A notebook

[Cain]

Foucault's Political Philosophy

The episteme  is for Foucault the historical order that governs the production of knowledge across disciplines in a particular historical epoch by governing what counts as proper knowledge within scientific discourse (which is to say that the episteme does not necessarily apply to everyday discourses).

Foucault takes as his model DNA, the hidden, material code which determines what unfolds at the explicit level

As Hubert Dreyfus (1987, xi) points out, Foucault in his work criticises the truth claims of the human sciences only, and thus not those of the natural sciences, though he is interested in understanding the "ritual" implicit in natural science

The notion of  ideology  is one that Foucault generally refuses to invoke because of a presumed Marxist connotation that discourse is subordinate to more basically material forces.

Foucault's point here is that Marx is situated within the same episteme as thinkers before him, and hence does not represent a radically new way of thinking. However, this indicates no difference between Althusser and Foucault at the level of ontology, only a difference in how they relate their own ontological claims to Marx, with Althusser claiming that his philosophy is fundamentally rooted in Marx, whereas Foucault claims that Marx was working within an older framework of thought that we have now moved beyond.

Nietzsche's Genealogy tells the story of the development of ethics as a means for the control of the strong by the weak—more generally, this exemplifies the use of supposedly non-political knowledge as a tool for taking power. Power and its ubiquity to life is a key theme of Nietzsche's philosophy, and it is this particular Nietzschean influence that is crucial to Foucault now.

This notion that knowledge is invented has two implications. The first is that there are ulterior motives behind it, which are not the high ones often imputed to it, namely the urge to understand and explain the world. For Nietzsche, knowledge is rooted in non-human animal drives: for knowledge to be invented, it must have been invented by an animal which did not have knowledge, in order to further the struggle of animal existence, which for Nietzsche (TI "Skirmishes" §14) is a struggle for domination.

The second implication is that, conversely, knowledge, while rooted in what came before, while an invention made by and out of things that were there before it, is in fact, "paradoxically" (EW3 7), something genuinely novel, an innovation: "Knowledge is the result of the instincts, but . . . it is not an instinct and is not directly derived from the instincts" (EW3 10). The novelty of knowledge means that it does not merely arise as the expression of experience of things in the world: "According to Nietzsche, there is no resemblance, no prior affinity between knowledge and the things that need to be known" (EW3 . Knowledge is rather the attempt to impose order on an intrinsically chaotic world (EW3 9). It was never just an attempt to describe the way things are.

"I repeat once again that by production of truth I mean not the production of true utterances but the establishment of domains in which the practice of true and false can be made at once ordered and pertinent. "

Foucault's demand is that we stop expecting discourse or knowledge to conform to either our perception or to reality. Appearances are in themselves ineffable: we cannot describe them  completely accurately, for to represent them in their complexity in words would take an eternity and destroy the utility of speech, the reason that we were speaking in the first place (cf. Nietzsche TL I). Thus, violence towards things is necessary to discourse; the error here is to have ever thought that the purpose of speech was to represent transparently how things truly are, non-violently, since that is impossible.

I think we can see the episteme as similarly underdetermining what is said: it governs what may be declared to be true, in the sense of excluding an infinity of possible propositions, but the relation of words to things also plays a determining role in whether propositions are assented to or not, although of course the role of individual volition in producing utterances is also important. As Foucault puts it in Birth of the Clinic, there is "an excess of the signified over the signifier" (BC xviii). To put it in a crude formula: truth = reality ÷ episteme.

Thus, words cannot correspond  to things, as in the classic philosophical theory of truth, but can only relate to them in an inevitably inadequate way through the rules of a given discourse or period.

Derrida shows that words do not in fact relate to things the way they were assumed to in Saussure's structural linguistics, but rather that the relation between words and things is more like the relation words have with one another: things are, like words, part of systems of reference/signification, which ultimately form a single network of signification encompassing both all words and all things. Words derive meaning from the relations both to other words and to things, which in turn have relations of signification to other things, so that all things are signifiers of signifiers, as well as themselves signified, rather than it simply being the words that signify and the things that are signified.

Foucault, on the other hand, sees all language as inherently violent, because language can never adequately respect reality, hence the dream of non-logocentric discourse merely veils the specific violence of Derrida's own work, as the theory of coherence did the violence of earlier discourse.  Derrida tries to eschew all violence, even that essential to discourse itself.   As Foucault has it, the "logophilia" of our rationalist culture belies a "logophobia" which is in fact so scared of discourse it tries to neuter it

It is the antagonism inherent to nature that is the basis for the discontinuity of language with previously-existing reality. Missing from Derrida's picture is both the animal that existed before language who invented language, the instincts and drives of that animal that led to that invention and which continue to support it, and the senseless materiality of extralinguistic reality; Derrida (1976, 74–75) brackets such questions.

This seems to contradict our epistemology, in that the notion of reality as chaotic seems impossible to square with a respect for scientific discoveries. As Descombes (1980, 116) puts it, "On the one hand, Foucault's approach is that of a positivist. . . . Yet, on the other hand, Foucault as a reader of Nietzsche does not believe in the positivist notion of  fact." Descombes (1980, 117) thus claims that Foucault's work amounts to nothing more than "a seductive construct, whose play of erudite cross-reference lends it an air of verisimilitude." The accusation here is the classic one of relativist paradox: the relativist says truth is relative, but then this statement is itself relative—so he cannot be sure of it. Happy positivism avoids this criticism, however, because it asserts the necessity of putting forward underdetermined statements in view of the impossibility of full determination. There is no need for provisos that this is not really how things are, since there can be no description which does cleave to how things actually are. "Knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting," as Foucault says (EW2 380).

"When I say I am studying the "problematization" of madness, crime, or sexuality, it is not a way of denying the reality of such phenomena.  On the contrary, I have tried to show that it was precisely some real existent in the world which was the target of social regulation at a given moment. The question I raise is this one: How and why were very different things in the world gathered together, characterized, analyzed, and treated as, for example, "mental illness"? What are the elements which are relevant for a given "problematization"? And even if I won't say that what is characterized as "schizophrenia" corresponds to something real in the world, this has nothing to do with idealism. For I think there is a relation between the thing which is problematized and the process of problematization. The problematization is an "answer" to a concrete situation which is real."

[Cain]

More of the same:

Foucault then rapidly becomes preoccupied with power. In 1971, in his famous televised conversation with Noam Chomsky in the Netherlands, Foucault (1974, 172) says that he thinks looking at the state or the class behind the state is insufficient to explaining what is going on at the level of power. On the 4th March 1972, Foucault makes the point that "we still perhaps do not know what power is. And Marx and Freud are perhaps not sufficient to help us understand this quite enigmatic thing called power."

In Society Must Be Defended, Foucault produces a genealogy of the notion of power.  The traditional conceptions of power—at any rate the "juridical" and "liberal" conceptions of power coming from the Enlightenment—tend, according to Foucault, to treat power as a "commodity" (SD 13) or "attribute" (Deleuze 1988, 27) that could be possessed, hence focusing attention on the powerful individual, the one who "has" power. Foucault's basic move is to say that this approach to power, relating it to the individual, fails to comprehend what happens at the level of power itself.

Foucault (EW2 440) himself later noted that his ignorance of the work of the Frankfurt School was unfortunate insofar as knowledge of their work would have saved him many missteps, and that his ignorance of their work and of Max Weber's was simply due to the fact that they were unknown in France. Weber's work on power itself has significant similarities to Foucault's, particularly its uncannily similar terminology: "power," "domination," "resistance," and "discipline." Still, Foucault (RM 115–29) himself notes, had he known of the work of the Frankfurt School, he probably would simply have followed their approach, hence would not have produced the unique and highly-influential approach that he did.

Elsewhere, Foucault criticises Marxists for reducing power to the state and to class, which is to say, because it too has power as a commodity held by a subject, albeit an institutional or corporate, abstract one, namely by the state and/or by a dominant class. Marxism is condemned because Marxism, like liberalism, fails to take power seriously as a level on which things happen.

I would extrapolate the following characteristics of power as composing Foucault's core anti-subjectivist conception of power; they are all found in both The Will to Knowledge and in Discipline and Punish:
  1. The impersonality, or subjectlessness, of power, meaning that it is not guided by the will of individual subjects (DP 26; SD 29; WK 94)
  2. The relationality of power, meaning that power is always a case of power relations between people, as opposed to a quantum possessed by people (DP 27; WK 94)
  3. The decentredness of power, meaning that it is not concentrated on a single individual or class (DP 27; PK 142; SD 27; WK 94)
  4. The multidirectionality of power, meaning that it does not flow only from the more to the less powerful, but rather "comes from below," even if it is nevertheless "nonegalitarian" (DP 27; PK 142; WK 94 [quoted])
  5. The strategic nature of power, meaning that it has a dynamic of its own, is "intentional" (DP 26; PK 142; WK 94 [quoted])

to say power is decentred is implied by its impersonality, since any centre, whether it be an individual or an elite, would be a subject; since power cannot be possessed, it can only be relational, residing in the interstices between individuals, since if it resided in individuals, they would possess it; if it is relational and decentred, then it must be multidirectional, because, since it does not have a centre, yet clearly must have form (if it is to be anything at all), it must be organised autonomously around its own tendencies and directionality, rather than those that individual subjects might have.

Foucault's additional stipulations are that power is:
coextensive with resistance (WK 95; PK 142)—this aspect we will leave aside for the moment, to deal with in Chapter 5, which is devoted  to the topic of resistance;
productive, producing positive effects (PK 94)—this aspect will be dealt with in a subsequent section of this chapter;
ubiquitous, being found in every kind of relationship, as a condition of the possibility of any kind of relationship (WK 94; PK 142)

Foucault's reconception of power is presented as a reaction and a solution to the problems of a long-dominant conception of power on the model of sovereignty, the model of the monarch reigning over his subjects, power of one person over another, and hence of one group over another, of the state over society. Famously, Foucault writes of there being a need to cut off the king's head in political theory (WK 88–89), to catch up with the actual political changes which were wrought by the literal cutting off of the King of France's head in 1793.

This is not to imply that the power structure ultimately rests on consent: "Power is not a matter of consent" (EW3 340) for Foucault. Foucault's point is that the power of the sovereign, sovereignty itself, is produced by complex relations across society, regardless of the degree of consent—as we shall see, the overall logic of the strategic situation is divorced from the desires of individuals. While power indeed "comes from below," it still admits of radically inegalitarian relations (WK 94). While power was always decentred and multidirectional, it was not acephalous: in the monarch there used to be one point in the network which was enormously privileged, even though its predominance was far from total. It was not the case that the power of the monarch was simply an illusion that could be thrown off in an instant, but rather part of a real, entrenched network of power and of discourses which could only be changed through a great rupture

As Thomas Lemke (1997, 100) points out, it was not just the monarchists, but also their opponents who bought into the monarchical conception of power. Indeed, the principle of having a supreme leader with a quasi-monarchical function is still ubiquitous in modern political societies, republics having presidents whose roles, though they may be ceremonial, seem somehow still to be requisite.

As David Weberman (1995, 194) points out, all power is necessarily both productive and repressive: if we stop someone from doing one thing, they will do something else (unless we kill them), while to make someone do one thing is always to stop them from doing whatever else they might have done; as Weberman (195) puts it, "in getting us to do X, it is always at the same time (more or less) effective in getting us not to do Y."

Foucault says something slightly different here, however, namely that the conception of society that predominates is a hangover from an earlier social formation. Marxism in fact itself is guilty of retaining this conception of power—Foucault specifically accuses Marxist class analysis of being more germane to feudal power relations than present-day society

In a society in which power was about negative sanctions, naturally a negative conception of power grew up. In the modern era, new technologies of power emerge, which, while they have the same general characteristics of all power, are more productive, in the sense that they allow for the close production of behaviours in both individuals and entire populations beyond what was possible before.

[Cain]

Even more of the same:

In the modern period, according to Foucault, sovereign power has been supplemented (though by no means replaced, at the limits of our society) by two new technologies, namely discipline and biopower, the former micropolitical, and the latter macropolitical. Discipline, the older of the two, is the technology by which men's bodies are controlled and trained in prisons, factories, schools, et cetera, the appearance of which is charted in Discipline and Punish: it is the technology of individuals. Biopower, operating at the entirely opposite level, is responsible for constituting the population (SD 245), hence the modern nation. The technology of discipline encompasses techniques of individual surveillance and dressage. Biopower involves techniques of mass surveillance, such as the census, and of mass control, such as health campaigns.  Because of the different levels at which these two modern technologies operate, they complement one another without conflict. By contrast, discipline and biopower are both in some contradiction with sovereign power, since they do not operate simply through violence, but by training bodies and keeping people alive respectively (SD 254).

Sovereignty only operates insofar as the newer technologies do not. They are used together in tandem, but require a device to separate those who are subject to the lethal technology of sovereignty, namely criminals, proscribed ethnic groups, and foreigners, and those who must be "made to live" by biopower—for Foucault, this device is racism (SD 256; see also Kelly 2004a)

As an example of a mobile technique of power, Foucault (RM 170) points to concentration camps in the twentieth century, which once invented were applied in vastly different scenarios by many different states.

There is no knowledge without an apparatus of knowledge-production in which relations of power are invested, but there is also no apparatus invested by power relations which does not itself produce knowledge, discourse by which it understands and explains its own operation, which it uses to further its operation. In the modern prison, knowledges such as criminology and psychology form a condition of the prison's existence, and have the prison as a condition of their existence. Such discourses on the one hand are a necessary part of the prison's functioning, organising data necessary for the control of the prisoners (DP 126), and on the other perform specifically discursive functions, explaining the prison's function in terms of correcting criminal behaviour, thus justifying the prison to society at large, allowing the prison system to understand itself and even acting as a controlling discourse by which criminals come to understand their own behaviour, which then modifies said behaviour in regular ways (cf. DP 102–3).

Power-knowledge is again an explicit corrective to Marxism, to the Marxist notion of ideology (Gordon 2004; O'Farrell 2004; cf. EW3 87), in which (non-Marxist) discourse is classically seen as a superstructural effect of, and cover for the machinations of, economically-based power.

Power and discourse are not automatically allied nor automatically opposed, nor is either more basic than the other. While Foucault (PPC 106) criticises the human sciences for being riddled with power, he also allows that there are "psychological and sociological theories that are independent of power," and leaves the natural sciences out of his criticisms entirely. While his general thesis does imply that there is power at work in the natural sciences—and it would be naïve to deny that there is a lot of politics at work in science—scientific discourses are not determined by power in their intrinsic content in the same way as certain other discourses, because the things whereof they speak generally do not have a great deal of specific political import, and are hence compatible with many different political strategies.

When Foucault speaks of "the tactical polyvalence of discourses" (WK 100) too, he might as well speak of the tactical polyvalence of power relations: just as apparently contradictory discourses can in fact cohere at the level of a grander strategy (WK 101), so too can apparently contradictory power relations; just as discourses can circulate unchanged between general strategies (WK 102), so too can power relations. Thus, the description from The Archaeology of Knowledge of a system which is coherent despite the presence of incompatible parts (AK 66), discursive unities composed of many competing sub-theories, can be applied to power too.

the materiality of power, just like the materiality of discourse, is mitigated by the fact that neither is truly self-sufficient. Neither can exist without people, nor without a social, institutional framework which supports them.

Foucault, for his part, points out that power is not a substance. Power is not the same as other things, cannot be reduced to them, but neither can anything else be reduced to it. Against the misinterpretation of Foucault's view of what power is, Foucault describes power as "the form, differing from time to time, of a series of clashes which constitute the social body, clashes of the political, economic type, etc."

Power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society.

The network of power relations and its strategies are emergent, regularly produced by the agents involved—although the now-familiar concept of emergence was not in Foucault's philosophical vocabulary. Emergent strategies of power loom large in Foucault's case studies of power, Discipline and Punish and The Will to Knowledge. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault claims that what he calls the "carceral system" functions regularly to produce a relatively stable effect, namely the existence of "delinquency"—in short, prisons function to demarcate and perpetuate a criminal class, who themselves play a certain social role. This is of course certainly not the intention of anyone who is involved in the carceral system, not the intention of government, of the guards, of the wardens, of the prisoners, but it is nonetheless the net effect. One of the most interesting and paradoxical parts of Foucault's thesis in Discipline and Punish is that one essential piece of this system is in fact the prison reform movement which condemns the prisons precisely for producing delinquency, since it buttresses the institution of the prison by calling for its improvement, whereas, as Foucault reveals, the prison is itself is as an institutional form inextricably bound-up with delinquency (DP 264–70). The intentions of those whose stated purpose is to eradicate delinquency are part of the logic of power which produces it, as are those of the policemen trying to eradicate crime. This is the aforementioned "tactical polyvalence," which is the condition of the coherent strategy with its contradictory elements, elements which speak against one another while strategically cohering, like prison reformers and prison guards.

Power therefore also lacks the type of directedness which is characteristic/constitutive of what is ordinarily called human intentionality, the type of relationship people have towards the world. Power has "aims and objectives," but these work ultimately towards a single purpose, namely the stability of the network of power relations itself: "power is an ensemble of mechanisms and procedures which have as their role or function and theme, even if they do not reach it, precisely securing power"

Society is full of different forces, individual and corporate, struggling with one another. Sometimes there is cooperation towards shared goals. At other times there is open combat. The more powerful force may utterly destroy the weaker, or force it into subjugation, or it may itself be forced to compromise and reach a settlement with the weaker force in order to pursue other objectives, or out of exhaustion. Any settlement is inherently unstable: the forces will change, the same old forces will try again to gain the upper hand, but after such disturbances, new accommodations will be found. The net effect of all this gross struggle is the production of an ensemble of power relations whose strategies are those of enforcing the social settlement.

[Cain]

Even more of the same:

Power organises itself by itself: it must adapt and take account of what it finds, an ever-changing environment. Foucault is clear, however, that power should not be understood on the model of an organism (PK 206).  Power, unlike an organism, is not autopoietic (to use another term Foucault never did), or "self-producing": "these relations are not self-generating, are not self-subsisting, are not founded by themselves" (STP 4); (a strategy of) power is not a Luhmannian system. But neither does this mean that power's intentionality arises simply by accident: rather it is produced from elsewhere, by the contestation of forces, which is itself self-organising.

The model Foucault chooses to employ instead of the organic model of autopoiesis used by Luhmann to understand social systems in understanding power is that of war: "power is war, the continuation of war by other means" (SD 15). Here Foucault reverses Clausewitz's famous dictum, that war is politics by other means, into the claim "that politics is war by other means" (SD 15). This is pure Nietzschean genealogy, reminiscent of Nietzsche's thesis that our present-day "civilised" society is the domination by slaves, rather than the absence of domination. It contradicts John Locke's (1689) formula that the state of nature is a state of peace which descends into a state of war, followed by the establishment of civil society, which ends it: for Foucault it is war from the outset, which never ceases, but rather becomes civil society. Foucault also pointedly distinguishes himself from Thomas Hobbes, who of course, unlike Locke, believes that the state of nature is already a state of war from the outset, because Foucault does not agree with the argument, common to Hobbes and Locke, that government ends the state of war.

While Hobbes readily concedes the continuation of a state of war in the present despite the existence of the Leviathan, this is in fact only to the extent that the Leviathan's dominance is not total. Foucault, on the other hand, self-consciously follows in the tradition of the left "political historicism" (SD 111) which sees war as "a permanent feature of social relations" (SD 110), something exemplified, not mitigated, by the state. The prime example of this is of course "class war," which does not need any kind of open conflict to exist, but is rather an entrenched antagonism.

Now, there is obviously a difference between such permanent antagonism and war  simpliciter. Actual, physical violence is the most obvious criterion for making such a distinction, yet it is in fact neither necessary nor sufficient to this distinction, since all states that have ever existed at some point or other employ violence in a regular way in their running, in "keeping the peace," and since wars themselves are not things which occur exclusively at the level of physical violence. We can thus see a continuum between war and politics: discourse and violence are always both present in either art; diplomacy and the knife are both tools of both war and politics.

When war starts, there is of course a kind of rupture in the international order, but power relations which cross the battle lines do not disappear entirely. Thus, we can see a certain kind of cooperation and mutuality between sides in even "total" conflicts. A war has a certain kind of semi-stable existence, which allows its incorporation into strategies of power, in which the war is presupposed in the strategic configuration of power relations on both sides of the battle lines, and in which a certain dynamic operates between the foes as the contest with one another for domination, just as individuals or groups do within society in peacetime. War is no more unidirectional than any other modality of power relations (it could not be, since the two are bound together): within the victor's camp there has always been vying for position, strategy, alliance, and also within the defeated people. Hence alliances, implicit or explicit, across the lines of battle between mutually supportive tendencies in the other camp have always existed too: the Allies wanted the plotters against Hitler to succeed and, even if the two groups were not in direct communication, the Allies formed an essential component of the renegades' plot to kill Hitler and rescue Germany, the Allies hoping to incite just such treachery within the ranks of the enemy.

Indeed, for Foucault, the peaceful state of society is an ossification of a previous state of war

Foucault, like the seventeenth-century political philosophers, posits a state of war, followed by the birth of civil society. Thus Foucault is genealogical in a sense which he shares with Locke as well as Nietzsche. For Foucault, however, unlike for the classical genealogists, including even Nietzsche to some extent, the establishment of civil society is a matter not of a compact between men to end war, nor of the forcible ending of war by a conquering leader, nor even of the cunning ruse against the warlike victors by the vanquished. It is rather a matter of a war which is self-organising, which, through the dynamic of the war itself forms civil society as a state of stabilisation, not by ending war with victory and thus peace, but by ossifying the battle lines and allowing for a new form of much more sophisticated and productive contention.

All the lines of force, across, behind, between the battle lines, carry over into the peace, with everyone contending even in so-called civil peace against one another, and every individual riven by struggles between sub individual forces. The difference between war and civil peace is only a relative lack of open violence in the latter, with the contention between forces possibly boiling over into new war or revolution, which may in turn result in a new settlement. Indeed, from the inversion of Clausewitz, Foucault concludes that "the final decision can only come from war, or in other words a trial by strength in which weapons are the final judges" (SD 16). Foucault calls this schema "Nietzsche's hypothesis," and it is indeed thoroughly Nietzschean, in that it sees society as a relentless struggle of contending wills to power.

This reality is at the heart of the thesis of Discipline and Punish: there is power wherever there is law, but the law neither describes nor prescribes what is happening at the level of power; the law is something flexible, which is applied very differently at different points, different times and different places (cf. DP 21–22). The law is something which does not do what it says it is doing: the net effect of a law which applies such-and-such penalties for such-and-such crimes cannot be discerned from the law itself.

"What is most dangerous in violence is its rationality. Of course violence itself is terrible. But the deepest root of violence and its permanence come out of the form of the rationality we use. The idea has been that if we live in the world of reason, we can get rid of violence. This is quite wrong. Between violence and rationality there is no incompatibility. My problem is not to put reason on trial, but to know what is this rationality so compatible with violence."

Foucault is still no pacifist, moreover, despite the above condemnation of violence. In 1983, provoked by a particular local manifestation of the early '80s pacifist movement, Foucault (DE2 1357) identifies the problem of pacifism with the problem of the concept of peace, which he calls "a dubious notion," and sets out the need for investigation along these lines.  Deleuze (1988, 70; emphasis in original) says that, for Foucault, violence is "a concomitance or consequence of force, but not a constituent element." This is to say that "force relations" will always produce violence, but violence is not part of what makes something a force relation—open violence is not required all the time, but it is sure to happen sometimes where power is concerned. Foucault stipulates in "The Subject and Power" that power and violence are quite different things, but that does not mean that you can have one without the other.

The metaphor that in Foucault's later work largely displaces that of war is that of the game. In the early '70s, Foucault tends to insist on violence and war: power is violence, politics is warfare by other means, discourse is violence. In the late Foucault, the paradigm is the game: truth is a game (TS 15; EW1 281), power is a game (DE2 545; EW1 29).

[Cain]

And again:

The essential difference is one of level: war occurs at a grand, societal level, whereas the game occurs at an interpersonal one. Note that the grand scale might be called a game, but should not be, since this plays into the hands of those politicians who do treat war like a game; and we can certainly describe friendships and other personal relations as strategic, but calling them "war" serves to diminish what is good in them, would sound paranoid.

Still, the model of war never really captured what Foucault was trying to do. War and strategy are models which suggest sovereignty, in that they suggest leadership. It is rather the Hobbesian war of all against all that most closely corresponds to Foucaultian power. A Freudian model would in fact do just as well, however: if archaeology looks at the "unconscious of knowledge" (OT x), then genealogy can be said to look at the political unconscious.

Like the psychic unconscious, discourses have their own unconscious, and so too does politics have its own unconscious, the strategies of power. The similarity to the unconscious mind is obvious: it has its own dynamic which is thoroughly concealed behind the explicit claims and interpretations associated with it, yet is nevertheless discoverable through an analysis of what is said at a level other than that of its explicit meaning.

Against the tendency to locate everything at the level of the masses and economics, Foucault claims that there is something highly specific going on at the level of government which is not reducible to what is going on below, that the state is not just the representation of struggles between subterranean forces.

Basically, power is less a confrontation between two adversaries or their mutual engagement than it is a question of "government." This word must be allowed the very broad meaning it had in the sixteenth century. "Government" did not refer only to political structures or to the management of states; rather, it designated the way in which the conduct of individuals or of groups might be directed—the government of children, of souls, of communities, of families, of the sick. It covered not only the legitimately constituted forms of political or economic subjection but also modes of action, more or less considered and calculated, that 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 for others.

Foucault's conception of power was always then one in which people related to one another, though also one in which the individuals involved in the games of power were themselves partly constituted by it, and the forces involved therefore operated at a "sub-individual" level.

There is indeed, however, a further criterion for what counts as a power relation: in a 1984 interview, Foucault identifies a power relationship as "a relationship in which one person tries to control the conduct of the other" (EW1 292; emphasis added).

On the side of the wielder of power, then, there must be some intention vis-à-vis the one who is to be affected. Otherwise there is no action upon an action, merely an action which affects another action, which any action whatever ultimately is. In the cases of communication and physical actions, they can affect others in such a way that power is involved, but also in such a way that it is not. If, in a blind rage perhaps, I shove someone out of my way and continue to walk, they may act to steady themselves, but this is completely irrespective of my intentions, which were just to get by. If I ask them to move, then it is power, since I act to try to make them act in turn. If I tell someone news that I do not know will affect them, and it does, profoundly, for reasons I could not have
known, this can hardly be power. But if, knowing this background, tell them the same news in the same nonchalant way, it can hardly not be power, hardly not be expected to provoke a response.

Thus when Foucault talks of power, he is not talking about one person having power over another, the legal right, but of one person actually exercising power over another. This includes acting "on the field of possibilities" (EW3 341); if I remove someone's ability to do something, that too is power. The case of Locke's (1690) locked room, where someone is willingly in a room, which has then been locked unbeknownst to them, thus removing the possibility of their leaving, would be a case of power. What is not power, in Foucault's sense, is the mere possibility of acting on someone else's activity: my capacity to intimidate people into doing things is not power unless it is actualised in actual intimidation.

Now, it is easier to grasp the point that what we mean our actions to do, our own intentionality, does not necessarily, or even particularly often, coincide with the actual effects of those actions than it is to grasp that all our actions, averaged over society, all our actions put together, between them have an intentionality of their own, which is neither our intentionality, nor even some corporate sense of purpose, nor Rousseauian general will.

In Foucaultian power, only  deliberate influence can concatenate into a network which exhibits strategic characteristics. Attempts of people to influence other people cohere together in a specific way. They take account of others' attempts to influence people, come together in alliances, are determined (in a sense) by other power relations. One power relation does not occur irrespective of other power relations.

if someone wants me to do things, and I want other people to do things, these various potential
power relations will play against each other, tending towards some kind of integration, either through the elimination of certain power relations, or compromises in which they attain compatibility. This compatibility is itself strategic: an overall strategy emerges for the purpose of integrating various power relations. The people who are fed up with crime exercise their power on their rulers to do something about it, the rulers exercise power directly by hiring underlings and having them build and staff prisons, by passing laws that direct police and the judiciary, these people follow their orders and exercise power on criminals. The net effect of this is nothing less than the regular and continuing production of a class of delinquents. This might seem bizarre in that it exceeds, and indeed apparently contradicts, the motives of the agents involved, but in fact it is simply the way in which all the power relations have been integrated productively. This can be seen in the way that the production of delinquency in fact serves a number of purposes, such as the purpose of capital in dividing the working class and demonising a certain element as the cause of problems, which in fact ensures the very stable situation which produces this very criminal layer. This network, (relatively) stable though it is, contains any number of power relations in which the intent behind the power relation is not realised: prisoners often do not respond as warders try to get them to, for example. And this is a regular part of prison functioning, providing the occasion for the regular occurrences of brutality and disorder which perform roles in the formation of the kind of individuals who are produced by prisons, in the confirmation of the beliefs of wardens, the public, in innumerable ways, despite that no-one wants this. The system is only, as I say, relatively stable, however, which means that often enough effects are produced which do not abide by the settlement that the system represents. But even within the stability of the system, apparent disorder occurs which is in fact a regular part and effect of the strategies of power, which appears to be resistance, and which is resistance from the perspective of local power relations, but is not from the perspective of the grand strategies of power.

Power is co-extensive with the social body; there are no spaces of primal liberty between the meshes of its network.

[LMNO]

Are these things cut and pasted, or are you actually typing them out?

[Cain]

Cut and paste.  They're ebook notes.  I do have IRL notes in IRL notebooks, but I have absolutely no inclination to transcribe them.

[Cain]

Fifty Key Thinkers In International Relations

Raymond Aron

A prudent approach to the theory and practice of politics lay in the acknowledgement of different of and often incompatible political values, and therefore in the availability of and competition between divergent interpretations/ideologies that privileged some at the expense of others. Particular interpretations could be analysed critically in terms of their internal consistency, as well as their compatibility with existing social and political structures, but it would be utopian to believe in the use of reason to transcend such competition.

In principle, he defended Western, liberal capitalism against its leftist critics as the best means of
combining economic growth with some measure of political freedom and economic redistribution. While recognizing the fact of class conflict, he never believed in the idea that 'the working class' was either sufficiently homogeneous or motivated to revolt against the inequities of capitalist society. If capitalist societies could combine the search for profits with some measure of welfare and redistribution, he saw no reason why the conflict between workers and capitalists should be zero-sum. Indeed, he hoped that in the longer term such societies could moderate ideological competition, although he worried about the dominance of pressure groups in weakening the democratic process and depriving liberal states of sufficient 'steering capacity' in the interests of the society as a whole.

In his most famous phrase, international relations is 'relations between political units, each of which claims the right to take justice into its own hands and to be the sole arbiter of the decision to fight or not to fight'.

In the absence of a simple formula to predict state goals, the best one could do as a thinker, diplomat or strategist is to attempt an understanding of state aims and motives on the best evidence available.

Aron points out, for example, that the 'excess capital' of France – which according to the theory would require overseas colonies to be invested in – usually went to South America and Russia rather than North Africa. Moreover, he suggested that there was no good reason why home markets should not expand indefinitely to absorb any 'excess production' of the advanced capitalist states. In contrast, he emphasized traditional interstate rivalry as the main 'cause' of war.

E.H. Carr

Carr engages in a sustained critique of the 'utopian' thinking that he argues dominated Western intellectual thought and diplomatic practice in the interwar years. He suggests that all human sciences, particularly when they are young, tend to be somewhat prescriptive, subordinating the analysis of facts to the desire to reform the world.

Carr argued that the faith and optimism concerning collective security, as well as the institution of the League of Nations, which was designed to implement it, was based on the erroneous assumption that the territorial and political status quo was satisfactory to all the major powers in the international system. In a world of separate sovereign states of unequal power, this was unlikely ever to be the case. Conflict among states, therefore, was not merely a consequence of a failure to understand one another, but an inevitable result of incompatible aspirations that could only be dealt with on the basis of negotiation in light of the balance of power, rather than by appealing to 'universal' principles of moral conduct.

This approach would entail the need to substitute rhetoric with diplomacy, and to subordinate universal principles to the procedural ethics of compromise between status quo and revisionist states in the international system.

"The process of give-and-take must apply to challenges to the existing order. Those who profit most by that order can in the long run only hope to maintain it by making sufficient concessions to make it tolerable to those who profit by it the least, and the responsibility for seeing that these changes take place as far as possible in an orderly way rests as much on the defenders as on the challengers."

Although he was a severe critic of utopian thinking in the 1930s and 1940s, he also acknowledged that realism without utopianism could descend into a cynical realpolitik: '[c]onsistent realism excludes four things which appear to be essential ingredients of all effective political thinking: a finite goal, an emotional appeal, a right of moral judgement, and a ground for action'.

Carr was acutely aware of the dramatic changes in foreign affairs brought about since the French Revolution and the growth of democracy. Mass participation in the political process could not be sustained unless Western societies discovered new ways to manage the market and achieve forms of social democracy that required intervention in the market-place rather than naive nineteenth-century ideas derived from simplistic readings of Adam Smith. Notwithstanding his own somewhat naive view of Hitler in the late 1930s, he acknowledged that the Second World War was as much a product of revolutionary ideology as the clash of enduring national interests. Despite the horror of war, he argued that the experience of fascism and communism had contributed useful lessons to Western democracies, particularly the need for social planning and international intervention to tame the inequities of global capitalism.

For those interested in the problems of nationalism at the end of the Cold War, Nationalism and After is still required reading, for many of its arguments and analyses are as relevant today as they were when Carr made them. In this book, he argues that the principle of national self-determination is no longer a recipe for freedom, but guarantees conflict insofar as its interpretation along ethnic lines is incompatible with the ethnic diversity of most states. Furthermore, twentieth-century nationalism is closely linked to the rise of public participation in the political system, which would lead to a dramatic rise in the number of 'nation-states' if the process were not managed. At the same time, there was a clear incompatibility between the value of national self-determination as an expression of freedom and the waning economic power of the nation-state to deliver either military or social security to its people. According to Carr, the solution was to create large multinational and regional organizations of states which could better co-ordinate their policies and sustain a commitment to social justice than either Soviet-style communism or American 'free enterprise'.

But whatever its philosophical weakness, Carr's work reminds us that however we justify our commitment to values such as liberty or equality, they remain abstract and somewhat meaningless unless they are embodied in concrete political and economic arrangements, the reform of which is contingent on a complex historical process in which progress cannot be guaranteed.

[Cain]

Continued extracts from the same book.

Robert Gilpin

Contrary to those who argued that the growth of economic interdependence was undermining the state and reducing the relevance of coercive military power to determine economic influence in world affairs, Gilpin argued that a liberal international trading order depended on the very factors it was alleged to be undermining, namely the presence of a powerful state to provide what have come to be called international 'public goods'.

Markets cannot flourish in producing and distributing goods and services in the absence of a state to provide certain prerequisites. By definition, markets depend on the transfer, via an efficient price mechanism, of goods and services that can be bought and sold among private actors who exchange ownership rights. But markets themselves depend on the state to provide, via coercion, regulation and taxation, certain 'public goods' that markets themselves cannot generate. These include a legal infrastructure of property rights and laws to make contracts binding, a coercive infrastructure to ensure that laws are obeyed, and a stable medium of exchange (money) to ensure a standard of valuation for goods and services. Within the territorial borders of the state, governments provide such goods. Internationally, of course, there is no world state capable of replicating their provision on a global scale. Building on the work of Charles Kindleberger and E.H. Carr's analysis of the role of Great Britain in the international economy of the nineteenth century, Gilpin argues that stability and the 'liberalization' of international exchange depend on the existence of a 'hegemon' that is both able and willing to provide international 'public goods', such as law and order and a stable currency for financing trade.

Gilpin's model of systemic change is based on a number of assumptions about states that he derives from microeconomic, rational choice theory. This is used to postulate a cyclical theory of change in the international system. It consists of five key propositions.

(1) An international system is stable (in a state of equilibrium) if no state believes it profitable to change the system.
(2) A state will attempt to change the international system if the expected benefits exceed the expected costs.
(3) A state will seek to change the international system through territorial, political and economic expansion until the marginal costs of further change are equal to or greater than the expected benefits.
(4) Once equilibrium between the costs and benefits of further change and expansion is reached, the tendency is for the economic costs of maintaining the status quo to rise faster than the economic
capacity to sustain the status quo.
(5) If the disequilibrium in the international system is not resolved, then the system will be changed, and a new equilibrium reflecting the redistribution of power will be established.

As far as Gilpin is concerned, world history since the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) has been a period of systemic change within a state-centric system, and the stability or otherwise of the system
depends on the existence of a political and economic hegemon. But stability is difficult to sustain because economic and technological change is never evenly distributed among states. Hence over time there is an increasing gap between the status and prestige of particular states and the power they are able to deploy to safeguard their national interests. Despite the need for peaceful change in the system to manage the process of change, Gilpin grimly observes that, up to now, 'the principal mechanism of change...has been war, or what we shall call hegemonic war (i.e., a war that determines which state or states will be dominant and will govern the system)'. The factors that
lie behind change in the international system are largely environmental, and these structure the array of incentives that states have to try and change the system to their benefit, such as population shifts and the diffusion of military technology throughout the system.

Gilpin argues that the decline of US hegemony is likely to usher in a period of 'new mercantilism', perhaps even the establishment of new trading blocs under the respective regional hegemonies of the United States, Germany and Japan.

John Herz

"We live in an age where threats to the survival of all of us – nuclear super-armament, populations outrunning food supplies and energy resources, destruction of man's habitat – concern all nations and people, and thus must affect foreign policy-making as much as views of security."

However, in contrast to Hans Morgenthau and other 'classical realists' of the period, Herz does not trace the 'power factors' to permanent characteristics of human nature. He acknowledges that the latter has many dimensions – biological, metaphysical and even spiritual – that combine to determine human behaviour, and any adequate account must recognize human ethical properties.

Instead of appealing to metaphysics, Herz posits the existence of a 'security dilemma' as the key factor. It arises from the individual's consciousness that others may be seeking his or her destruction, so there is always some need for self-defence, which in turn may make others insecure. What is true among individuals is equally relevant to understanding group behaviour. In fact, Herz argues that the security dilemma is more acute among groups, for the simple reason that groups can develop means of self-defence that are far more destructive than those available to individuals. Moreover, insofar as individuals come to equate their own identity and worth with that of the group to which they belong, they may be prepared to sacrifice their life on behalf of the survival of the group. Thus, even if one makes the most optimistic assumptions about the nature and motives of individuals and groups, the security dilemma will persist as long as there remain groups that are not subordinate to a higher authority. In the modern world, these are sovereign states.

"The very fact that technical developments of weapons and armaments in themselves wield such a tremendous impact has meant that they have almost come to dictate policies, instead of policies determining the type and choice of weapons, their use, amount of armaments, and so forth. In other words, instead of weapons serving policy, policy is becoming the mere servant of a weapon that more and more constitutes its own raison d'être."

Herz identifies three reasons for the continuation of territoriality as a marker of political differentiation. First, decolonization had led to a remarkable 'creation' of new states, and Herz admitted that he had not anticipated the speed with which 'old empires' had collapsed. Second, Herz admitted that the technological determinism of his earlier argument was in fact deterministic. He had not acknowledged the power of nationalism in sustaining the territorial state regardless of its military permeability in the nuclear age. Third, while Herz continued to lament the arms race between the two superpowers, he later claimed that the balance of terror was more robust than he had thought a decade earlier. In 1968, he argued that if the nuclear arms race was to be controlled in the future, a 'holding operation' was necessary. This would consist of a set of policies such as 'arms control, demarcation of bloc spheres, avoidance of nuclear proliferation...and reducing the role of the ideologies of communism and anticommunism'.

Herz does not think that the end of the Cold War justifies complacency in the analysis of international relations. The Cold War came to an end because one superpower could no longer sustain its competition with the West, on ideological or economic terms. It did not come to an end as a result of any policy-makers deciding to place the 'human' interest over the 'national' interest. Although the fear of nuclear war between the great powers has lessened, it has been replaced by new fears of nuclear proliferation, and the legacy of old images lives on. For example, the United States continues to evoke the legacy 'appeasement' in justifying its policies towards Iraq, and there is no indication that what Herz calls 'a survival ethic' has replaced what he disparages as 'regional parochial' ethics in international relations. In his retirement, Herz has dedicated himself to what he calls 'survival research', concerned less with descriptive and explanatory analyses of contemporary international relations than with urging us to abandon the images of international relations that make 'regional parochialism' possible.

Samuel Huntington

The 'Clash of Civilizations' thesis holds that religion has emerged as one of the primary causes of
conflict, and that the erosion of the nation-state, coupled with the rising influence of Western secular power (via globalization), reflects the likelihood that religion will replace the nation-state as the primary source of conflict in world politics. Its theoretical framework is based on two (seismic) indicators: so-called 'fault lines' between and among various civilizations, including Islam, Western secularism, Hindu, Sikh and Eastern Orthodox religion; and so-called 'hotspots' that refer to isolated areas of conflict. Of the various fault lines he describes, perhaps the best known is the North–South line that runs longitudinally from Scandinavia down through the Balkans and into North Africa.

This emergent shift from the nation-state to the civilization clash highlights two trends: the increasing decline of the nation-state; and the growing pressures between Western and Islamic civilization, where wars will increasingly be fought and launched in the name of civilization, and where the pervasive influence of globalization will continue to fuel many of these clashes.

George Kennan

In the late 1940s, Kennan argued that international stability depended on a recreation of a multipolar order that had been destroyed by world war. In particular, he advocated that the United States should use its enormous economic strength to help restore Europe and Japan as great powers, so that the burden of containing the Soviet threat could be shared rather than borne alone by a country that Kennan suspected was incapable of behaving in a moderate fashion abroad.

First, the United States enjoyed a nuclear monopoly in the 1940s that inspired Truman and some of his advisers to believe that nuclear weapons could be used to intimidate Stalin and achieve concrete concessions to American demands. Second, in the absence of any firm means of predicting Soviet foreign policy, the Truman administration relied heavily on the alleged 'lessons of history' of the 1930s, namely the self-defeating nature of 'appeasement' in the face of authoritarian aggression. Although the Marshall Plan was consistent with Kennan's emphasis on economic aid, he was aghast at the language used in the formulation of the 'Truman Doctrine' in 1947, which appeared to commit the United States to an open-ended support of any regimes confronted with 'internal subversion' supported by the Soviet Union. Third, the United States was very eager to cement Germany in a Western alliance, and this required the presence of American troops on German soil as part of what was to become (in 1949) NATO. Finally, Kennan underestimated the degree of volatility in American public opinion. As Barnet puts it, '[the Truman administration] had run into trouble when they tried to present a nuanced view of the situation in Europe, and a consensus swiftly developed in the administration that scaring the hell out of the American people...was essential for combating the isolationist mood'.

Much of Kennan's writing is concerned with the question of whether the United States is capable of behaving like a 'traditional' European great power. In his essays and lectures, particularly in the volume American Diplomacy, 1900–1950, he bemoaned what he liked to call American's tendency to adopt 'a legalistic-moralistic approach to international politics'. This was inevitable in a democracy like the United States, but it interfered with a cool calculation of the national interest on the basis of long-term trends in the balance of power rather than short-term fluctuations. A moral reaction is a short-term phenomenon when the public perceives the national interest to be at stake. Having no intensive knowledge of the situation, and lacking accurate facts even more than officialdom, citizens often have no option but to express their concerns in crude and moral terms. As a reliable guide to the conduct of foreign affairs, however, such reactions may have disastrous longer-term effects. For example, Kennan argued that the so-called 'fall of China' in 1949 did not represent a golden opportunity for the Soviet Union to cement a communist alliance against the West, but instead represented a major challenge to the Soviet Union as the leader of the communist movement.

"the position of Moscow as the 'third Rome' of international communism is essential to the carefully cultivated Soviet image of self. Take it away, and the whole contrived history of Soviet Communism, its whole rationale and sense of legitimacy, is threatened. Moscow must oppose China with real desperation, because China threatens the intactness of its own sense of identity."

[A.N. Other]

I'm going to say this, Cain. You're either one of the greatest minds alive (which I think is possibly true) or everyone one else is incredibly stupid (which is a less likely but also possibly true). And, for the record, lest anyone thinks otherwise, I ain't trying to kiss your ass.

I look forward to seeing more of your notes.

[Cain]

Thank you, but transcribing the (relevant and/or interesting) thoughts of others is hardly a decent test for intelligence.  Comphrehension, maybe...

[A.N. Other]

Still makes you smarter then most (and shows a lot more effort into reading a book then I would ever put in, that's for sure). Besides, it takes a brain to sum up something complex (or anything, really), and isn't that what notes are?

[Mu]

I have scanned over these and intend to read them in more detail later. It looks like they could be really useful; thankyou for putting them here Cain 

[Cain]

Well, the notes are ripped from the ebook text themselves.  So in reality I'm only selecting those sections which look important, interesting or warrant further investigation.

Mu, that was exactly what I hoped for with this.  I'm often reading so many things I don't have the time to follow up on everything with a hint of potential.

[Mu]

When i set out reading a book i always start taking notes and then forget after the first few pages...

I might try and actually take notes on the next thing i read.