Ortner has aligned Foucault with the rise of what she calls ‘dark anthropology’, because he provided ‘a virtually totalising theory of a world in which power is in every crevice of life, and in which there is no outside to power’. Does this adequately represent Foucault’s anthropological influence?
Power is multifarious; it exists in various forms and different types. It can refer to the capacity or ability to direct or influence people or events; political or social authority or control, especially that exercised by a government; authority given or delegated to a person or body, for instance a senator, the police force; the law, through the legal systems and judiciary; or even physical strength. Thus, delimitating what constitutes power, and what evades it, is difficult.
Ortner contends that Foucault has contributed in important ways to the rise of what she calls ‘dark anthropology’, wherein power is all pervasive and insidious. Yet is it accurate to limit his influence on anthropology to a ‘virtually totalizing theory of a world in which power is in every crevice of life, and in which there is no outside to power’?
This essay will look assess the extent to which the alignment of Foucault with ‘dark anthropology’ adequately represents his anthropological influence. It will first look at Foucault’s conceptualisations of power. Then, it will focus on attempts made to refute Foucault and his ‘totalising’ view of power. Lastly, it will briefly outline the issues inherent to the notion of influence.
There is no denying that Foucault has left a mark on anthropology, notably through the advancement of new understandings of the notion of power. For instance, he notes on the versatility and adaptability of power. In the subject and power (1982), he interrogates power in rather novel ways. He outlines that in thinking of power, it is interesting not to think about what it is or why it comes to be but rather to ask ‘how’. To him, asking ‘how’, not as in ‘how does it manifest’, but rather by what means it is exercised and what happens when individuals have power over others, enables interrogation into the imaginings of power. He claims that asking how allows for reflection on whether it is ‘legitimate to imagine a power which unites in itself a what, a why, and a how’; to start with ‘how’ is ‘to suggest that power as such does not exist’. Analysing in this manner allows for power to be thought of as particular rather than universal, as multifaceted rather than unified. For instance, he distinguishes between power understood as that which is ‘exerted over things and gives the ability to modify, use, consume, or destroy them’, which he refers to as ‘capacity’; and power understood as that which is brought into play relations between individuals or groups, thus a relational form of power. He stresses that to approach the theme of power through an analysis of ‘how’ is to introduce ‘several critical shifts in relation to the supposition of a fundamental power and to ‘give oneself as the object of analysis power relations and not power itself’ insofar as power relation are understood as distinct from objective abilities.
Thus, Foucault brings to the forefront the notion of power as relational. He emphasises however that ‘the exercise of power is not simply a relation between partners, individual or collective; [rather] it is a way in which certain actions modify others’. Thus, in his view, something called ‘Power’, with or without a capital letter, which is assumed to exist universally in a concentrated or diffuse form, in reality does not exist; instead ‘power exists only when it is put into action, even if [it] is integrated into a disparate field of possibilities brought to bear upon permanent structures’. In this sense, a notable influence Foucault has had on anthropology and its investigations into power is to actively refute the universality of power, focusing instead on particular manifestations of power and how they came to be.
Foucault further distinguishes between power and violence, noting how a defining feature of a relationship of power is that it is a ‘mode of action which does not act directly and immediately on others; [rather] it acts upon their actions: an action upon an action, on existing actions, or on those which may arise in the present of future’. Conversely, what characterizes a relationship of violence is the way in which it ‘acts upon a body or upon things; it forces, it bends, it breaks on the wheel, it destroys, or it closes the door on all possibilities. Its opposite pole can only be passivity’. To Foucault, a relationship of violence starkly contrasts a power relationship insofar as the latter can only be articulated on the basis of two elements which he understands to be indispensable for it to really be a relationship of power, that is ‘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 interventions may open up’. Importantly, Foucault highlights that consequently, the exercise of power is neither violence nor consensual, in fact, ‘it is a total structure of actions brought to bear upon possible actions; it incites, 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(s) by virtue of their acting or being capable of action. A set of actions upon other actions’. 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 disappear everywhere power is exercised), but a much more complicated interplay’. In fact, here, 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’.
To see these power relations in effect, Foucault favours the bridging of theory and practice, by suggesting taking ‘forms of resistance against different forms of power’ as a starting point. Essentially, it consists of ‘using [resistance] as a chemical catalyst so as to bring to light power relations, locate their position, and find out their point of application and the methods used’. Thus, instead of analysing ‘power from the point of view of its internal rationality’, Foucault proposes the analysis of power relations through ‘the antagonism of strategies’. He illustrates through a series of oppositions, such as opposition to the power of men over women, of parents over child, of psychiatry over the mentally ill, of medicine over the population, of administration over the ways people live; arguing that they are more than ‘anti-authority’ struggles. He suggests that there are three main commonalities between such struggles, that is; they are ‘transversal’ struggles in that they are not limited to one country, and while they may develop more easily or to a greater extent in certain countries, they are by no means confined to ‘a particular political or economic form of government’; the aim of these struggles lie in the effects of power with, for instance, the medical profession being criticised not because it is a ‘profit making concern’ but rather because of the ‘uncontrolled power’ it exercises over people’s bodies, health, life and death; and they are ‘immediate struggles’ wherein people criticise instances of power which are the closest to them, not looking for the ‘chief enemy’ but instead for the ‘immediate’ enemy. What is more, these ‘anti-authority’ struggles, Foucault argues, are not exactly ‘for or against the ‘individual’’, rather they are struggles against the ‘government of individualisation’. He outlines how these struggles are in fact an ‘opposition to the effects of power which are linked with knowledge, competence, and qualification: struggles against the privileges of knowledge’ as well as being an ‘opposition against secrecy, deformation, and mystifying representations of people’. Hence, what is at stake here is not so much an attack on ‘such or such’, whether an institution of power, group, elite, or class, but rather on a ‘technique, a form of power’. Foucault highlights that this form of power ‘applies itself to immediate everyday life which categorises the individual, marks him by his own individuality, attaches him to his own identity, imposes a law of truth on him which he must recognise and which other have to recognise in him’, rendering it a form of power which makes individuals subjects. Here, the meaning of the word ‘subject’ is twofold: ‘subject to someone else by control and dependence; and tied to his own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge’, with both meanings implying a form of power which at once ‘subjugates and makes subject to’. This illustrates how power can be conceptualised as more than solely contingent on violence, or authority, insofar as it ties notions of identity and personhood with those of dependence and struggle.
Interestingly, the state’s power has often been conceptualised in the singular, as a form of political power which ignores individuals, looking only at interests of the totality. Yet, Foucault stresses that in fact, the state’s power must be understood as both a totalising and individualising form of power, arguing that the ‘modern state’ should not be considered am entity which was developed ‘above individuals, ignoring what they are and even their very existence’, but on the contrary, as a ‘very sophisticated structure, in which individuals can be integrated, under one condition: that this individuality would be shaped in a new form and submitted to a set of very specific patterns’. This new understanding of power as being at once totalising and universalising, as well as individualising and particular, is echoed for instance in Bourdieu’s 1999 work Rethinking the State, in which he likens the construction of the state to the construction of a ‘field of power’ in which struggles over different forms of power ensue.
Foucault may have shown ways in which power is everywhere, but he has also highlighted how it is not a singular power but rather a multitude of various forms and manifestations of power struggling with one another. In saying, ‘where there is power, there is resistance’, Foucault has influenced authors to focus on power as something negotiable and malleable, inscribed in a temporality and locality, and open to potential forms of empowerment through the very existence of power (see O’Brien, Kevin and Li’s 2006 work on Rightful resistance in Rural China, Fassin’s 2015 book At the Heart of the State, and Graeber’s 2007 account of the Provisional autonomous zone: Or, the ghost-state in Madagascar).
However, Foucault’s outlook on society always through the lens of power has not gone uncontested. For instance, on noting the ‘marked increase in anthropological work looking at experiences of violence and cruelty’, Kelly (2013) asks ‘at what point does an ethnography of suffering turn into a voyeuristic quasi-pornography?’ Many would agree that there is a need for a move beyond the suffering subject, turning instead to issues of ‘wellbeing’, ‘care’, ‘love’. The turn to what Fischer (2014) calls ‘positive anthropology’ can be seen as reactionary to what Ortner (2016) has coined as the rise of ‘dark anthropology’, with Foucauldian notions of power and its totalising nature at the forefront. Lambek (2010), in Ordinary Ethics, states that focusing on attempts of ‘real actors to grapple with moral dilemmas and to make ethical choices can be seen as offering a positive and humane counterweight to the darkness of the work on neoliberal oppression and governmental constraint’, further claiming that, likewise, the focus on themes such as ‘care, love, empathy, responsibility, on trying – even if failing – to do the right thing, is a refreshing and uplifting counterpoint to a steady diet of (early) Foucault, in which no good deed goes unpunished, and in which every would-be positive action simply magnifies the webs of power in which we live’ (emphasis mine). However, this statement brings to the forefront an important point when considering the extent to which Foucault’s influence can accurately be constrained to being one of the origins of the rise of ‘dark anthropology’.
Indeed, while many understand Foucauldian power in the sense of an all-encompassing and totalising thing, Foucault himself in The subject and Power (1982) refutes this fatalism by noting on how power can be understood as particular variable, and located. He argues that ‘to live in a society is to live in such a way that action upon other action is possible and in fact ongoing’ making it all the more politically necessary to analyse ‘power relations in a given society, their historical formation, the source of their strength of fragility, the conditions which are necessary to transform some or to abolish others. For to say that there cannot be a society without power relations is not to say either that those which are established are necessary or, in any case, that power constitutes a fatality at the heart of societies, such that it cannot be undermined’ (emphasis mine). In saying that the analysis of power cannot and should not be reduced to the study of institutions insofar as power relations are, in fact, ‘rooted in the system of social networks’ suggests the following: power is everywhere if understood in terms of action or of potentiality, and that is not necessarily a bad thing; to actively try to remove power from analysis or observation is not necessarily a good thing, insofar as it would result in an analysis in many ways divorced from reality.
This last section will briefly address the issue of influence. Ortner in Dark Anthropology and its others (2016) outlines that ‘Foucault developed a theoretical framework that is deeply concerned with forms and modalities of power’ and has ‘given us a whole new vocabulary of power language’. Yet, Lambek’s (above) distinction between ‘earlier’ and ‘later’ Foucault implies that Foucault’s influence must be understood as plural. What is more, it is interesting to think of the extent to which influence and interpretations are conflated. In many respects, Foucault’s ‘influence’ is very much contingent on what one takes away from his work as well as the extent to which the influenced is aware and familiar with the breadth of his material. As Laidlaw (2018) remarks, there exists a ‘complex debate’ over the extent of the ‘continuities across Foucault’s whole oeuvre’, highlighting how ‘in an exegesis of Foucault’s own thinking, it would be a mistake to imply too radical a disjunction in what is a continuous, developing intellectual project’.
A further point can be made on the extent to which influence can be imputed to a person rather than an environment or context. As Ortner (2016) emphasises that ‘academic work, at least in the social sciences, cannot be detached from the conditions of the real world in which it takes place. The theoretical frameworks we use, and the phenomena we choose to explore, are affected in myriad ways by the political, economic, and cultural circumstances in which we carry our research’. Consequently, perhaps theoretical influence can rightly be assigned to Foucault insofar as he developed a fundamentally Foucauldian conceptualisations, yet to assert that Foucault’s influence on studies of power is prominent is in a sense to overemphasis the role of the individual rather than see interest in power as contextual.
To conclude, to align Foucault with the development dark anthropology, in which power is seen as totalising and insidious, solely based on the fact that he has contributed significant works to the analysis of power is to overlook the internal nuance of his work and, perhaps, overstate the influence one individual can have over others.
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