TRUTH AND POWER

Q) Critically analyze Foucault’s statement “the notion of repression is quite inadequate for
capturing what is precisely the positive aspect of power”.

Michel Foucault (1926-1984) was a French historian and philosopher well known for his
analysis of the nexus between power, discipline and knowledge. He was arguably the most
influential thinker of the second half of the twentieth century. It was during the 1960s that
Foucault started becoming popular amongst French universities and in academics.

The 1977 interview “Truth and Power” conducted by Alessandro Fontana and Pasquale Pasquino
with Michel Foucault trace the intellectual development of Foucault’s methods. In fourteen
questions, Foucault describes the whole sequence of his research, from his movement away from
Marxist as well as existentialist-humanist; it is strongly argued that the essay is primarily
concerned with destabilising the Marxist notion of the state and ideology and replacing the
Marxist theory about the relations of power in society with another, more Nietzschean theory of
power.

Foucault was critical of both Marxism and what he called “the juridical theory of sovereignty”,
in his view, both the theories neglect the complexity and immediacy of power in everyday life,
and they underestimate the extent to which the modern identities have been ‘produced’, if not
repressed by various overlapping networks of power and knowledge. According to him, power is
a rife throughout our social system, particularly in “control technologies”. Foucault conceives
power not as an institution or structure, but as a complex strategical situation and multiplicity of
force relations. Relations of power permeate and constitute the social body. Foucault spent a
large part of his career analyzing the ebb and flow of power in different situations and with
relevance to aspects of human life. He broadens the concept by explaining how the overall
volume of power rises with each individual that is involved in the play (of power). It was after a
lot of definitions of power and the ways of perceiving it that Foucault noted that power is
generally thought in terms of “relationship” and has led to the abandonment of “place” as a way
of conceptualizing power.
“His work marks a radical departure from previous modes of conceiving power and cannot be
easily integrated with previous ideas, as power is diffuse rather than concentrated, embodied and
enacted rather than possessed, discursive rather than purely coercive, and constitutes agents
rather than being deployed by them” (Gaventa, 2003)

In context with a critical analysis of modern power, Foucault proposed "one should not concern
itself with the regulated and legitimate forms of power in their central locations" but "with power
at its extremities, in its ultimate destinations, with those points where it becomes capillary, that
is, in its more regional and local forms and institutions". He was primarily concerned with the
point where power surmounts the rules of right which “organizes and delimits it” instead of the
general functioning of some central institutions or principles that are supposed to legitimize with
their power and authority.

Giving an example for the same, Foucault said “rather than try to discover where and how the
right of punishment is founded on sovereignty, how it is presented in the theory of monarchical
right or democratic right, I have tried to see in what ways punishment and the power of
punishment are effectively embodied in a certain number of local, regional, material institutions,
which are concerned with torture or imprisonment, and to place these in the climate - at once
institutional and physical, regulated and violent – of the effective apparatuses of punishment"
(Foucault, 1980)

For Foucault power was never about a dominant group or any one class trying to repress the
other or the minority, in fact, Foucault was suggesting that most people, even the ones who are
believed to belong to the oppressed classes or exploited groups are actively participating in
practices that will contribute to patterns of oppression or domination, thus making them the
opposite of ‘victims’.
With the notion of ‘capillary’ or ‘productive’, Foucault suggests that “power and conflict are
ongoing” and “these are not confined to the sphere of official, political or economic institutions”.

As for the productive understanding of power, Foucault regarded it as the characteristic of

modern society. According to him, the Marxist and the Freudian theories and the combinations
of thereof were completely dependent and centered around repression, thereby making the
productive side of the power an ambiguous one. For Foucault, power is productive, both in its
knowledge and to self-identity. For him, power is often exercised in ways to “produce” forms of
knowledge and resistance which then play or reproduce into the hands of power.

To elaborate this further, Foucault takes the example of homosexuals, given he himself was one.
He talks about how “homosexuals are medically labelled as ‘preserve personalities’ and thus, this
became a part of medical ‘knowledge’ and this, in turn, lead to a ‘counter-discourse’ in which the
personality of a homosexual was used to foster greater social acceptance on the grounds that
homosexuality was, though pathological, natural, like other diseases and afflictions” (Foucault,
1980). Furthermore, in Discipline and Punish, Foucault refers to the prison system and talks
about how with the help of new penology, they transformed “the occasional offender into
habitual delinquent” and created a “closed milieu of delinquency” (Foucault, 1977).

Finally, repression in power is only about saying ‘no’ which according to Foucault is the
negative attribute of power. The notion of repression is inadequate for capturing the productive
aspect of power. It is a narrow, skeletal notion of power that assumes power is a law that
prohibits. Thus, both Marxists and Foucault came to one conclusion that repression in power is
not fair, thus going back to Plato, it was understood that no regime succeeds in maintaining itself
simply through repressive methods – “repression may be necessary, but it never is enough to
maintain a stable form of rule”.

Stating all of the said facts about power and it’s functioning in the way that Foucault mentions is
not always feasible in the real society. Even though there are a few factors that Foucault
mentions which should not be a part of decent power, but in ‘actually existing’ capitalist
societies, there is lack of economic and political democracy thus making even the democracies
authoritarian and elitist. Thus, Foucault’s idea of power is not a perfect fit in the modern, class
divided, capitalist world. Foucault’s methods, especially capillary and productive powers should
be understood as an answer or an alternative to the Marxist ideology, but not as an idea that can
be used in real life.
“What Foucault drew attention to was the ongoing discipline, coercion, manipulation and
divisiveness that often works to keep those at the top comfortable - even though this requires
subtler methods of control than strictly repressive methods.” (G. Deleuze, 1988)
BIBLOGRAPHY

 Michel Foucault,‘TruthandPower’,inPowerandKnowledge,tr.Alessandro Fontana and

Pasquale Pasquino (New York: Pantheon, 1977) pp. 109–33.
 Barrett, M. & A. Phillips, eds. 1992. Destabilising Theory: Contemporary Feminist
Debates. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
 Deleuze, G. 1988. Foucault. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press
 Foucault, M. 1977. Discipline and Punish. NY: Vintage/Random House.
 Levine, A. 2004. A Future for Marxism? London: Pluto Press.