Power Is Not “The Man”
“Where there is power there is resistance” (Foucault 95). After reviewing my notes from our previous class, and doing Internet research on my own to clarify terms we discussed in class, I would like to discuss this quote. I will address what it means in terms of Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, as well as my personal opinions of the statement. I also welcome any comments or ideas from the rest of the class; in my opinion, the more minds the richer the discussion.
The first image that comes to mind when I read the quote, “Where there is power there is resistance,” is the civil rights movement. Conventionally, I think of power as the state, the “man,” and resistance as the common people who fight against it. In this vein of thinking, power is oppressive, and resistance is synonymous to reform. However, Foucault’s concept of power and resistance does not mesh well with my go-to image. In fact, almost every aspect of how I traditionally think needs to be re-thought. First, according to Foucault, “power is everywhere…because it comes from everywhere” (93). Contrary to my picture of power being the state, he further argues, “power is not an institution” (93). As we discussed in class, power is not juridico-discursive, or the rule of the law (i.e. “the man”). It is that which says “yes”. In addition, power is everywhere, and reproduces itself.
Second, and this is mind-blowing to me (and it took reading out loud in class for me to understand properly), “resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power” (95). Rather, there are various points of resistance in the power-relation system. Wherever there is power, there is resistance existing in it. It is an important (and somewhat confusing) distinction to make that resistance does not exist outside power, but within it. Furthermore, what was once resistance can, over time, become a “’local center[]’ of power-knowledge” (98). We are equivalent to the social conditions of our time, and thus what was formerly resistance could currently be normative. Additionally, resistance is not necessarily synonymous with reform. Resistance can be negative, just like power can be positive. Resistance is something that disrupts a current power-relation, shakes it up, and perhaps reshapes it.
Discussing power-relations and resistance this past week has made me eager to read (or re-read, but I do not remember much of it from eighth grade) Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlett Letter. If I remember correctly there are many local centers of power in the story. I also am curious to see how resistance displays itself. Similarly, I wonder if the resistance present in the book is considered normative today.
Tags: Foucault, Power, Power-Relations, Resistance
February 22nd, 2012 at 3:04 pm
Hi Tal,
This is an exciting post to read because I love to witness deep thought in process. I do want to nuance the discussion of the State some to build on your insights. It’s not that the State is not involved in power relations, of course, but that the kinds of power relations that fuse what we think of as the State are multiple and increasingly affected by the myriad apparatuses of biopower. So you are right that the State is not “the Man.”
Your example of Civil Rights is a good one as a case in point. Consider the miscegenation and eugenics principles that became legal in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Among other things, they defined a concept of race via a one-drop blood rule, so that a person of mixed heritage that included African descent was to be considered African American by law and therefore subject to the white superiority Jim Crow laws that emerged after slavery ended. Foucault points out that racism is a State operation in this sense. Eventually in the case of Loving vs the State of Virginia, which had applied these laws to criminalize the marriage of Richard and Mildred Loving, more complex science helped show how racist that rule was. So in that sense, resistance was integral to the power relations that set up those laws because they were built on certain aspects of scientia sexualis.