The Micro-structure of Power
Foucault: Power in the substantive sense, ‘le pouvoir’, doesn’t exist. What I mean in this. The idea that there is either located at -- or emanating from -- a given point something which is ‘power’ seems to me to be based on a misguided analysis, one which at all events fails to account for a considerable numbers of phenomena. In reality power means relations, a more-or-less organised, hierarchical, co-ordinated cluster of of relations. So the problem is not that of constituting a theory of power which would be a remake of Boulainvilliers on the one hand and Rousseau on the other. Both the authors start off from an original state in which all men are equal, and then what happens? With one of them, a historical invasion, with the other a mythico-juridical event, but either way it turns out that from a given moment people no longer have rights, and power is constituted. If one tries to erect a theory of power one will always be obliged to view it as emerging at a given place and power is in reality an open, more-or-less coordinated (in the event, no doubt, ill-coordinated) cluster of relations, then the only problem is to provide oneself with a grid of analysis which makes possible an analytic of relations of power.
Grosrichard: And yet in your book, speaking of the repercussions of the Council of Trent, you propose to study ‘via what channels and through what discourses power is able to gain access to the slightest, most individual forms of behaviour, by what routes it is enabled to reach into the most insubstantial, imperceptible forms of desire’... Here the language you use still suggest a power beginning from a single center which, little by little, through a process of diffusion, contagion or carcinosis [a form of metastasis following specific patterns of spread], brings within its compass the minutest, most peripheral details. Now it seems to me that elsewhere, when you talk about the multiplication of ‘disciplines’, you show power as having its beginnings in the ‘little places’, organising itself in terms of the ‘little things’, before it gets to the stage of concentrated organisation. How can one reconcile these two representations of power, the one describing it as exercised from the top downwards, from the center to the perimeter, by the important over the trivial, and the other, which seems to be the exact opposite?
Foucault: I inwardly blushed while listening to you reading, thinking to myself, it’s true, I did use that metaphor of the point which progressively irradiates its surroundings. But that was in a very particular case, that of the Church after the Council of Trent. Generally speaking I think one needs to look rather at how the great strategies of power encrust themselves and depend for their conditions of exercise on the level of the micro-relations of power. But there are always also movements in the opposite directions, whereby strategies which co-ordinate relations of power produce new effects and advance hitherto unaffected domains. Thus up to the middle of the sixteenth century the Church only supervised sexuality in à fairly distant manner. The requirement of annual confession, with its avowal of the different kinds of sins committed, ensured that in fact one wouldn’t have to relate very many sexual adventures to one’s cure. With the Council of Trent, around the middle of the sixteenth century, there emerge, alongside the ancient techniques of the confessional, a new series of procedures developed within the ecclesiastical institution for the purpose of training and purifying ecclesiastical personnel. Detailed techniques were elaborated for use in seminaries and monasteries, techniques of discursive rendition of daily life, of self-examination, confession, direction of conscience and regulation of the relationship between director and directed. It was this technology which it was sought to inject into society as a whole, and it is true that the move was directed from the top downwards.
Comments