Care of the Self and Pastoral Power

In his lecture of 13 January 1982, we get a glimpse of how the Greek care of the self might be linked historically and genealogically to Christian pastoral power.

The Socratic dialogue circles around the following logic:

Q: How should I govern?
A: By learning to govern oneself.
Q: And how should I learn to do that?

This passage begins with reference to the “double failing of pedagogy”—schools are poor, and amorous desire interferes in other mentor-student relations. In essence, you can’t rely on teachers to learn to govern; you can only rely on yourself: one has to take care of oneself. “Actually, you can see that the two things are connected: taking care of oneself in order to be able to govern, and taking care of the self inasmuch as one has not been governed sufficiently and properly. ‘Governing,’ ‘being governed,’ and ‘taking care of the self’ form a sequence, a series, whose long and complex history extends up to the establishment of pastoral power in the Christian Church in the third and forth centuries.” (HS 44-5)

Can we infer what happens to this sequence governing-being governed-taking care of oneself as pastoral power gathers force?

We should start with the differences between the governor and the governed in the two societies Foucault investigates. In “Omnes et Singulatim,” Foucault notes that for Aristotle the politician’s task was not to oversee the well-being of each and every citizen individually, but “to weave a strong fabric for the city” (OS 234) within which a host of others (bakers, doctors) can look after people’s well-being. On the other hand, the pastor/shepherd is precisely concerned with the lives of every individual. It is a profoundly “nosey” and centralized kind of power, poking its head into every dusty corner.

This new, pastoral relation between governor and governed is achieved through a transformation of the very techniques we saw described as care of the self. The shepherd is bound to the flock because his salvation is found only through the salvation of the flock, which entails a thoroughly “individualizing knowledge” (OS 237) of every member of the flock. This individualizing knowledge is secured through the flock’s voluntary submission to the shepherd—a submission in turn secured through two techniques that the flock should exercise on themselves: self-examination and guidance of conscience (OS 237).

So what has happened to these Greek techniques in pastoral power? First, even though self-knowledge in each case is achieved in reference to some transcendent point—the “divine element” (HS 71), the Christian God—the object of this self-knowledge—what it is we need to learn about—has changed: the soul-subject of Greek practices has been replaced by the soul-substance (HS 56-7). It seems to me that we can think of this soul-substance in terms of what Foucault calls in “Omnes”, the pursuit of “self-identity” (which is what results in each person’s “mortification” (239)). Second, the relationship to authority embedded in these practices has been transformed. Being guided by conscience is no longer a temporary situation of getting some advice to survive hard times; it becomes a whole state of being, and the only way to insure that one is not lost. Conscience, in other words, is exercised through total submission to the shepherd. And self-examination is no longer a way “to close self-awareness upon oneself”; it becomes a way to “open it up entirely to its director—the unveil to him the depths of the soul” (238).

The series governing others-being governed-caring for oneself, which completed the circuit of political power in Greek society, has been “rewired,” and no doubt more efficiently, by Christian thought. The series is now obedience-knowledge of oneself-confession (239). In effect, whereas the question of, ‘how shall I govern?’ was first answered with reference to the governor’s self vis-à-vis the divine, in the pastorate it is answered with reference to the total knowledge of the governed, who are meant to submit and confess all. The techniques of the care of the self have been transferred from governor to governed. The site of political action is no longer the body-soul of Alcibaedes, but the mind of each member of the flock. And the aim of politics is no longer governing well, but governing efficiently.

This, then, seems to be another Foucauldian paradox. The totalizing and individualizing form of pastoral power that defines the modern state is actually exercised primarily at the level of (and, in fact, by) the subject. For me it becomes interesting to try to think of activities like psychotherapy (or yoga, as in Dan’s case) as modern forms of “care of the self.” Do these trouble the exercise of pastoral power, and, at the same time, the modern state? Or is Foucault’s account of governmentality at the same time an account of the ways that new forms of care of the self have continually been integrated into governing projects?

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Ethics as a Process

Foucault’s elaboration of an ethics of care of the self was intended as an alternative to modern moral systems. Of course, care of the self as Foucault focused on it was almost entirely an ancient ethical practice caught up in the cultural atmosphere of late Greek and early Roman antiquity. As such, it is clear that this ethics cannot be easily imported into the modern context to which Foucault was addressing himself. The ethics of the care of the self will require significant revision if it is to be meaningful and viable in contemporary contexts. That said, there are certain elements of an ethics of care of the self which are already immediately relevant to contemporary ethical contexts, and these elements can be used to assist in a rethinking of our contemporary ethical practices. These elements, I think it was Foucault’s point, do not require significant revision in order to be deployed with effectiveness in contemporary settings. Is the idea of 'ethics as a process' one of these central ideas which Foucault finds relevant for modern moral philosophy?

The crux of modern ethical practice, as Foucault described it in such works as Discipline and Punish and The Will to Know, was an attempt to divide power from freedom. We might say, then, that modern ethics is problematized around the oppositional relation between power and freedom. This oppositional relation constitutes the core problem for modern moral systems. Almost every modern moral system is an attempt to show how we can effectively disentangle power and freedom in such a way that conceptualizes their relation as oppositional.

Foucault elaborated the ancient ethical tradition of care of the self as an alternative to the modern approach insofar as care of the self is described by him as specifically emphasizing the way in which power and freedom are intensely and inevitably interleaved with one another. This turn to ancient ethical practice in terms of the interlocking relation between power and freedom can be conveniently reformulated in the terminology employed in his work on power: “Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are ‘free’.” The ethics of self-care specifically focuses on this intrinsic interrelation between power and knowledge and as such offers an alternative to the modern moral systems of the fascist and the freespirit. What was this alternative? How did it work? What did it look like? Obviously these question leave a great deal open.

One of the most interesting features of care of the self is the way in which Foucault tends to describe it as a 'spiritual' practice or process in contrast to a 'philosophical' theory or knowledge. The idea for him is that care of the self comes into being by being practiced. It is not a morality that already exists which we can come to know. What is at stake in this contrast between a dynamic ethics of process and a static ethics of knowledge? Does it presuppose a valid and accurate portrait of modern moral philosophy? And is Foucault's alternative itself viable?

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From Genealogy to Problematization

An important question provoked by Foucault's later works on ethics and subjectivity concerns the issue of why Foucault felt he had to expand his genealogical work to take problematization into account. What does problematization add to genealogy? What, if anything, does it subtract from it? Is problematization crucially associated with Foucault's third axis (in addition to knowledge and power) of ethics or subjectivity? Could problematization also be associated with some other domain or axis of analysis? A few thoughts on these questions follows.

The much-debated question of why Foucault shifted from archaeology to genealogy can be answered in this way: whereas archaeology offers a static analysis of practices synchronically pulled from the past, genealogy offers a dynamic analysis whereby these practices can be viewed diachronically as historical processes themselves. Genealogy enabled Foucault to explain historical change and continuity. In this way, genealogy was an expansion of archaeology rather than a refutation of it—of course genealogy refutes a few assumptions made by archaeology, but on the whole it refutes these assumptions by reinterpreting the key elements of the earlier approach. Perhaps, then, problematization expands genealogy in a similar way. Few would, I think, want to urge that Foucault’s ‘problematization’ refutes or abandons his ‘genealogy’. An approach to an answer might be: problematization expands the analysis of historical change by describing it in terms of the purposive action of agents. No longer can change merely be an effect of something basic to history (e.g., Marxist materialism or Foucaultian power dynamics)—change can now be seen as effected by purposive agents who are internal to the practices under analysis.

This perhaps helps illuminate ways in which Foucault’s work successively expanded domains of analysis according to these successive expansions of methodology. One could write an archaeology of knowledge (Foucault did this), or power, or subjectivity. There have been numerous archaeologies of power, Foucault would readily admit. But in order to connect any two of these axes together, to explore their interlocking tensions, one needs to adopt the diachronic perspective of the genealogists. This is why Foucault’s work on genealogy was provoked by the urge to internalize power into his analysis of knowledge—but to do this Foucault realized that he could not remain at the level of archaeology. Could one also have written the genealogy of knowledge/subjectivity? Perhaps, but what Foucault seems to have suggested with his own work was that in order to inflect a genealogical analysis with purposive agency, we need to expand our methodology so as to embrace all three axes of knowledge, power, and subjectivity.

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The Concept of Problematization

Foucault often described his late work in the history of ethics in terms of the concept of ‘problematization’. But Foucault seemed to use ‘problematization’ in at least two senses. What are the relations between these two senses of 'problematization'? Do they suggest a tension in Foucault's own approach or rather a delicate nuance which we must be careful to discern?

In one sense, he described it as the work which the historian does to direct the work of thought toward present practices which were once seen as stable but which the historian shows to be problematic in some crucial sense. For instance, Foucault once offered the “problematization of a present” as “the questioning by the philosopher of this present to which he belongs and in relation to which he has to situate himself” (“The Art of Telling the Truth” in Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, Culture, p.88)

In a second sense, Foucault described his work as ‘the history of problematization’ such that his historical inquiries would aim less to problematize present practices and instead be focused on the way in which certain practices have been subjected to problematization in history. This is the way in which Foucault seemed to describe his work in the methodological “Introduction” to the second volume of The History of Sexuality. Foucault here describes himself as analyzing “the problematizations through which being offers itself to be, necessarily, thought—and the practices on the basis of which these problematizations are formed” (p.11). Foucault goes on to clarify that he is not so much problematizing concepts by writing their histories as he is writing the histories of there having been problematized: e.g., madness or crime as problematized in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries or sexuality as problematized in Stoicism and early Christianity.

This all provokes the question, for me, of whether or not these two senses of problematization are related to one another. Are they compatible? If they are compatible are they two aspects of the same process?

One possible answer would be that these two senses of problematization feed into one another. The historian of problematization provides practical exemplars from the way in which the problematizing critic of the present can direct our focus toward current practices. At the same time, since Foucault’s own domain of analysis for his history of problematization, sexual ethics, is so central to our own culture, it is difficult to believe that one could trace the way in which, and the reasons why, these ethics have varied through history without provoking in at least some sense the thought that at present our own sexual ethics needs to be more carefully considered. This, of course, seems plausible, but it also does not appear that Foucault spelled out this connection with sufficient detail. Is the history of problematizations the only way to problematize the present? Are there other routes to this? And must the history of problematizations provoke a critical attitude toward our present? Could it, instead, be used to justify present modes of practice? These are difficult questions which, I hope, a careful reading of The Hermeneutics of the Subject might help us resolve.

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Sovereign Power and Bio-Power

One crucially important feature of Foucault’s analysis of modern powers is his discussion of the relationships between repressive legal-sovereign power, on the one hand, and the modern descendents of productive normalizing-pastoral power, on the other. Sovereign powers are essentially repressive and pastoral powers are essentially productive. If in The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 (aka The Will to Knowledge) Foucault views sovereign power as representing itself as negating, legislative, prohibitive, censoring, and homogenous (1976, 83-85), he views bio-power as always productive, immanent, exercised, capillary, and resisted (1976, 94-95). These five qualifications of each conception of power are not necessarily opposed to one another point-to-point, but one clearly gets the drift that there is a deep rift between sovereign power and pastoral power.

A difficult ambiguity, however, remains in Foucault’s models of power as presented in The Will to Knowledge. This deep ambiguity, in my view, continued to plague Foucault’s work over the years to come. Given their heterogeneity, do both forms of power (repressive sovereign power and productive biological power) continue to characterize the exercise of power in our own times? Or has bio-power gradually colonized sovereign power thus displacing it? Foucault was unfortunately never clear on this question. But a great deal rides on it, both historically in reference to the past and philosophically in reference to the future. There is in Foucault’s writings evidence for both interpretations.

First, the interpretation emphasizing their continued simultaneous practice. In “Two Lectures” (from the 1976 course lectures), Foucault clearly views the operation of sovereign and pastoral power as depending on the continuing simultaneous employment of both: “The powers of modern society are exercised through, on the basis of, and by virtue of, this very heterogeneity between a public right of sovereignty and a polymorphous disciplinary mechanism” (106). Similarly in “Omnes et Singulatim” (the 1979 Tanner lectures) Foucault proposed this reciprocal heterogeneity once again in claiming that “pastorship happened to combine with its opposite, the state” (1979, 300). Elsewhere, in “Governmentality” (from the 1978 course lectures), Foucault sounds very explicit: “We need to see things not in terms of the replacement of a society of sovereignty by a disciplinary society and the subsequent replacement of a disciplinary society by a society of government; in reality one has a triangle, sovereignty-discipline-government” (1978, 219). On this first interpretation, modern power essentially functions such that both sovereign power and bio-power (etc.) are simultaneously deployed. In this way, modern power can be understood as deriving its effectiveness through a double conditioning or reciprocal enhancement of both: each form of power augments, or lends credit to, the other, but only insofar as they are cleanly purified of one another. The first interpretation might seem to better account for many of Foucault’s claims. For example, Foucault’s claims in The Will to Knowledge that the passage from “the symbolics of blood” to “the analytics of sexuality” was not sudden but occurred with “overlappings, interactions, and echoes” such that “the preoccupation with blood and the law has for nearly two centuries haunted the administration of sexuality” (1976, 149). Foucault notes racism and psychoanalysis as two very different domains in which this preoccupation with blood, law, and sovereignty persists. Taking another example from the same text, there are Foucault’s strong claims to the effect that sovereign and pastoral power are “utterly incongruous” with one another (1976, 89). Such utter incongruity might be taken to suggest that bio-power could not have colonized sovereign power even if it had wanted to: colonization requires at least some degree of minimal continuity in order to establish the relations through which the colonization could take place. Of course, the view that bio-power simply displaced rather than colonized sovereign power remains conceptually consistent with such incongruity.

There is also evidence for reading Foucault another way, as plenty of commentators and critics have noticed. Here one would focus more attention on Foucault’s earlier work on power/knowledge such as “Truth and Juridical Forms” (the 1973 Rio lectures). One could also take many choice quotes from The Will to Knowledge. Part V (“Right of Death and Power over Life”) of the book is a study of “a very profound transformation of these mechanisms of power” in the modern era (1976, 136). The transformation is one which shifts the level of the exercise of power from “the juridical existence of sovereignty” to “the biological existence of the population” (1976, 137). Foucault here clearly claims that “the ancient right to take life or let live was replaced by a power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death” (1976, 138). Sovereign power was “replaced” by the disciplinary and regulatory functions of bio-power. Foucault later refers to this as the “threshold of modernity”: “For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question” (1976, 143). According to Foucault, the most important consequence of the shift to modern power has been “the growing importance assumed by the action of the norm, at the expense of the juridical system of the law” (1976, 144). Here we have a picture, then, where sovereign law does not totally disappear under the inwashing tide of bio-political normalization, but where law certainly recedes as normalization becomes increasingly important. This is evidence for a second interpretation, where modern power does not persist as the heterogeneity of sovereignty and bio-power, but where it takes the form of a modern bio-power that increasingly colonizes and then displaces sovereign power. Foucault is almost this explicit just a little later: “[T]he judicial institution is increasingly incorporated into a continuum of apparatuses (medical, administrative, and so on) whose functions are for the most part regulatory” (1976, 144). Law and sovereignty persist, but are increasingly put to the service of norm and biology. We are a “normalizing society” experiencing “juridical regression” such that our history is one in which “[i]t was life more than the law that became the issue of political struggles” (1976, 144, 145).

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"Omnes et Singulatim"

Foucault’s 1979 Stanford Tanner Lectures, “Omnes et Singulatim”, represent an earlier version of an inquiry which he was later to publish as the first section of the better-known 1982 essay “The Subject and Power”. As in “The Subject and Power” Foucault is here concerned to understand the relation between power and the forms of rationalization which operate alongside it. And, as in “The Subject and Power”, the result of his inquiry is to have uncovered a form of modern power and its rationalization which consists in “the simultaneous individualization and totalization of modern power structures” (1982, 336).

Foucault is clear in the later essay that he intends his work as aiming towards a criticism of this simultaneous individualization and totalization, a form of political rationality whose paradigm is the modern state: “the political, ethical, social, philosophical problem of our days is… to liberate us both from the state and from the type of individualization linked to the state” (1982, 336). Foucault, in other words does not want to defend a new form of romantic privacy vis-à-vis the public power of the state, but neither does he want to defend increased public powers vis-à-vis modern forms of freedom. Rather, what he seems to be insisting upon is an alternative to modern power and knowledge themselves, where these are understood in terms of the simultaneous production of opposed spheres of state totalization and non-state individualization.

“Omnes et Singulatim” is in my opinion less convincing at setting forward the thesis which Foucault would later publish, but his attempt here is nevertheless productive. The piece consists of two lectures, the first of which traces the early development of pastoral power in first centuries of Christianity, and the second of which traces the later development of the modern state in the sixteenth and seventeeth centuries. The overall theme which Foucault here seems to be working toward is the idea that the early Christian pastoral power was reactivated in the early part of the modern era in such a way as to be redeployed along the lines of what Foucault had elsewhere called governmentality. Pastoral power, then, is the genealogical ancestor of modern governmentality. (An obvious question, though, is this: Why does Foucault not use the term “governmentality” in this essay? He had already introduced it elsewhere? Is the not talking about governmentality here? Is he no longer satisfied with that term? If so, is the concept the same?)

So what is it about early pastoral power that Foucault finds important for later governmentality? First, pastoral power is clearly totalizing. “[T]he shepherd was to assume responsibility for the destiny of the whole flock” (1979, 308). Pastoral power is a technique of caring for an entire flock. The shepherd does not look after just a few. He cares for the whole flock, in its entirety, taken as a total unit. But second, pastoral power is also individualizing. “Christian pastorship implies a peculiar type of knowledge between the pastor and each of his sheep” (1979, 309). The shepherd individualizes his flock. He knows the details of each sheep. Each is cared for in these details and idiosyncracies. Individualization is looked after just as much as totalization.

It is, I believe, primarily this double process of individualization and totalization in pastoral power that Foucault finds of interest in his genealogical study of “the formation of the state” (1979, 312). Foucault traces this formation through two sets of doctrine, those of “reason of state” (314ff.) and “theory of police” (317ff). It is difficult to say what is new in Foucault’s analysis here. It does not seem that he really offers anything decisive that was not already given as early as the publication of Discipline and Punish (1975). While the finer details are seemingly not all that different, there is nonetheless a difference in the bigger picture. For Foucault is here explicit, as he was not always in Discipline and Punish, that what interests him in modern power is the way that it both individualizes and totalizes. Considering von Justi’s theory of police, Foucault writes: “He perfectly defines what I feel to be the aim of the modern art of government, or state rationality, namely to develop those elements constitutive of individuals’ lives in such a way that their development also fosters the strength of the state” (1979, 322). Still, even this view was somewhat on view as early as Discipline and Punish.

One other question concerns the status of Foucault’s inquiry in both “Omnes et Singulatim” and “The Subject and Power”. Both texts open with Foucault inquiring into the relation between power and rationalization (1979, 299, and 1982, 328). As Foucault better puts it later in “Omnes et Singulatim”: “Rather than wonder whether aberrant state power is due to excessive rationalism or irrationalism, I think it would be more appropriate to pin down the specific type of political rationality the state produced” (1979, 313). What are we to understand by Foucault’s use of the terms “rationalization” and “rationality” in these inquiries? Can we take him to be exploring the relation between power and knowledge that was crucial for his earlier work in the middle of the 1970s? Is “rationalization” here a synonym for “knowledge”? Is Foucault still interested in the “power/knowledge” relation? If so, why change the terms?

This question takes on added significance when we consider the final passages of “Omnes et Singulatim”. For here Foucault argues that political criticism cannot effectively take the form of the criticism of power in general nor of reason in general. Rather, “What has to be questioned is the form of rationality at stake” (1979, 324). It is not clear, however, what such a criticism should be. That Foucault places a great deal of weight on it in “Omnes et Singulatim” is, however, undeniable. The “inevitable effects” of our modern political rationality, he concludes, “are both individualization and totalization.” So what are we to do? “Liberation can come from attacking not just one of these two effects but political rationality’s very roots” (1979, 325). There is much to be gleaned from Foucault’s remark that it would be fruitless to oppose individualization to totalization (liberalism) or totalization to individualization (communism). What he seeks instead is a third way beyond the forms of modern power which turn us into the subjects that we are. However, I doubt there is much to be gained by following up on Foucault’s vague reference to attacking “rationality’s very roots”.

Instead, we might perhaps do better to follow Foucault’s own shift of tack in the early 1980s when he began to more fully flesh out a third axis intersecting with power and knowledge—the axis he variously referred to as subjectivity or experience. This strategy is already anticipated in “Omnes” where Foucault briefly refers to his problem in this text as concerning “the relations between experiences, knowledge, and power” (1979, 311). For what Foucault’s later studies of this axis would reveal is the way in which pastoral power and governmental power can also come to inhabit the closest aspects of experience itself, can also come to structure our very understanding of ourselves as subjects. Foucault’s work here was tied up with the elaboration of the Christian and modern hermeneutics of the subject, which in the language of “Omnes et Singulatim” can be seen as feeding into modern individualization and totalization. The alternative to the modern hermeneutics of telling the truth about oneself is a modern practice of freedom which, though Foucault never fully elaborated it in any of his essays, requires getting free of oneself.

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"Governmentality"

The essay published as “Governmentality” is the second lecture of Foucault’s Collège de France Course Lecture series given in the Winter months of 1978. Foucault titled that lecture series “Security, Territory, and Population” but at the end of the “Governmenality” lecture he already expresses that a better titled would have simply been “Governmentality.” This, then, was the year in which Foucault theorized the modality of governmental power, to be placed alongside of the other modalities of pastoral power, biopower, and disciplinary power.

There are (at least) two related issues the reader faces in grappling with Foucault’s conception of “governmentality.” The first of these concerns the status of Foucault’s concept of power. Is it a historical description of an actual-working modality of power? Is it a philosophical theory of an ideal form of power? Or is it both? Undoubtedly, for Foucault, it would have to be both. But I think there remain serious questions concerning the historical legitimacy of this model. The “Governmentality” lecture is given at times to sweeping historical claims which Foucault barely backs up. This raises questions concerning the historiographical status of Foucault’s genealogy (What is genealogy? How is it practiced? What does it assume? Where does it differ from traditional history?). It also raises questions for Foucault’s readers concerning the ongoing use of his models of power—what historiographical and philosophical adjustments must we make to Foucault’s methodologies and assumptions in order to legitimate the deployment of his various concepts of power?

A second related concern stems from my own interest in trying to deploy Foucault’s concepts of power in the context of my own work in political history, specifically American political history. I am particularly interest in how well Foucault’s work meshes with a very summary account of American liberalism which goes like this: American liberalism can be characterized in terms of a bifurcation of politics into the two opposed realms of public power and private freedom, following on from the quintessential theorization of John Stuart Mill or, more recently, John Rawls and Richard Rorty; the high point of American liberalism thus described was the Progressive Era or, more broadly, the years from the Civil War through the Wilson presidency; American liberalism thus described began to retreat during the Hoover administration, slowly intensified its retreat after the Second World War, and then really began to thoroughly dissipate with the new social movements of the 1960s and 1970s; while public/private liberalism continues to dominate much theoretical and political discourse, liberal political practice today is not very well characterized according to the discursive universe of public versus private power. Regardless of the validity or accuracy of this account (which I would, of course, defend), I am curious specifically how it sits with Foucault’s models and histories of power.

An initial point concerns the genesis of governmentality out of the context of pastoral power, a point which Foucault discusses in the first 1978 Course Lecture, the one immediately prior to “Governmenality”. In his summary for the Course Lectures of that year, Foucault describes the relation thus: “Now, the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries saw a general crisis of the pastorate open up and develop, but in a much more complex fashion: a search for other modes (and not necessarily less strict ones) of spiritual direction and new types of relation between pastor and flock; but also inquiries concerning the right way to ‘govern’ children, a family, a domain, a principality” (EW1, 68). This, then, is the genealogical point of entry of governmental power. The situation is one of “a double movement, then, of state centralization, on the one hand, and of dispersion and religious dissidence, on the other” (EW3, 202). This is a first approximation of the theme of public versus private power, but as Foucault goes on to elaborate “governmentality” the story is much more complex.

Toward the end of the “Governmentality” lecture, Foucault writes: “[I]t is the tactics of government that make possible the continual definition and redefinition of what is within the competence of the state and what is not, the public versus the private, and so on. Thus, the state can only be understood in its survival and its limits on the basis of the general tactics of governmentality” (EW3, 221). Governmentality, then, describes a very general modality of power in which the split between public and private is able to sustain itself. At the same time, it is clear that governmental power, like disciplinary power and biopower, itself transverses the distinction between public and private. This has serious consequences for the liberal practice of dividing public and private spheres. For, if power is exercised often enough on the governmental model, then it will become increasingly clear that power assumes both public and private forms. This will eventually result in the realization that the liberal model of public power versus private freedom is untenable. Power, in other words, is pervasive throughout both public and private domains (this is the crucial Foucauldian point which resonated so well with so many feminists).

Here, then, is one possible way of relating Foucault’s accounts of power to my mini-history of American liberalism offered above. On the sovereign model of power, as outlined in History of Sexuality Volume 1 (pp. 83-85), power essentially contains the split between public and private spheres within itself. So long as power is exercised and theorized on the sovereign model, then, the public versus private split will seem natural. The interesting thing about governmentality, and its correlate forms of power (discipline, biopolitics), is that it is capable of sustaining the public-private split within itself at the same time that the actual powers exercised under governmentality exceed the logic of that split. Eventually, then, power itself starts to run outside of the boundaries of the public/private theory. This is what happened in American liberalism in the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s which very often outstripped the conceptual terms of public versus private (feminism being the primary example). Yet theorists and politicians alike continued to describe power on the sovereign model of public versus private (witness the academic fame of John Rawls’s theory of political justice, which is premised on state versus nonstate dualism). With Foucault comes finally a new model of power, written in the wake of and in response to the failed assumptions of the new social movements (cf. “Truth and Power”, 117 and “The Subject and Power”, 329), which finally enables us to recognize the extent to which our exercises of power transgress the familiar dichotomy of public versus private. We are finally able to recognize that the state, though of importance for politics, is not the only thing of importance in politics: “Maybe what is really important for our modernity… is not so much the statization of society, as the ‘governmentalization’ of the state” (EW3, 220). Governmentality is one of the first moments in this genealogy of the disintegration of public versus private power. It is a complex genealogy, but we have its origins here.

This way of relating Foucault’s account to the summary history of American liberalism is of course in parts very sketchy. One problem is this. It goes against one of Foucault’s explicit warnings to his readers: “We need to see things not in terms of the replacement of a society of sovereignty by a disciplinary society and the subsequent replacement of a disciplinary society by a society of government; in reality one has a triangle, sovereignty-discipline-government” (EW3, 219). Foucault here cautions against the familiar claim that his work demonstrates how sovereign power gradually receded against the in-washing tide of disciplinary (etc.) power, a caution previously sounded, but largely unheard, in his 1976 Course Lectures: “The powers of modern society are exercised through, on the basis of, and by virtue of, this very heterogeneity between a public right of sovereignty and a polymorphous disciplinary mechanism” (“Two Lectures”, 106). The idea, then, is not that discipline-government-biopolitics replace sovereignty, but that they develop alongside of it throughout modernity. This seems to run against my interpretation above.

There are two ways of dealing with this problem and it is unclear which is preferable. The first way consists in massaging the inconsistency. My model of liberalism can admit the persistence of sovereign power, but only in discursive terms. That is, the discourse of sovereign power persists, while the exercise of sovereign power dissipates. This, in fact, is precisely what my model holds and why it is so deeply concerned with the incoherence between official sovereign theories of power and actual non-sovereign (e.g., disciplinary) practices of power. It is doubtful, however, that when Foucault speaks of a persistence of sovereign power, he thinks of this persistence on the level of discourse only and not on the level of the exercise of power. Another way of dealing with the inconsistency between Foucault’s account and mine is simply to deny the historical adequacy of Foucault’s inconsistent claim. This is, of course, a risky strategy. But it is, ultimately, I think advisable. Foucault does not offer a wealth of evidence that sovereign power continues to be an important model for the actual exercise of power in modernity and late modernity. He claims this, but his evidence is fairly thin. In fact, the only evidence he offers in “Governmentality” is the persistence of this theme in the theoretical discourse of Rousseau. What Foucault needs to offer, then, is a more precise historical account of the actual continued functionings of sovereign power. Surely the execution of Damiens the regicide recounted in the opening pages of Discipline and Punish would be an extremely foreign experience for most of we moderns these days. Indeed, one way of reading Discipline and Punish is that it accounts for precisely this distance. In any event, this issue is much too thorny to deal with in a short space. But it is worth considering because it raises all the important historiographical questions mentioned above concerning the assumptions, utility, and efficacy of the genealogical mode of history.

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"The Subject and Power"

Foucault’s 1982 essay “The Subject and Power” registers the much-acknowledged shift in his late years from his work on power in Discipline and Punish to his work on subjectivity in The Care of the Self and The Use of Pleasure. While many commentators understood this shift to be almost a reversal in Foucault’s thought, “The Subject and Power” helps show that more Foucault’s work on power and subjectivity were two ways of approaching the same family of questions.

This essay makes particularly clear at least two points I find crucial. The first point is that where Foucault is talking about “power” we must always understand him to be talking about “freedom” at the same time. On Foucault’s view, freedom and power always imply one another. Wherever power is exercised, freedom is also exercised. “Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are ‘free’” (342). This view may sound strange at first. But it can be understood by observing that Foucault is not describing power and freedom as we typically see them. This leads me to the second crucial point in “The Subject and Power”.

The second point is that Foucault did not write a “theory of power” so much as he wrote “theoretical histories of powers”. Foucault, in other words, did not have one model of power, but a number of models of different modalities which power has assumed during modernity. In this and other works Foucault describes: disciplinary power, biopower (also called sometimes called ‘regulatory power’), pastoral power, and governmentality. “The Subject and Power” offers helpful commentary on pastoral power (333), disciplinary power (339), and governmentality (341) (all references to Essential Works, Volume 3). This immediately raises questions concerning the relations amongst these various modalities of power. Are they different theoretical forms of power? Are they different historical forms of power? Do they stand in need of some kind of synthesis, either historically or philosophically? Foucault’s texts are remarkably ambiguous on this point.

As I understand it, and this is really only a tentative sketch, the various forms of power can be related as follows. Disciplinary and biopolitical power were for Foucault two different forms of power, both of which emerged (not simultaneously) in the eighteenth century. Discipline and biopolitics often interwove with and reinforced one another. But they did not, historically or conceptually, require one another. They operated independently and at different levels, though these levels were quite capable of intersecting one another (cf. Society Must Be Defended). After theorizing these two forms of power in Discipline and Punish and The Will to Know, respectively, Foucault then turned to the forms of power he called governmentality and pastoral power as part of his genealogy of discipline and biopolitics (see comments by Fontana and Bertani 2003, 273). Foucault describes pastorship and governmentality as going back at least to the sixteenth century (333, 341). On this longer story about modern shapes of power, Foucault describes pastorship and governmentality as arising within the context of religious institutions. Though originating there, these forms of power (and knowledge) over time migrated away from the Church and into the State. It was then in the context of State pastorship and government that discipline and biopolitics took hold over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As they took hold, they quickly proliferated to other political domains such that discipline and biopolitics soon became dominant both within the context of the State and without.

This admittedly tentative account leaves two pressing questions lingering. The first question concerns the history of power in the twentieth century. Do discipline and biopolitics deepen their hold then? Do new modes of power emerge in their place? What happens to the State?

The second question concerns these forms of power relate to what Foucault elsewhere calls ‘sovereign’ power? One thing that all of Foucault’s various models of power have in common is that they are all for Foucault theoretically opposed to sovereign power. Foucault’s interpretation of the commonly-employed theory of sovereign power was summarized in The Will to Know (History of Sexuality, volume 1) in terms of negation, legislation, prohibition, censorship, and homogeneity (83-85). In an interview conducted around the time The Will to Know was published, Foucault famously said: “What we need, however, is a political philosophy that isn’t erected around the problem of sovereignty, or therefore around the problems of law and prohibition. We need to cut off the king’s head.” What this suggests for him is a theory of power that is not obsessed with the state: “relations of power, and hence the analysis that must be made of them, necessarily extend beyond the limits of the state” (“Truth and Power”, 122-3).

Is sovereign power, then, a historically actual mode of power? Did it function alongside of, or within, pastorship and governmentality? Did it then slowly give way to discipline and biopolitics? In giving way to these new forms of power, did we continue to deploy the sovereign model of power, even though it was not still the primary form that power took? Are Foucault’s models of discipline and biopolitics historical accounts which “problematize” the sovereign theory of power? Do these accounts help show us a new model of power more in line with the historically actual modalities of power which we have been exercising for the past two centuries?

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Blog Introduction

The purpose of this blog will be to facilitate further collaborative work related to the focus of the 'Foucault Across the Disciplines' study group at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

The webpage for the group is at http://foucaultacrossthedisciplines.googlepages.com.

Members are encouraged to post their thoughts, questions, curiosities, and struggles here. Ultimately the idea is to extend our collaboration beyond the confines of our regular biweekly meetings. Particularly useful would be for posts related to the readings scheduled for upcoming group meetings.

Anyone can post to or comment on the blog, but why not create a blogger account to identify yourself?

We are also hoping to have an online working papers forum. It is still to be decided whether or not the best location for that would be here (via long cut-and-pasted blogs) or on the group's webpage. Most likely, we will post discussion papers on the webpage and at the same time create corresponding blogs for other group members to discuss these papers.

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