitute the principle or the basic nature of power. The exercise of power can produce as much acceptance as may be wished for it can pile up the dead and shelter itself behind whatever threats it can imagine.In itself the 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 action. A set of actions upon other actions.Pe rhaps the equivocal nature of the term endure is one of the best aids for coming to terms with the specificity of power relations. For to conduct is at the same time to lead others (according to mechanisms of coercion which are, to varying degrees, strict) and a way of behaving at bottom a more or less open field of possibilities. * The exercise of power consists in guiding the possibility of conduct and putting in order the possible outcome.Basically power is less a confrontation between two adversaries or the linking of one to the other than a question of government. This word must be allowed the very broad meaning *Foucault is playing on the double meaning in French of the verb conduire, to lead or to drive, and se conduire, to behave or to conduct oneself w and so la conduite, conduct or behavior. -Translators note. 790 Michel Foucault The Subjectand Power which it had in the sixteenth century. Government did not refer only to political structures or to the management of stat es rather, it designated the way in which the conduct of individuals or of groups might be say the government of children, of souls, of communities, of families, of the sick. It did not only cover the legitimately constituted forms of political or economic subjection but also modes of action, more or less considered or calculated, which were destined to act upon the possibilities of action of other people. To govern, in this sense, is to structure the possible field of action of others.The relationship proper to power would not, therefore, be sought on the side of violence or of struggle, nor on that of voluntary linking (all of which can, at best, only be the instruments of power), but rather in the area of the singular mode of action, neither warlike nor juridical, which is government. When one defines the exercise of power as a mode of action upon the actions of others, when one characterizes these actions by the government of men by other men-in the broadest sense of the term-o ne includes an important element freedom.Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free. By this we mean individual or collective subjects who are faced with a field of possibilities in which several ways of behaving, several reactions and diverse comportments, may be realized. Where the determining factors saturate the whole, there is no relationship of power slavery is not a power relationship when man is in chains. (In this case it is a question of a physical relationship of constraint. Consequently, there is no face-to-face confrontation of power and freedom, which are mutually exclusive (freedom disappears everywhere power is exercised), but a much more manifold interplay. In this game freedom may well appear as the condition for the exercise of power (at the same time its precondition, since freedom must exist for power to be exerted, and also its permanent support, since without the possibility of recalcitrance, power would be equivalent to a physical determination). The relationship between power and freedoms refusal to submit cannot, therefore, be separated.The crucial problem of power is not that of voluntary servitude (how could we seek to be slaves? ). At the very heart of the power relationship, and constantly provoking it, are the recalcitrance of the will and the intransigence of freedom. Rather than speaking of an essential freedom, it would be better to speak of an agonism*of a relationship which is at the same time reciprocal incitation and struggle, less of a face-to-face confrontation which paralyzes both sides than a permanent provocation. *Foucaults neologism is based on the Greek &ycvro-ota meaning a combat. The term would hence imply a physical contest in which the opponents develop a system of reaction and of mutual taunting, as in a wrestling match. -Translators note. Critical Inquiry How is one to analyze the power relationship? Summer1982 791 One can analyze such relationships, or rather I should s ay that it is perfectly legitimate to do so, by focusing on carefully defined institutions. The latter constitute a privileged point of observation, diversified, concentrated, put in order, and carried through to the highest point of their efficacity.It is here that, as a first approximation, one might expect to see the appearance of the form and logic of their elementary mechanisms. However, the analysis of power relations as one finds them in certain circumscribed institutions presents a certain number of problems. First, the fact that an important part of the mechanisms put into operation by an institution are designed to ensure its own preservation brings with it the risk of deciphering functions which are fundamentally reproductive, especially in power relations between institutions.Second, in analyzing power relations from the standpoint of institutions, one lays oneself open to seeking the explanation and the origin of the former in the latter, that is to say, finally, to exp lain power to power. Finally, insofar as institutions act essentially by bringing into play two elements, explicit or tacit regulations and an apparatus, one risks giving to one or the other an exaggerated privilege in the relations of power and hence to see in the latter only modulations of the law and of coercion.This does not deny the importance of institutions on the establishment of power relations. Instead, I wish to suggest that one must analyze institutions from the standpoint of power relations, rather than vice versa, and that the fundamental point of anchorage of the relationships, even if they are incorporated and crystallized in an institution, is to be found outside the institution. Let us come back to the definition of the exercise of power as a way in which certain actions may structure the field of other possible actions.What, therefore, would be proper to a relationship of power is that it be a mode of action upon actions. That is to say, power relations are rooted deep in the social nexus, not reconstituted above society as a supplementary structure whose radical effacement one could perhaps dream of. In any case, to live in society is to live in such a way that action upon other actions is possible-and in fact ongoing. A society without power relations can only be an abstraction. Which, be it said in passing, makes all the more olitically necessary the analysis of power relations in a given society, their historical formation, the source of their strength or fragility, the conditions which are necessary to transform some or to abolish others. For to say that there cannot be a society without power relations is not to say either that those which are realized are necessary or, in any case, that power constitutes a fatality at the heart of societies, such that it cannot be undermined. Instead, I would say that the analysis, elaboration, and bringing into question of power relations 792 Michel Foucault The Subjectand Power nd the agonism betwe en power relations and the intransitivity of freedom is a permanent political task inherent in all social existence. The analysis of power relations demands that a certain number of points be established concretely 1. The system of differentiationswhich permits one to act upon the actions of others differentiations heady by the law or by traditions of status and privilege economic differences in the appropriation of riches and goods, shifts in the processes of production, linguistic or cultural differences, differences in know-how and competence, and so forth.Every relationship of power puts into operation differentiations which are at the same time its conditions and its results. 2. The typesof objectivespursued by those who act upon the actions of others the maintenance of privileges, the accumulation of profits, the bringing into operation of statutary authority, the exercise of a function or of a trade. 3.The means of bringing power relations into being according to whether pow er is exercised by the threat of arms, by the effects of the word, by means of economic disparities, by more or less complex means of control, by systems of surveillance, with or without archives, according to rules which are or are not explicit, fixed or modifiable, with or without the technological means to put all these things into action. 4. Forms of institutionalization these may mix traditional redispositions, legal structures, phenomena relating to custom or to modal value (such as one sees in the institution of the family) they can also take the form of an apparatus closed in upon itself, with its specific loci, its own regulations, its hierarchical structures which are carefully defined, a relative autonomy in its work (such as scholastic or military institutions) they can also form very complex systems endowed with multiple apparatuses, as in the case of the state, whose function is the taking of everything under its wing, the bringing into being of general surveillance, the principle of regulation, and, to a certain extent also, the distribution of all power relations in a given social ensemble. 5. The degrees of rationalization the bringing into play of power relations as action in a field of possibilities may be more or less elaborate in relation to the effectiveness of the instruments and the certainty of the results (greater or lesser technological refinements employed in the exercise of power) or again in proportion to the possible cost (be it the economic cost of the means brought into operation or the cost in terms of reaction constituted by the resistance which is encountered).The exercise of power is not a naked fact, an institutional right, nor is it a structure which holds out or is smashed it is elaborated, transformed, organized it endows itself with processes which are more or less adjusted to the situation. One sees why the analysis of power relations within a society cannot be reduced to the study of a series of institutions, not ev en to the study of Critical Inquiry Summer1982 793 all those institutions which would merit the bod political. Power relations are rooted in the system of social networks. This is not to say, however, that there is a primary and fundamental principle of power which dominates society down to the smallest detail but, taking as point of departure the possibility of action upon the action of others (which is coextensive with every social relationship), multiple forms of individual isparity, of objectives, of the given application of power over ourselves or others, of, in varying degrees, partial or universal institutionalization, of more or less deliberate organization, one can define different forms of power. The forms and the specific situations of the government of men by one another in a given society are multiple they are superimposed, they cross, impose their own limits, sometimes cancel one another out, sometimes reinforce one another. It is certain that in contemporary societi es the state is not simply one of the forms or specific situations of the exercise of powereven if it is the most important-but that in a certain way all other forms of power relation must refer to it.But this is not because they are derived from it it is rather because power relations have come more and more under state control (although this state control has not taken the same form in pedagogical, judicial, economic, or family systems). In referring here to the restricted sense of the word government, one could say that power relations have been progressively governmentalized, that is to say, elaborated, rationalized, and centralized in the form of, or under the auspices of, state institutions. Relations of power and relations of strategy. The word strategy is currently employed in three ways. First, to designate the means employed to attain a certain end it is a question of rationality functioning to arrive at an objective.Second, to designate the manner in which a partner in a certain game acts with regard to what he thinks should be the action of the others and what he considers the others think to be his own it is the way in which one seeks to have the advantage over others. Third, to designate the procedures used in a situation of confrontation to deprive the opponent of his means of combat and to reduce him to giving up the struggle it is a question, therefore, of the means destined to obtain victory. These three meanings come together in situations of confrontation-war or games-where the objective is to act upon an adversary in such a manner as to render the struggle impossible for him. So strategy is defined by the choice of winning solutions.But it must be borne in mind that this is a very special type of situation and that there are others in which the distinctions between the different senses of the word strategy must be maintained. Referring to the first sense I have indicated, one may call power strategy the totality of the means put into opera tion to implement power effectively or to maintain it. One may also speak of a strategy proper to 794 Michel Foucault The Subjectand Power power relations insofar as they constitute modes of action upon possible action, the action of others. One can therefore interpret the mechanisms brought into play in power relations in terms of strategies. But most important is obviously the relationship between power relations and confrontation strategies.For, if it is true that at the heart of power relations and as a permanent condition of their existence there is an insubordination and a certain essential obstinacy on the part of the principles of freedom, then there is no relationship of power without the means of escape or possible flight. Every power relationship implies, at least in potentia, a strategy of struggle, in which the two forces are not superimposed, do not lose their specific nature, or do not finally become confused. Each constitutes for the other a kind of permanent limit, a point of possible reversal. A relationship of confrontation reaches its term, its final moment (and the victory of one of the two adversaries), when stable mechanisms replace the free play of antagonistic reactions.Through such mechanisms one can direct, in a fairly constant manner and with reasonable certainty, the conduct of others. For a relationship of confrontation, from the moment it is not a struggle to the death, the fixing of a power relationship becomes a target-at one and the same time its fulfillment and its suspension. And in return, the strategy of struggle also constitutes a frontier for the relationship of power, the line at which, instead of manipulating and inducing actions in a calculated manner, one must be content with reacting to them after the event. It would not be possible for power relations to exist without points of insubordination which, by definition, are means of escape.Accordingly, every intensification, every extension of power relations to make th e insubordinate submit can only result in the limits of power. The latter reaches its final term either in a type of action which reduces the other to total impotence (in which case victory over the adversary replaces the exercise of power) or by a confrontation with those whom one governs and their transformation into adversaries. Which is to say that every strategy of confrontation dreams of becoming a relationship of power, and every relationship of power leans toward the idea that, if it follows its own line of development and comes up against direct confrontation, it may become the winning strategy.In effect, between a relationship of power and a strategy of struggle there is a reciprocal appeal, a perpetual linking and a perpetual reversal. At every moment the relationship of power may become a confrontation between two adversaries. Equally, the relationship between adversaries in society may, at every moment, give place to the putting into operation of mechanisms of power. Th e consequence of this instability is the ability to decipher the same events and the same transformations either from inside the history of struggle or from the standpoint of the power relationships. The interpretations which result will not consist of the same elements of meaning or the same links or the same types of intelligibility, Critical Inquiry Summer 1982 795 lthough they refer to the same historical fabric, and each of the two analyses must have reference to the other. In fact, it is precisely the disparities between the two readings which make visible those fundamental phenomena of domination which are present in a large number of human societies.Domination is in fact a general structure of power whose ramifications and consequences can sometimes be found descending to the most recalcitrant fibers of society. But at the same time it is a strategic situation more or less taken for granted and consolidated by means of a long-term confrontation between adversaries. It can ce rtainly happen that the fact of domination may only be the transcription of a mechanism of power esulting from confrontation and its consequences (a political structure stemming from invasion) it may also be that a relationship of struggle between two adversaries is the result of power relations with the conflicts and cleavages which ensue. But what makes the domination of a group, a caste, or a class, together with the resistance and revolts which that domination comes up against, a central phenomenon in the history of societies is that they manifest in a massive and universalizing form, at the level of the whole social body, the locking together of power relations with relations of strategy and the results proceeding from their interaction.