Foucault’s Dismissal of Ideology: A Critique

Political Studies, 2002

The resurgence of interest in the concept of ideology and its empirical application neglects the important contribution of Michel Foucault. Despite Foucault's epistemological reservations about the concept of ideology, both his archaeological and genealogical writings develop original approaches to the analysis of concrete ideologies. This article evaluates Foucault's archaeological approach by applying it to the case of Black Consciousness ideology in South Africa. When translated into an appropriate form, archaeology provides a useful set of tools for the analysis of concrete ideologies. However, it should not be taken as a free-standing approach for its employment exposes important methodological and substantive difficulties. Archaeology thus needs to be supplemented by a genealogical investigation of discursive practices and by a post-Marxist theory of hegemony.

in Manzo, L.K.C. (ed) Culture and Visual Forms of Power. Experiencing Contemporary Spaces of Resistance, 2015

Michel Foucault’s construction of power offers a revaluation of the modern “perpetual battle” (1995, 26) and, in particular, of the biopolitical and neoliberal forms of governance that characterize our present. The Foucaldian idea of power is that it is not a thing, but a relation (1971). Power is not simply repressive (like the use of violent control in the pre-modern era), but is also productive and is an everyday disciplinary practice. “It is not the ‘privilege’, acquired or preserved, of the dominant class, but the overall effect of its strategic positions- an effect that is manifested and sometimes extended by the positions of those who are dominated” (1995, 26-27). In short, Foucault conceives power as “exclusively social, multiple, variable in character” (Sluga 2005, 231) and, more importantly, exercised on a small scale by political acts taken up by the supposedly powerless. In order to understand what power relations are about, rather than analyze distinctive forms of power, perhaps “we should investigate the forms of resistance and attempts made to dissociate these relations” (1983, 211). (in Manzo 2015: page 1).

Cogito. Multidisciplinary Research Journal, 2010

The problem of power was of great importance in Michel Foucault's philosophical work. He parted clearly with the marxist interpretations of power relations, arguing that power is not essentially something that institutions possess and use oppressively against individuals and groups. Consequently, Foucault tries to move the analysis one step beyond viewing power as the plain oppression of the powerless by the powerful, aiming to examine how it operates in day to day interactions between people and institutions. In this sense, the power is more like something that acts and operates in a certain way, it's more a strategy than a possession Foucault sees it as co-extensive with resistance, as a productive factor, because it has positive effects such as the individual's self-making, and because, as a condition of possibility for any relation, it is ubiquitous, being found in any type of relation between the members of society.

Foucault's theorisation of Power is often assumed to lead to nihilism or moral relativism in which Resistance is impossible. This paper argues that any such assumption relies upon a fundamental, even wilful, misconception of the Foucauldian conception of Power. Rather, Foucault presents us with a perpetual frontier of Resistance against any and all forms of Power which confront the Subject.

2016

Freedom from Domination A Foucauldian Account of Power, Subject Formation, and the Need for Recognition Katharine M. McIntyre Michel Foucault is criticized for offering an account of power that leaves no room for the freedom of individuals. This dissertation will provide an account of freedom that is compatible with Foucault’s descriptions of the operation of power and its role in the constitution of the subject. First, I clarify Foucault’s own distinction between power and domination, the conflation of which has been the primary source of criticism of his social theory. With this distinction in hand, I address the apparent break in Foucault’s middle and late periods, which, respectively, describe human beings as constituted by power on the one hand and as having the reflective critical capacities necessary for selftransformation on the other. I then explore Foucault’s criticism of the modern concept of autonomy, which he believes to be inherited from the Enlightenment and, more spe...

This paper takes issue with interpretations of Foucault's thought that understand power and resistance as forces working in opposition to one another to fix and dissolve or construct and deconstruct social identities. Starting from the theme of dispersion presented in The Archaeology of Knowledge, it maintains that, for Foucault, power works only in a dispersive manner and that identities are not so much substantialities produced by power as simulacra that appear on the surface of a very different dynamic. Resistance, in turn, is not a force opposed to power but rather a consequence of the disjunctive nature of power relations themselves. Using this reconceived dynamic of power and resistance, the paper revisits Foucault's understanding of disciplinary society and the micropolitics of the care of the self, and argues that although Foucault has been deployed in political theory to show that identities are both necessary and problematic, his work in fact points to a politics and ethics that strives to dispense with this necessity altogether.

Engaging Foucault (vol. 1) , 2015

In the paper, I am going to focus on a particular epistemological difficulty, demonstrated in one sentence, which I think is crucial for the understanding of Foucault's concept of power. In one of his lectures on power, after explaining that power is not repression, that it is not in someone's hands and that it forms a »net-like« structure, Foucault stated: »/…/ But I do not believe that one should conclude from that that power is the best-distributed thing in the world, although in some sense that is indeed so.« It seems like a riddle: something is true and false at the same time. How to draw the difference in power on the basis of such a conception? If nobody possesses power, if it does not have a location, how can we explain the hierarchy and inequality of power? I hypothesize that in order to explain those phenomena, we have to (in a precise sense) return to the old conception of power as a sovereign. The question is as follows: why does the power, even if it is distributed and non-localized, represent itself as a steadily defined possession, central position, etc.? What is the advantage of such a »false« representation for power itself? Precisely this masking of power is crucial for the reproduction of the same power relations. So in order to resist the existing order of power, we should not divide it form anarchy. We have to reject the representation of power and unmask anarchy, which is already immanent to power itself. This epistemological turn may be crucial in the understanding of some of the problems in contemporary emancipatory struggles. Keywords: Power, net, anarchy, representation, emancipation

This piece of writing argues for the utility of Foucault's approach to politics, upholding that genealogy gives the instruments to assess discourses of truth and to investigate the relations of power that inform political decisions and debates. Indeed considering power relations something that has been always understood as social interaction gives the possibility of conferring the status of “political” to struggles otherwise overlooked. Firstly, Foucault's approach will be shortly summarized in his fundamental character, delineating the most problematic features of the concepts central to his analysis. Subsequently critiques of his work, most notably by the Marxist tradition and by Critical theorists, will be assessed and discussed. Lastly, contemporary applications of Post-Structuralist methods of analysis to the understanding of International Politics will be briefly presented, as a mean of demonstrating that Foucault's method and its development continue to maintain vitality in the field of political analysis.