Gauntlett, David. Media, Gender and Identity: An Introduction. London: Routledge, 2002. 115-125.

Foucault on Power

To understand why Foucault’s model of power caught the attention of many scholars and activists, it helps considerably to remind ourselves of what had come before. Prior to Foucault, power was largely seen as a “thing” which was “held” by certain dominant groups. For Marxists, and people on the Left generally, power was seen as something held by the dominant class, the bosses, the owners of the means of production. The workers, in this system, were powerless, because in order to earn money to live they had to surrender to their exploitation by the dominant class. For feminists, it was men in patriarchal society who had the power; women were the powerless.

Foucault’s understanding of power is quite different. For Foucault, power is not an asset which a person can have; rather, power is something exercised within interactions. Power flows through relationships, or networks of relationships. You couldn’t really say that someone was powerful, per se, then; but you could say that they frequently found themselves in a powerful position, or had many opportunities to exercise power.

Foucault’s clearest description of power occurs in Chapter 2 or Part 4 of The History of sexuality, Volume One: The Will to Knowledge (1998 [1976]). Here he says:

Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere … Power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society.” (1998: 93)

This doesn’t mean that everybody has equal access to power, though. Foucault falls back on talk of “force relations” as the general social background of inequality against which all power interactions are played out. Power, he says, “is the moving substrate of force relations which, by virtue of their inequality, constantly engender states of power, but the latter are always local and unstable” (ibid.: 93). This part of the argument seems a little poorly defined – is Foucault trying to sneak back to the old idea of power, here, by re-introducing it as “force relations?” He explains it better elsewhere (Foucault, 2000: 283) when he says that we may find “states of domination” where power relations have become so entrenched that they can seem entirely one-sided and unchangeable. Nevertheless, Foucault says, such situations can be resisted and changed. The central point remains: power simply cannot be held by one group; power is everywhere and plays a role in all relationships and interactions (though this may be to a large or small extent in each case). Power does not exist outside of social relationships; it’s exactly within these relationships that power comes into play. So it is a very different model of power.

But when I was first introduced to this idea, as a student, it was hard to see its value. If power is everywhere, doesn’t that mean we can hardly talk about it – or, perhaps, that there’s nothing to talk about? And with power slipping and sliding all over the place, it was difficult to see either what this really meant, or what the implications would be.

This view of power also, unsurprisingly, upset those who were attached to the previous model. To see power as a force held by a dominant group – as in the traditional view – is valuable, from a political point of view, because it highlights the inequality between the dominant people and everybody else, and it emphasizes exploitation. Sometimes it was hard to see what it really meant, though, and it was always based on a one-dimensional definition of power. For example, it would seem clear-cut to say that your boss at a workplace has more power than you – they can tell you what to do, and they can even sack you. (The boss can exercise power due to institutional arrangements of power, that can be called upon and used.) So that’s power, and this simple case alone seems to suggest that the traditional left-wing view – that power is held by bosses and owners of companies – was a strong one. However – to continue the example – maybe your boss would go home and be beaten by their partner, who would dominate the home and make your boss feel miserable and useless – and suddenly, your boss is no longer “a powerful person” per se; we find that the idea of them as powerful only made sense in one particular context.

Similarly, when women could point to ways in which patriarchal society supported the continuation of men’s power, on the level of individual relationships it would always be easy to find instances where women seemed to have more power than men. In particular, the idea of all men having power, whilst women were united in their global powerlessness, never really worked – especially when a middle-class feminist academic would have much more in common with her male colleagues than she had with a woman living in poverty in the Third World.

So the idea that power is not actually a glorious substance held by dominant groups makes sense. But this is a disappointment if we liked to be able to oppose domination and support minorities; the old model allowed us to jeer at nasty powerful groups, whereas Foucault’s model seems to have taken that opportunity away. At the same time, though, we know it makes sense. Whilst it may have been thrilling to condemn all men for their global conspiracy of power, for example, this was always difficult to reconcile with the pathetic examples of men that feminists would encounter in their everyday lives. Meanwhile, Foucault is not saying that there are no inequalities in society, or no marginalized groups. In fact, Foucault himself was quite an activist in support of minorities. Foucault’s message, then, is not automatically reactionary just because it proposes a new way of looking at how power works. It doesn’t really say that you can’t jeer at nasty powerful groups, either, but it encourages a more practical and sophisticated approach to examining how that power is exercised. It also doesn’t imply that feminism or Marxism are useless, it just forces them to become more interesting, complex and realistic.

Power and Resistance

Foucault asserted that wherever power is exercised, resistance is also produced. “Where there is power, there is resistance” (Foucault, 1998: 95). This is an essential part of his approach to power. Points of resistance are “everywhere in the power network” (ibid.), and resistance does not (simply) occur at one major point, but all over the place. It might take the form of quiet tensions and suppressed concern, or spontaneous anger and protest. Just as power flows through networks of power relations – “a dense web that passes through apparatuses and institutions, without being exactly localized in them” (1998: 96) – so the “swarm of points of resistance” appear all over the place too. (This doesn’t mean that resistance would always be dissipated and disorganized – revolutions are possible, Foucault suggests, if enough of these points of resistance can be strategically mobilized.)

This may sound like abstract theory, but it’s easy to observe in the real world. We know from experience that wherever power needs to be referred to, to make something happen, then grumbles of discontent accompany it. If a boss has to make menacing reference to the terms of someone’s employment, to make them work harder or in a particular way, this creates resentment. If one member of a couple has to allude to all the money they are bringing into the household, in order to get their partner to do something, then resistant feelings will be aroused. If an “expert” places a contentious label on a situation, this will produce oppositional feelings amongst the people involved, or other concerned parties.

These examples help to show why Foucault says that power is productive. Whilst the traditional view of power would see it as a negative force, and a dampener on interesting things happening, in Foucault’s eyes the exercise of power might have positive or negative consequences, but most importantly is productive, bringing things into being – whether as a result of the original action, or the effects of resistance to it, or both. This does not mean that Foucault is saying that acts of power are always “good,” as such – just that they cause things to happen, and are rarely one-dimensional.

This brings us to Foucault’s argument in The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, that it was precisely the discourse about sexuality, in Victorian times and the early twentieth century, which sought to suppress certain kinds of behavior, which simultaneously gave an identity to them, and so (ironically) launched them into the public eye:

There is no question that the appearance in nineteenth-century, jurisprudence, and literature of a whole series of discourses on the species and subspecies of homosexuality, inversion, pederasty, and “psychic hermaphrodism” made possible a strong advance of social controls into this area of “perversity;” but it also made possible the formation of a “reverse” discourse: homosexuality began to speak in its own behalf, to demand that its legitimacy or “naturality” be acknowledged, often in the same vocabulary, using the same categories by which it was medically disqualified. (Foucault, 1998: 101)

The exercise of power on the one hand – the labeling of “deviant” sexualities by authority figures – actually produced the resistance which would drive gay liberation movements I the twentieth century. The discourses about sex should not be viewed just as a form of domination, then, Foucault suggests, because in fact by making such a fuss about sex they were contributing to the vibrancy of the subject – stoking the fires of sexual discourse, as it were. (One of the broader arguments in The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, is that far from being a time when no one could bear to think about sex, the Victorian era was absolutely obsessed with sexuality, which is why it was talked about as a problem so much.)

Sex and Identity

In The History of Sexuality, Foucault dismissed the common view that sex had been a freely-expressed, unproblematic part of life throughout history until it had been suppressed and hidden from public view within the last couple of hundred years. Tracing the history of discourses about sex, Foucault argues that sex was brought into the spotlight by Christianity in the seventeenth century, when it was decreed that all desires – not just forbidden ones, but all of them – should be transformed into discourse, in the form of the Christian confession. Desires suddenly acquired great importance. This idea of sex as the inner “truth” about the self spread through Western culture, becoming further reinforced by carefully-worded studies in the eighteenth century, when sex became a “police” matter, and also rested at the core of the newly-emergent political and economic concern about “population” (Foucault, 1998: 20-25). Sex became a social and political issue – as it still is today, when teenage pregnancy, AIDS, sex education and pornography, for example, are thrust into the news by an interested party. From the start of the twentieth century, of course, the idea of sex as being at the core of identity was further reinforced by Freudian and psychoanalytic discourses, in which sexual urges and conflicts are the driving force of child development, and at the root of most problems. These ways of thinking about the self are not limited to the readers of Freud’s books, or the clients of psychotherapists, but are widely dispersed through the kind of popular general knowledge you gain by reading magazine articles, watching sit-coms or seeing Woody Allen films.

Does it make sense to say that sex is at the heart of identity today? The answer is surely yes, and more so than ever before. As we have seen already, and will consider in more detail in later chapters, the discourses of magazines and self-help books, as well as many screen dramas make knowing one’s sexual identity of crucial importance to inner happiness. The media clearly suggests that, in order to be fulfilled and happy, you should:

-understand your own sexuality,

-have sex often,

-seek help for sexual problems,

-have a satisfactory sexual partner – or get a new one.

Talk shows, dramas, magazines, newspaper problem pages and other media all relay these points. We cannot assume that these messages have a direct impact on people, of course; and it is not necessarily the case that the mass media are adding these messages into society – perhaps the media are only circulating ideas which already seem like common sense to many people. But whatever their origins and power, these notions seem stronger than ever. Between 1961 and 1999, the divorce rate in England and Wales grew from 25,4000 to 144,600 per year (having peaked at 165,000 in 1993 – more than a six-fold increase between the early 1960s and the early 1990s). Whilst divorce rates are not a perfect indicator – they only tell us about the kind of heterosexual people who are (or were) interested in getting married – the statistic clearly makes the point that people are no longer staying in relationships which no longer satisfy them. (So statistics for divorce – where people have made the dramatic step of disbanding a relationship which they previously swore to stay in forever, at a formal ceremony – are particularly telling here.) Whilst a general explanation for these divorces would be over-simplistic, we can say with some confidence that the modern proliferation of discourses of self-fulfillment, in terms of both sex and relationships, are likely to play a part in the termination of these marriages.

The high percentage of people who re-marry indicates that these people have not gone off the ideals of romantic love per se – they just wanted a better partner, someone who would understand them better, that satisfy their needs. (In 1999, 41 per cent of UK marriage ceremonies were for couples where one or both of them had been previously married.) Also, of course, marriage itself is in decline, partly because being “locked” into marriage does not correspond, for a growing number of people, with the modern discourses of self-fulfillment. An official UK Population Trends report notes: “There have been steady trends over the last quarter century, both in the increasing proportion [of couples] cohabiting, and the decline in the relative numbers married – and these trends seem set to continue” (National Statistics, 2001: 15). Major government surveys have found that two-thirds of the UK adult population agree that “it is all right for a couple to live together without intending to get married” (ibid.: 7), and those opposed to this idea are clearly shown to be largely clustered within the older generations – those born before 1935 – who are, of course, on the decline.

All in all, we see from these statistics that couples are increasingly unlikely to get married – due in part to an uncertainty that this will bring self-fulfillment – and that those who are married, are today much more likely to divorce in order to continue the quest for self-fulfillment elsewhere. Whilst this does not show that sex itself has become more important than a few decades ago, the popular media discourses of self-fulfillment – which refer to relationships in general but include a heavy emphasis on sex in particular – are likely to be feeding these trends.

Foucault’s Ethics

In the previous chapter we discussed Anthony Giddens’s interest in lifestyle – the idea that in modernity, everyone has to make choices about the shape and character of their lives and identities. A few years before Giddens was publishing in this area, Foucault had come to focus on similar questions, albeit with different emphases, whilst preparing The History of Sexuality volumes two and three, in the early 1980s.

In this work, Foucault talks about “ethics,” and it is important to understand that for Foucault this term does not (simply) mean a general moral code; instead, it refers to “the self’s relationship to itself.” To put it another way, ethics here means a person’s concern for and care about themselves; the standards they have for how they would like to be treated, and how they will treat themselves. Ethics describes “the kind of relationship you ought to have with yourself” (Foucault, 2000: 263) – the rules one sets for one’s own behavior. These rules, although personal and subjective, are vitally important; as Ian Hacking (1986: 236) notes, “It is seldom force that keeps us on the straight and narrow; it is conscience.” A person’s own ethics will usually relate to, but are unlikely to be exactly the same as, well-known sets of morality codes. For example, society says that it is wrong to be unfaithful to your partner, and says that “being unfaithful” is having sex with another person: But an individual’s own ethics might allow them to have sex with someone other than their partner, as long as that partner will not find out, and so cannot (in theory) be hurt by this action. Someone else might deal with this ethical problem in a different way, by shifting their definition of sex – as did Bill Clinton when, as President of the United States, he insisted he had not had “sexual relations” with the young intern Monica Lewinsky, because they had )as it later transpired) engaged in oral but not penetrative sex.

Summary

Foucault shows that a particular way of talking about things (discourse) shape the way that we perceive the world and our own selves. Today, popular media are obviously primary channels for the dissemination of prevailing discourse. The ability to influence a certain discourse is a form of power that can be exercised (although power is not a property held by a particular group, but is something that flows through social processes and interactions). The exercise of power always produces resistance, and so in this sense power is productive because it causes things to happen (which will not necessarily be the consequences intended by the original agent). The discourses about sexuality and identity are strong ones, enthusiastically spread by the media and consumed by audiences. Sexuality is seen as the key to happiness and knowing your “true self.” In modern life, Foucault suggests, we have to establish an ethics and a mode of living – not dissimilar to Giddens’s ideas about lifestyle – and he hints that the possibilities are virtually endless but are not always visible to us.

Gauntlett, David. Media, Gender and Identity: An Introduction. London: Routledge, 2002. 115-125.