"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?