The_Cambridge_Foucault_Lexicon

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Hence, although there can be no overall liberation from power, there can and should be particular emancipations from different systems of domination: from oppressive relations of power and the effects of the employment of certain normalizing techniques. Foucault lists speciic transformations that have proven to be possible in his lifetime: in our ways of being and thinking, relations to authority, relations between the sexes, and the way we perceive insanity or illness (EFR, 46–47).

This view of resistance as aiming at liberation from particular states of domination appeals to a shared commitment to the value that is freedom and involves an understanding of negative freedom. In another late interview, “Subject and Power,” Foucault claims that power relations arise when there is action on the actions of others. Power only functions on free action; it is an action on action (EEW3, 341–342). It is thus always exercised on free subjects. Here, however, free means no more than being able to act in a variety of ways. Subjects free of domination are capable of resistance in the sense that they are able to instigate shifts in power relations by acting in different ways to inluence each other’s behavior. Resistance to domination poses a more dificult challenge, however. Even though power relations are essentially luid and reversible, what usually characterizes domination is that these relationships have become stabilized through institutions. This stabilization means that the mobility of power relations is limited and that there are strongholds that are dificult to suppress because they have been institutionalized in courts, codes, and so on. Although Foucault recognizes that resistance to states of domination often requires collective political action, the accounts he gives of it are rare.

An important discussion occurs in his Collège de France lecture course “Security, Territory, Population” held in 1978. Foucault explicitly poses the question of resistance against the spread of modern technologies of power – governmentalization – in his lecture on March 1, 1978: “Just as there have been forms of resistance to power as the exercise of political sovereignty, and just as there have been other, equally intentional forms of resistance or refusal that were directed at power in the forms of economic exploitation, have there not been forms of resistance to power as conducting” (ECF-STP, 195)? He replies by arguing that as governmentality refers to a speciic form of power that focuses on the conduct of people, the way in which they behave, resistance against it must take the form of counterconduct. He discusses various movements – religious and political – that have historically developed in tandem with the growth of governmentality and whose objective was a different form of conduct: to be conducted differently, by other leaders, toward other objectives, and through other procedures and methods.

Foucault’s late work on practices of the self provides his fullest account of resistance, but the project was cut short by his untimely death. The last two volumes of The History of Sexuality study ancient ethical practices and technologies of the

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self. Foucault also signiicantly discusses their relevance for the contemporary art of living in his late interviews and lectures.

The two volumes appeared in a very different form from the one that Foucault had originally planned and proposed. He indicates in the introduction to volume two that there was an analytical axis missing from his previous work. To be able to study the history of “the experience of sexuality,” he also needed, besides the methodological tools with which his archaeologies and genealogies had provided him, to “study the modes according to which individuals are given to recognize themselves as sexual subjects” (EHS2, 5). He then turned to studying the historical constitution of the self: the forms of understanding subjects create about themselves and the ways they form themselves as subjects through historically changing technologies of the self. Whereas his earlier genealogical studies investigated the ways that the power/ knowledge apparatus constitutes the subject, in his late work the emphasis is on the subject’s own role in implementing or refusing forms of subjectivity. His late work thus brings into focus a new component of the constitution of the subject – modes of relation to oneself – and thus presents a more elaborated understanding of the subject than is found in his earlier writings.

This third axis of analysis also makes possible a more sophisticated understanding of resistance: the government of the self by oneself becomes its principal domain. Foucault advocates “a politics of ourselves” that does not attempt to ind an authentic or true self but aims at a creative transformation of ourselves. In his rare but important comments in interviews with the gay press, he argued that the gay movement did not need scientiic knowledge about sexuality but an art of life: “We don’t have to discover that we are homosexuals ... we have to create a gay life. To become”

(EEW1, 163).

In his late thinking, Foucault also returns to the idea, found in his early work, of the subversive role of art. The practices of the self are closely linked, or even fused with aesthetics. He describes them in several contexts in terms of art of life and aesthetics of existence. They are ways of living and thinking that are transgressive in the extent to which, like a work of art, they are not simply the products of normalizing power. The target of these practices is primarily modes of normalization: the forms of power that produce docile forms of subjectivity. Resistance against forms of subjectiication cannot be situated outside the networks of power in Foucault’s thought since subjectivity is only possible within them. This means that resistance also becomes possible only within them, through the subject’s creative practices that help to constitute forms of subjectivity; through refusal and adoption of forms of subjectivity. Resistance comes to mean contesting determinations, of refusing what we are told we are.

For Foucault, the problem with modern power is that it is normalizing power: it is individualizing and yet totalizing. It “separates the individual, breaks his links

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with others, splits up community life, forces the individual back on himself and ties him to his own identity in a constraining way” (EEW3, 333). The modern state is a sophisticated structure, into which individuals can be integrated, but under the condition that their individuality is shaped in a determinate form, and submitted to a very speciic pattern. The way to resist this normalizing power is by shaping oneself and one’s lifestyle creatively: by exploring possibilities for new forms of subjectivity, new ields of experiences, pleasures, relationships, modes of living and thinking.

Technologies of the self are not separate from technologies of domination, which had been the focus of Foucault’s earlier studies, and he points out necessary links between them (EPT, 181). Hence, technologies of the self do not introduce a totally autonomous subject to Foucault’s late thinking. But neither are technologies of the self simply extensions of techniques of domination disguised as voluntary. Foucault theorizes a subject with relative independence in regard to the constitutive power/knowledge apparatus: a subject capable of critical self-relection and deliberate transformation of the self. As Gilles Deleuze (Deleuze 1988, 101) argued, Foucault’s fundamental idea was that of a dimension of subjectivity derived from a power/knowledge apparatus without being dependent on it. The constituted subject is capable of turning back on itself: of critically studying the processes of its own constitution but also deliberately subverting them and effecting changes in them.

In his late texts and interviews, Foucault emphasizes the importance of critique.

He sees it as an essential form of resistance and links it to the legacy and attitude of the Enlightenment. For Foucault, governmentalization is the process through which individuals are subjugated in modern society, and this subjugation is effected essentially through mechanisms that adhere to truth. Critique is “the movement by which the subject gives himself the right to interrogate truth on its effects of power and question power on its discourses of truth.” It is “the art of voluntary insubordination, that of relected intractability” (EPT, 47).

In Foucault’s introduction to The Use of Pleasure, as well as in his late interviews, he also introduces the concept of “problematization.” It is closely linked to the possibility of critique and refers to the way in which certain forms of behavior, practices, and actions can emerge as possible objects of social critique, politicization, redescription, and ultimately change. He explains that for a practice, a domain of action, or a behavior to enter the ield of political problematization it is necessary for a certain number of factors to have irst made it uncertain, to have made it lose its familiarity, or to have provoked a number of dificulties around it. This is the result of social, economic, and political processes, but their role is only that of instigation. Effective problematization is accomplished by thought. When thought intervenes, it does not assume a unique form that is the direct result or the necessary expression of the social, economic, or political dificulties. It is an original or speciic response, often taking many forms, sometimes contradictory in their aspects. “Thought is freedom in relation to what one does, the motion by which one detaches oneself from it,

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establishes it as an object, and relects on it as a problem” (EFR, 388). Foucault thus recognizes that philosophical thought and social critique form an important condition of possibility for political change and as such a signiicant aspect of resistance to hegemonic forms of power.

In sum, resistance against domination and the normalizing effects of power/ knowledge must advance on multiple fronts. It consists of creative transformations of the self, communal forms of counterconduct, and critical interrogation of our present.

Joanna Oksala

See Also

Conduct

Contestation

Critique

Power

Problematization

Strategies (and Tactics)

Transgression

Suggested Reading

Butler, Judith. 1997. The Psychic Life of Power, Theories in Subjection. Stanford, CA: Stanford

University Press.

Deleuze, Gilles. 1988. Foucault, trans. Seán Hand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Heyes, Cressida. 2007. Self-Transformations: Foucault, Ethics and Normalized Bodies. Oxford:

Oxford University Press.

McGushin, Edward. 2007. Foucault’s Askesis: An Introduction to the Philosophical Life. Evanston,

IL: Northwestern University Press.

McWhorter, Ladelle. 1999. Bodies and Pleasures: Foucault and the Politics of Sexual Normalization.

Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Oksala, Johanna. 2005. Foucault on Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. O’Leary, Timothy. 2002. Foucault and the Art of Ethics. London: Continuum.

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Madness, Foucault sees madness as reappearing immediately prior to the revolution as a result of reforms; and in Discipline and Punish, France’s new penal code results from the revolution, but in other countries the decisive changes occur before it and without any local revolution spurring it. Foucault is clear that it was not revolution that actually created these changes, even if he also holds that the French Revolution “completely turned upside down” the various institutions his histories had dealt with (FDE3, 411). One can infer then that the revolution is as much the effect as it is the cause of the changes.

Foucault would seem to assign particular importance to the Revolution in his remark that “we still have not cut the head off the king” in political theory in the irst volume of his History of Sexuality (EHS1, 88–89). However, the point here is precisely that cutting the head off the king in reality failed to achieve a crucial shift in political theory, or indeed in politics itself, insofar as it continued to be dominated by a “sovereign” model of power.

None of Foucault’s books thematizes revolution, then; for his explicit views on the subject, one has to look elsewhere. He irst explicitly engaged with the theme only in the late 1970s, and then only in interviews, and in his 1976 lecture series “Society Must Be Defended.” Foucault locates the irst political use of the notion of revolution with French philosopher Henri de Boulainvilliers in the seventeenth century. Boulainvilliers employed the notion literally, as a matter of politics revolving, a turn of the wheel of history by which empires rise and then fall, just as the earth revolves around the sun (ECF-SMD, 193).

More generally, however, Foucault sees revolutionary discourse as founded on the notion of a struggle between opposing forces underlying politics. Revolution is thus understood as a matter of a decisive inversion of the balance of forces, victory for one side or the other (ECF-SMD, 79). Revolutionaries struggle deliberately to produce a inal inversion, whereas “antirevolutionary” discourses are opposed to it, defending the state against those who would usurp the existing order. Both sides, however, for Foucault take their cue from the notion of society as struggle; it is only that antirevolutionaries understand themselves as dominant and hence seek to maintain this dominance (ECF-SMD, 81). Racism is thus understood by Foucault as “inverted” revolutionary discourse, which demands the protection of the pure master race (ibid.). Similarly, he notes the possibility that a revolutionary discourse might end up being the discourse of a dominant faction, as in the Soviet Union, on the basis that an oppressed class that has seized power needs to maintain its dominance (ECF-SMD, 83).

In relation to the French Revolution, Foucault discusses a view of revolution as a inal reconciliation of historical tendencies, as their logical development (ECFSMD, 232–233). This position, I think, can be broadly described as Hegelian, though Foucault does not explicitly make that reference. It is not completely at odds with understanding revolution as a victory in a struggle between forces, as evidenced by Marx’s dialectical historicism (ECF-SMD, 233–234).

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Foucault in Society Must Be Defended locates his own thought as lying in the tradition that thinks of politics as the struggle between forces. This gives rise to an apparent antinomy in his position vis-à-vis revolution: on the one hand, he describes it as a limited episode in the history of thought, and on the other locates himself inside this episode. This antinomy is repeated in his remarks regarding revolution in interviews from around the same time. On the one hand, there he bemoans the fact that progress toward revolution has stagnated and urges a return to it. On the other, he criticises the extent to which revolution has been a dominant category of political thought since 1789.

Regarding the claim that revolutionary politics has stagnated, Foucault (FDE3, 398), speaking in 1977, after the collapse of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, argues that we ind ourselves for the irst time since 1830 in a situation in which no revolution is taking place that we can point to as something to rally toward. Indeed, Foucault notes that the situation in 1830 was less serious because there was an ongoing possibility of harking back to the French Revolution. Whatever the reason, Foucault thinks we ind ourselves in a situation where the masses in the West have ceased to desire revolution (FDE3, 85). In the face of this mass opposition to revolution, a minority who continue to advocate revolution have succeeded only in creating an association of revolution with “extreme intellectual elitism” and terrorism. Foucault argues, however, that only mass desire for revolution can bring revolution about, not terror. This leads him to conclude that: “In my opinion, the role of the intellectual today must be to re-establish the same status of desirability for the image of revolution that existed in the 19th century.” “To do this,” he argues, “it is necessary to invent new modes of human relations, which is to say new modes of knowledge, new modes of pleasure and of sexual life.” Foucault’s claim is that these new relations can “be transformed into a revolution and render it desirable” (FDE2, 86).

The compatibility of his pro-revolutionary attitude with his critique of revolution can be seen in these remarks: Foucault wants revolution only on condition that it can be a new kind of revolution, different from what has gone before. This indeed may imply that politics as we are used to understanding it will cease to exist (FDE3, 267; cf. EPPC, 122). There is nothing assured about this, however; it might not happen. Hence, for Foucault the task of the intellectual is “to try to know, with the most honesty possible, whether revolution is desirable” (FDE3, 267, my translation; cf. EPPC, 122). Importantly, he adds the caveat here “that only those who accept risking their lives to make it come about can answer this question ultimately” (FDE3, 269, my translation; cf. EPPC, 124).

There is an apparent contradiction here still between the idea that intellectuals are supposed to make revolution desirable and the idea that they should be questioning whether it is desirable. However, the two tasks are compatible: to make us want revolution can combine with the honest posing of the question of whether it is desirable; we try to make it desirable, because it is not yet clearly desirable, through

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changing reality, not merely engaging in a publicity exercise on behalf of revolution. It is not the intellectual’s task to incite revolution regardless of the context. For Foucault (FDE3, 476), no philosophical position is truly in and of itself “revolutionary,” or indeed conservative. Thus Hegel or Nietzsche, for example, can be used for either revolutionary or conservative purposes. The point here is that philosophers think about the world in a sophisticated way that does not simply automatically commend the same course of political praxis in all situations.

The problem with revolutionary thought for Foucault (FDE3, 279–280) is that it aims at “the revolution,” that it presupposes that history is directed toward a singular revolution and bases history and politics around this contextualization of the present. Foucault (FDE3, 530) argues that such ways of thinking are demobilizing in practice by deferring everything away from local, immediate struggles toward a grand struggle. Instead of aiding struggle, then, the notion of revolution becomes a point around which power is constituted (FDE3, 551). For Foucault, this is how the concept of the revolution has operated since its entry into European thought a couple of centuries ago. It

constituted a gigantic effort to domesticate revolts within a rational and controllable history: it gave them a legitimacy, separated their good forms from their bad, and deined the laws of their unfolding; it set their prior conditions, objectives, and ways of being carried to completion. Even a status of the professional revolutionary was deined: by thus repatriating revolt, people have aspired to make its truth manifest and to bring it to its real end. (EEW3, 450)

Against this tendency to domesticate revolution by seeing it as an absolute and singular rupture, Foucault characterizes it as a “type of codiication” of power relations (EPK, 122). It is thus not merely a break but a kind of status quo in itself, even if a revolution is by deinition temporary; it will collapse into a nonrevolutionary codiication (EPPC, 219). That it is a codiication furthermore implies that a revolution has its own speciic inherent structure and hence “that there are many different kinds of revolution, roughly speaking as many kinds as there are possible subversive codiications of power relations, and that one can moreover perfectly well conceive of revolutions which leave essentially intact the power relations which allow the state to function” (FDE3, 151, my translation; cf. EPK, 122–123).

Thus, revolution is never absolute, nor does one revolution necessarily particularly resemble another. Foucault argues that revolutionary thought has been universalist in insisting that all revolutions must follow the same model (FDE2, 816). When applied globally, this implies Western revolutionaries are guilty of an “imperialism of the universal discourse,” or alternatively of “exoticism” (presumably what Saïd would call “orientalism”). That is, they either see every revolution in the world as according to a Western model or as utterly different, and thus impossible to understand at all.

442 / Mark Kelly

Foucault made these remarks in 1975, but he would go on to apply them concretely in relation to the Iranian Revolution a few years later. Here, he tries to analyze what he saw irsthand in Iran in its uniqueness as a political event. Predictably, the Left in the West either interpreted Iranian events according to their model or refused to recognize its status as a revolution. For Foucault, its speciicity lay, most obviously, in the way Shia Islam operated politically, and also, he suspects, in a status as the irst revolt of global modernity, against global systems rather than a merely national situation, representing a new kind of insurrection (FDE3, 716). These comments, however, pertain to the protest movement that forced out the Shah. In 1979, when the Ayatollah Khomeini returned and contested power after the Shah’s departure, the Revolution entered a phase that saw it accord with conventional Western notions of revolution, at which point, says Foucault (Afary and Anderson 2005, 239), it was recognized as such for the irst time.

Mark Kelly

See Also

History

Politics

Power

Race (and Racism)

Resistance

Henri de Boulainvilliers

Suggested Reading

Afary, Janet, and Kevin B. Anderson. 2005. Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.