[Generation_online] power/resistance: thoughts in progress

[Arianna]

From: "M" <swerve@onetel.net.uk> 
To: <generation_online@kein.org> 
Subject: R: [Generation_online] re: Yves's comments on section 3.1 
Date: Wed, 20 Feb 2002 11:50:12 -0000 
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Clearly I think that what needs to be
thought through - as with all positions that are heavily Althusser and/or
Foucault influenced, when the subject is to some extent constructed through
disciplinary regimes, or regimes of control, or interpellation, where does
the subject of resistance come from... Foucault is always rather mysterious
about the pre-existing resistance that is always somehow always already
there...


hi, sorry this isn’t relevant to alienation as such, is this the passage you are thinking of when you say mysterious?

'Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only in so far as they are free. By this we mean individual or collective subjects who are faced with a field of possibilities in which several ways of behaving, several reactions and diverse comportments may be realized. Where the determining factors saturate the whole there is no relationship of power, slavery is not a power relationship.... since without the possibility of recalcitrance, power would be equivalent to a physical determination [...] If it is true that at the heart of power relations and as a permanent condition of their existence there is an insubordination and a certain essential obstinacy on the part of the principles of freedom, then there is no relationship of power without the means of escape or possible flight. Every power relationship implies, at least in potentia, a strategy of struggle, in which the two forces are not superimposed, do not lose their specific nature, or do not finally become confused. Each constitutes for the other a kind of permanent limit, a point of possible reversal. The agonism between power relations and the intransitivity of freedom is a permanent political task inherent in all social existence.' (The subject and power)

This is in the context of an essay that analyses the role of the state and anti-authority struggles (as transversal and immediate struggles against the government of individuation).  

I think the question of the subject of resistance is very important but where Foucault is brought into it I find it misleading. I agree that there is no such thing in Foucault but it sort of makes sense. The notion of a subject of resistance is more suited to the contractualist (juridical) and the repressive (institutional) hypotheses, and the discourses of sovereignty and right (also of liberation from alienation, in Marcusean terms), through which this subject must pass in order to become intelligible and identifiable. Foucault historicizes, questions and explicitly rejects both of these models.
Whether this is at the price of a clear-cut definition of subversion is difficult to answer, also because he doesn't give a 'clear-cut' definition of power either. I agree that at points there is a symmetrical tension in the notion of power-resistance, which takes overly Nietzschean tones and ends up almost essentialising struggle as constitutive of power relations. Do you think Negri does this too? 
Foucault says that in order to take seriously the assertion that struggle is at the center of every power relation (the politics war paradigm), we should get rid of the old logic of contradiction and the 'sterilizing constraints of the dialectics'. Whether he comes up with some kind of substitute is another question. But this is complex and maybe the notion of governmentality and biopower are more useful, because they point to how our possible field of action is structured by others and more importantly, what precisely is at stake in the struggle itself. This is almost off topic but I see Negri's politics of subversion as informed by an idea of 'reappropriation', obviously not of a 'lost liberty of human essence' but of the conditions of production, of that collective field of action where self government is possible, and this sometimes makes his adoption of Foucault's idea of power quite problematic to me.

Arianna