les voix: For/Getting｜Re/Membering

Excerpts for Notes:

Cynthia R. Nielsen [Blog], Power, Subjectification and Resistance in Foucault, 2010
Discussing:
Kevin Jon Heller, Power, Subjectification and Resistance in Foucault, 1996
Citing:
- Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish
- Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol. 1
- Michel Foucault, The Subject and Power

Power, which is assumed to exist universally, does not exist; it exists only when it is put into action.

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.

A power relationship can only be articulated on the basis of two elements which are each indispensable if it is really to be a power relationship: 1) “the other”, and 2) a whole field of responses, reactions, results, and possible inventions.

Power as “transformative capacity” – the ability of an individual to influence and modify the actions of other individuals in order to realize certain tactical goals; power relationships are the condition for the possibility of change, whether personal or societal.

If the relationship is one of total domination or controlled by violence such that one side has no freedom and cannot act in any way upon the dominating partner – then it is no longer a power relationship.

For Foucault, power has a positive aspect and creates possibilities for change. Of course, change can be for the better or the worse; however, Foucault’s use of the term should not be reduced only to the negative aspect.

Power mechanisms are necessarily incapable of being controlled by any particular individual, because they are structured and reproduced by a multiplicity of power-relations that are not reducible to the individuals who exercise them.

This state of affairs does not rule out the fact that some individuals and groups within a power-diagram control more of a diagram’s mechanisms of power than others. Nor is it the case that subjects, because they are “located” within the machine, are unable to execute intentional and volitional actions.

The exercise of power can of course be oppressive, but it can also be utilized for social reformation and to achieve other positive collective goals.

According to Heller, Foucault uses the terms “tactics” and “strategies” to highlight whether or not an action is intentional.

“Tactics” are the intentional actions carried out in determinate political contexts by individuals and groups; “strategies” are the unintentional – but institutionally and socially regularized – effects produced by the non-subjective articulation of different individual and group tactics.

Both tactics and strategies involve power, because both create social change, but only strategies involve non-subjective power.

So why do certain institutions whose unintentional effects are clearly out of sync with the original intentional aims continue to exist? Foucault’s answer: because certain groups within a particular diagram benefit (economically and otherwise) from the institution.

*** BY THE WAY ***

Happy birthday to Michel Foucault,
as well as to Friedrich Nietzsche!!!
And, to all the Foucauldian legacies!!!