Must an anthropological interest in freedom be at the expense of attention to power?
Freedom refers to both the state of not being imprisoned or enslaved and the power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants. It is interesting freedom should be thought of as the power to (act, speak, think) insofar as there is a tendency to think of freedom as being from power rather than a form of power. Hence, from the point of definition, freedom and power appear as inextricable. Yet, anthropological discourse on power often focuses on the brute dimension of it, casting freedom aside to focus on the totalising nature of power. Some have tried to break away from this propensity, striving to cast power to the side, to focus on the good.
This essay will ask whether an anthropological interest in freedom must be at the expense of attention to power; and whether it canbe. It will first look at the slide from Power and Freedom to power and freedom. It will then focus on the interactions between power and freedom and action.
Foucault has in some ways become notorious for his all-pervasive and totalising view of power. Ortner (2016) writes about ‘dark anthropology’, referring to Foucault’s works on power (for instance Discipline and Punish, 1975) and subsequent writings by anthropologists having had a ‘steady diet of (early) Foucault’. Yet, Laidlaw (2002) notes how ‘among anti-Foucauldians, Foucault was the original, and in many ways the best’. Indeed, aware of the conceptions of power imputed on him, he firmly maintains that his intellectual journey was, in fact, processual. Laidlaw (2016) highlights how Foucault explicitly claimed that to ‘attribute to him the idea of a ‘system of domination that controls everything and leaves no room for freedom’’ was a ‘misreading’, insofar as his writings following Discipline and Punish (1975) and The History of Sexuality (1976-1984) became centrally concerned with how ‘freedom might be conceived (and practiced) not as an absence of power but as particular forms of the exercise of power, and particular configurations of power relations’.
That both freedom and power emerge as ‘particular’ is an important takeaway from Foucault’s later writings as it enables a refocusing from the idea of Power and Freedom to the ideas of power and freedom. Koopman (2013) argues that it is to some extent our ‘modern ideals of freedom as liberation’ that limit the scope of analysis vis a vis freedom but also power. He contends that Foucault’s work on power and freedom underline that ‘positive transformation is to be sought elsewhere than in liberation, emancipation, autonomy, and other prevailing conceptions of freedom in modernity’. It is worth noting that Foucault did not ‘throw in doubt the very concept of freedom itself’, rather, Koopman claims, his point was that ‘we too often assume forms of freedom that are anything but freeing in the contexts in which they are deployed’. Hence, Foucault deliberately did not theorize freedom and power as universal, totalising constants. Instead, he sought to describe the ‘precise historical shapes assumed in their specific, and variable, instantiations. Koopman stresses how Foucault described ‘various powers, but not power itself; he traced the shape of modern rationalities, but not the structure of universal reason itself; freedoms and madnesses, not Freedom, not Madness’. In refuting a universal quality to power and freedom, moving away from the idea that freedom should be understood in romantic terms of ‘total autonomy opposed to the total dependency induced by the utilitarian efficiency of disciplinary power’, Foucault was trying to articulate the idea that freedom and power can neither be dissociated nor assimilated. Koopman writes that Foucault’s point about power and freedom is that they now stood in a ‘relationship of reciprocal incompatibility in which they both imply one another and oppose one another such that neither is capable of overturning the other’. Further, modern conceptions of ‘freedom as liberation’ and ‘power as disciplinary’ are tied up such that ‘transforming one requires transforming the other’. Indeed, given that power is thought to operate on the ‘sovereign model’, freedom is thus practiced in terms of liberation. Yet, Koopman stresses that power more frequently ‘operates on a more disciplinary model, and where it does we lack the concepts and practices of freedom that might effectively resist these forms of power’.
Here, a shift from the Power and Freedom dyad to the acknowledgment of the multifarious natures of both power and freedom, an interest in freedom enables, and perhaps, in fact, requires an attention to power. This is emphasised by Koopman who suggests that a re-reading of Foucault requires not an exclusion of freedom from power but rather a purification of freedom from power, whereby exclusion refers to a form of banishment or exclusion such that the exclusion of freedom by power amounts to an exile of freedom wherever power reigns, and purification can be understood as a process in which ‘two kinds of practices rigorously isolate themselves from one another’ such that the purification of freedom and power amounts to ‘the simultaneous production of both [freedom] and [power] in such a way that they cannot admit of admixture with one another’. Moreover, he underlines the importance of learning to understand how ‘freedom works through, not merely against, power’, recommending that a model of freedom as liberation should be substituted by a more ‘transformational model of freedom’, and stating that ‘freedom [is] most transformative when it is humble and hesitant, exploratory and experimental … [and while] experimental freedom does not make for good cinema on the blockbuster model [it does make] for good practices of freedom’.
As such, anthropological interest in freedom should not be done at the expense of an attention to power but rather recognise the interplay between the two and how the ideas of freedom(s) and power(s) evolve in tandem.
That power and freedom interact implies action. Laidlaw (2002) highlights Foucault’s claim that a chief quality of freedom is that it is not an achievement but instead exercised, referring to ‘the extent to which and the ways in which people can exercise choice or are subject to coercion’, and how the amount of freedom one has is variable, and takes different forms in different historical situations. Foucault (1982) for instance, in his work on the subject and power, stresses the particular nature of power as expressed through action. He notes that the exercise of power is ‘not simply a relationship between partners, individual or collective; it is a way in which certain actions modify others’. He posits that ‘something called Power, with or without a capital letter, which is assumed to exist universally in a concentrated or diffused form, does not exist. Power exists only when it is put into action’.
Of note, however, is Foucault’s distinction between a relationship of power and one of violence. He contends that a relationship of power is defined by being a ‘mode of action which does not act directly and immediately on others. Instead, it acts upon their actions: an action upon action, on existing actions or on those which may arise in the present of the future’. This stands in stark contrast to a relationship of violence, which he defines as being one which’ acts upon a body or upon things; it forces, it bends, it breaks, [it] destroys, or it closes the door on all possibilities’. Interestingly, while a relationship of violence which comes up against any resistance, has no other option than to ‘minimise it’, a power relationship can ‘only be articulated on the basis of two elements which are each indispensable if it is really to be a power relationship: that ‘the other’ (the one over whom power is exercised) be thoroughly recognised and maintained to the very end as a person who acts; and that, faced with a relationship of power, a whole field of responses, reactions, results, and possible inventions may open up’ (emphasis mine). Power, in Foucault’s understanding therefore emerges as ‘a total structure of actions brought to bear upon possible actions; it incites, it induces, it seduces, it makes easier or more difficult; in the extreme it constrains or forbids absolutely; it is nevertheless always a way of acting upon an acting subject or acting subjects by virtue of their acting of being capable of action’.
As such, to better outline the specificity of power relations, he likens them to the notion of conduct. By virtue of its equivocal nature, conduct brings to light the ambivalence of power insofar as to ‘conduct’ can be understood as to ‘lead’, but also as ‘a way of behaving withing a more or less open field of possibilities’. (Foucault here is playing on the double meaning of the French verb ‘conduire’, as in ‘to lead’ or ‘to drive’, and ‘se conduire’, meaning ‘to behave’ or ‘conduct onself’). As such, by defining power as a ‘mode of action upon the actions of others’, Foucault outlines that, inherently, ‘power is exercised only over free subjects and only insofar as they are free’. Moreover, Foucault highlights that it follows that there is ‘no face-to-face confrontation of power and freedom, which are mutually exclusive (freedom disappears everywhere power is exercised), but a much more complicated interplay’. In fact, freedom appears as the condition for the exercise of power as well as its precondition given that ‘freedom must exist for power to be exerted’ but also as its permanent support since ‘without the possibility of recalcitrance, power would be equivalent to a physical determination’.
Despite his emphasis on the implication of freedom(s) in and through power(s), readers of Foucault have often attributed a fatalistic quality to his view of power. Yet, Foucault refutes this by stressing that it is not because there is a structure to action that it invalidates it. He claims that to see power as a ‘mode of action upon actions’ is to intimate that power relations are rooted ‘deep in the social nexus’ rather than ‘reconstituted ‘above’ society as a supplementary structure’. In fact, he argues that to live in a society is to live in such a way that ‘action upon other actions is possible and in fact ongoing’ insofar as a society with power relations can ‘only be an abstraction’. However, an acknowledgment of power relations does not lead to an effacement of the possibility of freedom; instead, to say that ‘there cannot be a society without power relations’ does not crucially mean that either that ‘those which are established are necessary’ not that power ‘constitutes a fatality at the heart of societies, such that it cannot be undermined’. Rather, the possibility of action stands in parallel to the possibility of freedom when the diverse, pervasive, and insidious manifestations of power(s) are recognised to find a form of symmetry in the various, performative, and multifarious manifestations of freedom(s). The need for anthropological interest in both freedom and power and the mutual influence and interaction between them is exemplified in Kuan’s (2015) work on the politics and ethics of child rearing in contemporary China. Noting on the importance of the acknowledgment of the everyday and particular manifestations of power and freedom, she highlights how ‘interpretations that reduce everyday experiences to the order of political economy miss not only how people actually experience their lives but also the opportunity to track inconsistencies, multiplicities, ironies, and subtle shifts’. She writes that a focus on ‘moral agency and experience’ would provide a ‘remedy for structural or political-economic reductionisms without reverting back to the kind of humanism that assumes a rationally and morally autonomous subject’ – with ‘moral experience’ referring to the ‘intermediate space between the force of social norms and moral codes on the one hand, and the capacity of actors to deliberate about their situations and to make the effort to respond accordingly, on the other’ (emphasis mine). Through her observation of the tension between being an easy-going parent facilitating the development of a child’s potential, happiness, well-being, and being a hypervigilant parent who is hyperattentive vis a vis their child’s academic life to give them the best potential outcome in the future, which plagues childrearing conceptions and practices in contemporary China, Kuan relates the ease with which Chinese parents, because of all these constraints, can be thought of as subjects – i.e. ‘subject to someone else by control and dependence’ (Foucault, 1982) – rather than subject – i.e. ‘tied to [their] own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge’ (ibid). She states that she could argue that urban, middle class mothers labouring to raise a child who is ‘both academically competitive and psychologically healthy, full of personality, and happy’ have been ‘duped into serving a state agenda’ insofar as anxieties driving parents to push their child can be understood to stem from the recent requirement for individuals and families to assume responsibility for their own life security (rather than been guaranteed by the ‘iron rice bowl’). Yet, Kuan posits that reading such maternal efforts only as the ‘expression of some hidden force or mutation in power’ would in fact overshadow the ‘very real coexistence of multiple lines of force and influence, [some being] related to politics and economics [and others not]’. Indeed, she outlines how ‘in managing their own immediate realities, ordinary mothers [create] a space apart even when collaborating with the state’. Thus, new understandings of power as located, everyday manifestations, allows for an understanding of freedom through an analysis of power – power, echoing Foucault’s idea that it can be used as a chemical catalyst to bring to the forefront new understandings of resistance, can also shed light and direct attention to new conceptions of freedom, which break away from romanticised ideals of liberation or emancipation or total autonomy.
In conclusion, the freedom-power dyad is still relevant and should not be neither separated nor subject to unification; rather it should be expanded on, becoming a freedoms and powers dyad which is constantly in interaction and mutually influencing the other, making sense relationally. Rather than being done at the expense of an attention to power, anthropological interest in freedom should strive to follow in line with recent analysis of power which have rendered it multiple, particular, mutable, and more elusive.
Bibliography
Foucault, M. 1982. The subject and Power. Critical Inquiry, Vol. 8, No. 4, pp. 777-795
Koopman, C. (2013). Genealogy as critique: Foucault and the problems of modernity. Indiana University Press. 24.
Laidlaw, James. (2016). "Through a glass, darkly." HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6, no. 2: 17- 24.
Laidlaw, James. 2002. ‘For an Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 8: 311-32.
Kuan, T. 2015. Love's uncertainty: the politics and ethics of child rearing in contemporary China. Oakland: University of California Press.