ABSTRACT

This paper argues for understanding the systems of power investigated by Michel Foucault as “machines” in the idiosyncratic sense of this term developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. These systems are called “dispositifs” by Foucault, and each is made up of a heterogenous collection of elements, such as institutions, techniques, procedures, and discourses, that co-operate in the exercise of power over a phenomenon such as crime, disease, reproduction, or education. Although there are many reasons for believing that Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of machines was an important influence on Foucault’s thinking about systems of power, the relationship between the concept of the dispositif and the concept of the machine remains obscure. I argue that Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of machines provides a model for the emergence of functionality in a system of power that is crucial for Foucault’s understanding of dispositifs. For functionality to be “emergent” is for it to arise in large part through contingency and chance, rather than through the designs of technocrats or the scheming of elites. By reconciling the study of systemic power with the acknowledgement of historical contingency, I argue the concept of the machine is at the center of a project common to Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari that I call “Nietzschean functionalism.”

ABSTRACT

This paper provides a reconstruction of Michel Foucault’s conception of systemic power that defends it against objections made by Charles Taylor, Jürgen Habermas, Axel Honneth, and others. These objections identify a central tension in Foucault’s view: although he maintains that power is not possessed by individuals but put into operation by governmental systems (i.e. “dispositifs”), he claims it is exercised in accordance with strategies for the exercise of mastery and control. But how can a “system” undertake a “strategy” if that strategy is not consciously arranged or centrally coordinated by any individual or group? In homage to Hegel’s doctrine of “the cunning of reason,” I call the view that systems of power exhibit a strategic rationality not reducible to the rationality of individuals “the cunning of power.” This article shows that by conceiving dispositifs as “technological” in Martin Heidegger’s sense, Foucault provides a compelling account of how bodies of knowledge concerning objects such as crime, disease, and terror can act as a mechanism for the coordination of strategies of mastery and control even in the absence of any conscious coordination or central planning, i.e. that “the cunning of power” is at work in “the will to knowledge.”

ABSTRACT

This paper analyzes Michel Foucault’s conception of resistance, revolt, and uprising through the lens of Georges Bataille’s conception of “excess.” Critics of Foucault have often leveled the charge that his investigations of power fail to show in what ways regimes of power can be opposed or resisted. At best, these critics argue, resistance is a topic that is underexplored and underthematized in Foucault’s writings. At worst, Foucault is said to conceive of power as having such a totalizing hold and pervasive presence in any social order that resistance becomes altogether inconceivable. These criticisms imply a stark rejection of Foucault’s own understanding of his work, since he often claims his analysis implies that resistance to power is as prevalent and even more fundamental than power itself. This paper seeks to reconstruct the conception of resistance that Foucault means to invoke in making this claim by showing his debt to the thought of Bataille. “Excess” is a functional notion in Bataille’s thinking, i.e. a behavior is an example of “excess” only if it resists integration into the normal functioning of a social order due to its violent or disruptive character. Eroticism, for instance, is fundamentally linked to excess since, in Bataille’s view, it is a form of sexual urge aroused precisely by the allure of violating and disrupting everyday taboos. I argue that for Foucault “resistance,” which occasionally expands into large-scale revolts and uprisings against a regime of power, initially consists in “excessive” behaviors that the regime is unable to functionally integrate or accommodate.