The_Cambridge_Foucault_Lexicon

STATEMENT / 485

See Also

Archaeology

Language

Literature

Parresia

Truth

Suggested Reading

Deleuze, Gilles. 1988. Foucault, trans. Seán Hand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gutting, Gary. 1989. Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Scientiic Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

Strategies (and Tactics) / 487

that strategies operate as abstract forms imposed from the outside onto concrete tactics. Rather, strategies and tactics are absolutely immanent to each other as well as co-conditioning. That is, discipline could not be effective at the global level if it did not ind its support in precise relations between doctors and patients, teachers and students, and so on. Conversely, no single tactic would function were it not conjoined and coordinated with other tactics. Foucault will call this co-dependence between strategies and tactics their “double conditioning” (EHS1, 99–100), but “double” here does not refer to any kind of copying or modeling between tactics and strategies. We would misunderstand this relationship completely if we thought tactics were miniature copies that emanated from a model strategy: “[T]he father in the family is not the ‘representative’ of the sovereign or state; and the latter are not projections of the father on a different scale. The family does not duplicate society, just as society does not imitate the family” (EHS1, 100). Strategies do not exist before tactics. Rather, the tactical relationship that deines the family is conjoined with other tactics in medicine, statistics, and psychiatry to form a strategy, and the “double conditioning” between strategies and tactics must refer to the way in which strategies enable particular force relations to ind their consistency and stability, whereas tactics must anchor a strategy in precise and concrete points of support.

This heterogeneity of tactics and strategies is important when we consider the fact that although tactics are often carried out quite explicitly by individuals at the local level, the way in which they are connected to one another to form a comprehensive system is entirely anonymous in Foucault’s account. That is to say, there is no subject who invents or is responsible for carrying out a strategy, and furthermore, the strategy that comes to envelop a tactic may be quite antithetical to the aims of those who “invented” any particular practice. Yet the anonymity of strategies does not result in a kind of physical determinism: even though strategies coordinate tactics to form a general line of force, the particular force relations that are traced out and conjoined are by no means entirely stable. This instability derives from the contingent nature of any tactical relation. Although these local force relations do anchor strategies and function as their points of support, their tenuous nature constantly harbors the possibility of a redistribution or realignment of any broader strategy of power. Thus, because tactics are not only the concrete supports of any strategy but also the site of these strategies, we might say that tactics are situated as a sort of hinge between the potentially totalizing effects of strategies and the resistance to these very strategies.

How does a simple relationship between confessor and pastor, doctor and patient, or inmate and guard transform itself into the restructuring of complex political strategies such as biopower or disciplinary power? An example is instructive. In Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France from 1977–1978, we ind several maneuvers at the tactical level that are essential to the struggle against the Christian pastorate, including tactical shifts in eschatology, Scripture, mysticism, the community,

488 / John Nale

and askesis. Let us briely examine askesis, which will of course become a major theme in Foucault’s late work.

One of the tenets of the Christian pastorate is that the pastor must be concerned with the conduct of each and every individual so as to guarantee their salvation. This functions in part through what Foucault calls a “complete subordination” (ECF-STP, 178) whereby each and every individual completely renounces his will and submits himself to the pastor. This relationship of servitude is manifested in the minute details of monastic life and ultimately comes to take the form of a “test of good obedience” within the monastic institution. Referring to these tests of obedience, Foucault explains, “As soon as an order is given to a monk, he must immediately stop whatever he happens to be doing at the time and carry out the order without wondering why he has been given this order or whether it wouldn’t be more worthwhile to continue with what he was doing” (ECF-STP, 176). Accordingly, this form of power relies on a complete renunciation of the will, and the sincerity of the renunciation is guaranteed by a series of tests. However, the Christian pastorate will enter a “crisis” when this test of obedience and the renunciation of the will becomes a test of askesis. These ascetic practices, deined by Foucault as “an exercise of self on self” (ECF-STP, 205), involves the self-imposition of a series of tests such as fasting, whipping oneself, or burning oneself that become progressively more dificult and insufferable. But the intent of these exercises is essentially incompatible with pastoral obedience because these self-imposed sufferings ultimately create an individual who “becomes the guide of his own asceticism” (ECF-STP, 205). That is to say, through these tests, the ascetic no longer stands in a position of servitude to a superior but rather achieves mastery over himself and his body – a self-mastery that is antithetical to the pastoral obedience to another. This is merely a single tactical reversal, but when it is coordinated with other practices such as mysticism, eschatology, and so on, a crisis and restructuring at the strategic level is brought about.

Examples of tactical reversals such as this, where a dominated group or individual seizes on a tactic as a means of escape, help us see why Michel de Certeau, following both von Clausewitz and Foucault, will declare, “a tactic is an art of the weak” (Certeau 2002, 37). However, what is essential to note is that although this tactical reversal is opposed to the Christian pastorate’s call for obedience, this is not an opposition that operates from outside the pastoral system of power. Rather, asceticism resists pastoral power by reimplementing or reutilizing its own elements, such as the “test,” and thereby must be deined as an immanent form of counter-conduct or resistance. Foucault emphasizes the immanence of resistance when he writes, “the struggle [against pastoral power] was not conducted in the form of double exteriority, but rather in the form of the permanent use of tactical elements that are pertinent to the anti-pastoral struggle insofar as they fall within, in a marginal way, the general horizon of Christianity” (ECF-STP, 215, my emphasis). Thus, whenever we ind an instance of resistance or opposition in Foucault’s work, we must be careful

Strategies (and Tactics) / 489

that it is not actually based on practices of “reimplementation” or “reutilization,” or even repetition, that underpin oppositions to a strategy. In sum, because resistance occurs at the tactical level, and because tactics and strategies are co-conditioning and immanent to each other, any resistance to strategies such as pastoral power, disciplinary power, or biopower must be anchored in tactics constituting these very strategies. That is, the possibility of an escape or light from any strategic regime is always immanent to every speciic application of power, and this aspect of power derives from the “double conditioning” of tactics and strategies, whereby unstable tactical relations constitute potentially totalizing strategies and these strategies are built on unpredictable, tenuous tactical relations.

John Nale

See Also

Biopolitics

Discipline

Politics

Power

Suggested Reading

Certeau, Michel de. 2002. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Deleuze, Gilles. 1988. “Strategies or the Non-stratiied: The Thought of the Outside (Power),” in Foucault, trans. Seán Hand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 47–69.

Derrida, Jacques. 1985. “The Ends of Man,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass. Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, pp. 109–136.

Thompson, Kevin. 2003. “Forms of Resistance: Foucault on Tactical Reversal and SelfFormation,” Continental Philosophy Review 36, no. 2:113–138.

STRUCTURALISM / 491

of the Clinic for its second edition, notably by erasing several of the irst edition’s explicit references to structuralism.

But Foucault’s reversal took more the form of a visceral self-defense than that of a leshed-out argument, and his position ended up being at times incoherent. For instance, at the end of the “Foreword” to the English edition of The Order of Things, he claimed that he had “used none of the methods, concepts, or key terms that characterize structural analysis” (EOT, xiv). But in a conference presentation given that same year (1970), he explained that what he had done in his work was “only to have recourse to the structuralist method” (FDE2, 133). One year later, he lipped back and afirmed that he had “never, at any time, used the methods peculiar to the structural analyses” (FDE2, 209–210, 216). Interestingly, in the early 1970s, Georges Dumézil, who strongly inluenced Foucault throughout his career, was uttering similar contradictory statements about his own position toward structuralism (see Eribon 1992, 329–334).

Foucault was probably more exasperated by structuralism as a label that was uncritically and automatically stamped on his work than as a method for studying cultural issues. Instead of trying to determine whether Foucault was a structuralist, it is more enlightening to look at the points of intersection between some general aspects of structuralism and Foucault’s work. Whether these commonalities are suficient to win Foucault a membership card in the structuralist club will depend on how exclusive one wants this club to be, but at the very least this analysis will make clear that Foucault rode the wave of structuralism that took over France as he was beginning his work.

Already in his very irst interview, given in 1961, Foucault explained that he had been greatly inluenced by Dumézil’s idea of structure (FDE1, 168). Dumézil had showed in his analyses of myths how the same structure can be found, with some modiications, in the myths of radically different cultures. In good structuralist fashion, a structure was therefore independent from its concrete elements. After the publication of The Order of Things in 1966, Foucault presented his book as a type of Dumézilian work, in which he had tried to show how there is “an isomorphism between discourses at a given time period” (EOT, xi). Against historians who believe they can fully explain a discourse by reducing it to its social and economic conditions, Foucault emphasized the importance of the structural level: one must “take into consideration the force and consistency of ... isomorphisms” (FDE1, 591).

Although The Order of Things marks the pinnacle of Foucault’s focus on discursive isomorphisms, he kept privileging structures and rules over substantial elements in his later works. Most radically, in The Archaeology of Knowledge, he explained that what he wished to do was “to dispense with ‘things’,” which meant to deine objects “without reference to the foundation of things, but by relating them to the body of rules that enable ... them [to be formed] as objects of a discourse and thus to constitute the conditions of their historical appearance” (EAK, 48). As Foucault later

492 / Patrick Singy

said of sexuality, for instance, its “fundamental characteristics ... correspond to the functional exigencies of the discourse that must produce its truth.... It is the ‘economy’ of discourses, that is to say their intrinsic technology, the necessities of their operation, the tactics that they employ, the effects of power which underlie them and which they transmit – it is this ... that determines the fundamental characteristics of what they say” (EHS1, 68–69). “Sexuality” was for Foucault nothing more than the nodal point of a set of “functional exigencies,” very much like for Saussure the knight in a chess game is not deined substantially (by its shape, color, size, matter, etc.) but structurally: any object can be a knight as long as it follows the rules that knights must follow (Saussure 1995, 153–154; see Veyne 1978, 423, for the rapprochement between Foucault’s method and the Saussurean chess analogy).

Several important methodological consequences follow from the primacy given to structures over their elements. First, the relations governing the elements within or between structures are not causal but “of a logical kind, like implication, exclusion, [and] transformation” (FDE1, 607). Foucault criticized the traditional historians’ focus on causal relations: “one must get rid of the prejudice according to which a history without causality would not be a history” (FDE1, 607). Acknowledging the inluence of linguistic structuralism, the new type of history that he advocated looked at the problem of “the insertion of logic into the very heart of reality” (FDE1, 824). After the publication of The Order of Things, Foucault played down this type of abstract terminology and claimed instead that “language can be analyzed in its formal properties only if we take into account its concrete functioning” (FDE1, 595). Yet even in later works he continued to show very little interest in causal relations, which have always been front and center in traditional historiography, and kept focusing on structural relations of implication or exclusion. For instance, in Discipline and Punish he was not primarily interested in the causes of the emergence of modern prisons. What he tried to do was to show that there is a relation of implication between the modern modality of power, which he called “the disciplines,” and a series of elements that include not only prisons but also schools, the army, hospitals, psychiatry, and criminology. The disciplines also logically exclude practices that were typical of the power of the Old Régime, such as torture. Torture was thus presented by Foucault as being “irrational” in relation to the disciplines (FDE4, 26).

Second, inasmuch as a structure is not an aggregation of discrete elements but a holistic system, a transformation of one element is necessarily accompanied by the transformation of all the other elements (see FDE1, 839). This implies that the transition from one structure to another can only occur in a block: history is discontinuous. In The Order of Things, the three discourses on which Foucault focused (the discourses on natural creatures, on economic exchanges, and on language) are transformed synchronically and abruptly, since these discourses are the three elements of

STRUCTURALISM / 493

one structure, or episteme. Foucault wanted to abandon “the grand and old biological metaphor of life and evolution” that had plagued the traditional, continuous type of history since the nineteenth century (FDE2, 280–281).

Third, Lévi-Strauss had claimed that the fundamental difference between ethnology and history is not a difference in goals, objects, or methods but in the fact that ethnology, unlike history, is primarily concerned with the unconscious conditions of social existence (Lévi-Strauss 1958, 24–25). In that regard, Foucault’s history is an application of Lévi-Strauss’s ethnology to Western civilization. He tried to “ind in the history of science, of knowledge [connaissances] and of human knowledge [savoir humain] something that would be like their unconscious” (FDE1, 665–666; see also EOT, xi). There is, however, a crucial difference between Foucault’s and LéviStrauss’s concepts of the unconscious: Foucault always conceived of the unconscious as something thoroughly historical, whereas Lévi-Strauss claimed that it remains fundamentally the same in every civilization (Lévi-Strauss 1958, 28, 224–225; see Revel 2008, 126).

Last, and most importantly, Foucault found in structuralism an eficient weapon against humanism. His main target was Jean-Paul Sartre, to whom he opposed LéviStrauss, Lacan, and Dumézil (see FDE1, 513–516). As Foucault said in a laconic formula, with structuralism “the ‘I’ has exploded ... it is the discovery of the ‘there is’” (FDE1, 515; see also FDE1, 591). Hence he makes the following counterintuitive statement in The Order of Things: the classical episteme “has made possible these individualities that we call Hobbes, or Berkeley, or Hume, or Condillac” (FMC, 77; see also FDE2, 59–61). Methodologically, the structural dissolution of the subject undermined “the great myth of interiority” and therefore the “old exegetic tradition” that required identifying the “true thought of an author” (FDE1, 592). Foucault wanted instead to “determine the conditions of [a statement’s] existence, to ix as exactly as possible its limits, to establish its correlations with the other statements with which it might be linked, to show what other forms of enunciation it excludes” (FDE1, 706). Accordingly, Foucault relentlessly attacked the writing of “commentaries,” which “by deinition admits an excess of the signiied over the signiier” (FNC, xii), and gave himself the task of making “visible what is invisible only because it is too much on the surface of things” (FDE1, 772).

Anti-humanism had emerged early in French thought, and independently from structuralism (Geroulanos 2010). Foucault himself identiied at least three other breaches made to the Sartrean subject: the philosophy of Nietzsche (FDE1, 775; FDE4, 48), the literary works of Blanchot and Bataille (FDE1, 614–615; FDE4, 48), and a new kind of history, which according to Foucault had its origin in Marx and had been developed by the Annales school (FAS, “Introduction”; FDE1, 700; FDE2, 280–281). Despite this overdetermination of anti-humanism, Foucault’s repeated mentions of structuralism’s ability to “call into question the importance