Foucault by Lois McNay

Author:Lois McNay
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley

Discipline and resistance

While Foucault’s account of a normalizing disciplinary power offers a compelling account of tendencies immanent in societal modernization, the derivation of a general paradigm of social power from the disciplinary model is contentious. One difficulty arising from such a derivation is that it leads to a slippage from a positive to an essentially dominatory model of power. As many commentators have pointed out, Foucault fails to distinguish between the totally reified power relations that characterize the ‘complete and austere’ institutions from which his model of disciplinary power is derived and the more open and reciprocal forms of power relations that tend to operate within other institutional sectors of society.45 Anthony Giddens, for example, contrasts Foucault’s problematic positing of the total institution as the paradigm of all social relations with Erving Goffman’s treatment of the issue. In Asylums, Goffman shows that total institutions, by virtue of their all-embracing character and the process of ‘civil death’ that entry into these regimes involves, are demonstratively different from other social contexts. Taking into account these fundamental differences, total institutions can be said only to represent ‘aspects of surveillance and discipline’ found in other social contexts in a highly distilled form.46

The tendency to fall back on a negative notion of power that ensues from the generalization of the idea of discipline is exacerbated by Foucault’s one-sided analysis of institutional power. Power relations are only examined from the perspective of how they are installed in institutions and not considered from the point of view of those subject to power. Peter Dews has pointed out that Foucault’s analysis of the disciplinary techniques within the penal system is skewed towards the official representatives of the institutions – the governors, the architects, etc. – and not towards the voices and bodies of those being controlled. Failure to take into account any ‘other’ knowledges – such as a prison subculture or customs inherited from the past – which those in control may have encountered and come into conflict with means that Foucault significantly overestimates the effectiveness of disciplinary forms of control.47

This slippage from a theory of power as positive to an implied history of unmitigated domination has problematic implications for Foucault’s postulation that resistance or counter-discourses arise at the very points where power relations are at their most rigid and intense. Following on from the idea that power is a positive force is the idea that all power relations are potentially reversible and unstable. Wherever domination is imposed, resistances will inevitably arise (the rule of the tactical polyvalency of discourses). Repression and resistance are not ontologically distinct; rather repression produces its own resistance: ‘there are no relations of power without resistances; the latter are all the more real and effective because they are formed right at the point where relations of power are exercised.’48 In this way, Foucault circumvents the problematic tendency, characteristic of his earlier work, to posit resistance in the form of a radical rupture or as an ‘extra-social’ force.

On this view of resistance, the sexed

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