Intertexts

Intertexts, Vol. 6, No. 1, 2002 Smash t±LC Sovereign Paradigm! The War of the Races” as an Alternative to the Discourse of Sovereignty 4 4 Hasana Sharp P e n n s y l v a n i a S t a t e U n i v e r s i t y Michel Foucault scandalized many by suggesting that, contrary to com¬ mon sense as well as to much of philosophy and juridical theory, the decreasingly visible and less physically brutal character of modern power is attribut¬ able to its increased effectivity and the tightening rather than softening of its grip over social relations. Foucault demands that we understand power not as an external, alien force to which our souls and consciousness are opposed, but as constitutive of knowledge formations, subjectivity (i.e., the soul or con¬ sciousness), and most aspects of our being in the world. Foucault’s provocation, his dare for us to think power and ourselves at their very limits, comes in some sense from what appears to be an “empirical” analysis that power no longer operates according to amodel of sovereignty but according to atechnology of discipline. Power, in the form of discipline, functions at the level of the most quotidian aspects of our existence rather than emanating from acentralized, identifiable, commanding force acting in the form of interdiction, prohibition, and taboo. Yet political theory and modelsofhumanconsciousnesscontinuetounderstandpowerandhuman agency through an image of sovereignty: power is conflated with authority and practices of repression, while agency, in order for morality and ethico-political responsibility to be possible, is understood as the transparent sovereign will of the individual who acts and thinks in spite of, rather than be¬ cause of, social forces. Foucault argues persuasively, however, that we must surrender our at¬ tachment to athought of sovereignty in all of its guises. In its stead, we might more fruitfully consider power relations, including those constitutive of sub¬ jectivity, as relations of struggle, relations of war. This does not render politi¬ calengagementimpossible,asmanycontend,butnecessaryandinescapable. This paper focuses on three texts from the middle period of Foucault’s work. Discipline and Punish {1975), ?i\cct\iTC course entitled “H faut defendre la socidte” [“Society must be defended”] (1976), and The History of Sexuality, volume 1(1976), to contend that, while his later works on the cultivation of the self take up the question of resistance and agency explicitly, the so-called bleak and nihilist middle period on power demonstrates aclear commitment to struggle and resistance. Indeed, the texts most noted for their elaboration of aconcept of power ask why radical transformation is so difficult (certainly a question for many immediately following the failed uprisings of 1968) and portray historical reality such that resistance always constitutes social organi¬ zation. No society exists except as anegotiation of power, astruggle, a“war of 9 8 . . _ J Sharp—Smash the Sovereign Paradigm! 9 9 position,” aseizure of authority. Sovereignty has always been Utde more than an effective fantasy that power maintains about itselfwhereby it imagines itself as necessary rather than contingent; that is, “sovereignty” functions to deny that power remains always subject to the vicissitudes of struggle, subject to the logic of war. Thus the later works may shift their emphasis, but they are neither the sole place in Foucault’s oeuvre to locate human agency nor do they represent acorrective of the sometimes reviled work from the mid-1970s. Transformations in Social Organization Nancy Fraser asserts that, “Foucault’s most valuable accomplishment consists of arich empirical account of the early stages in the emergence of some distinctively modern modalities of power” (Fraser 17). Yet she finds the political implications of these empirical insights to be paralyzing for social criticism because they lack positive normative content and “rule out some rather widespread political orientations” (18). Thus she finds Foucault’s work to be, at the same time, politically dangerous and empirically useful. This section is quite curious, since, if one were to agree with Foucault’s “empirical” account of the transformation of social relations as described in Discipline and Punish, one might think the challenge would be to construct apolitics ade¬ quate to the reconfiguration of power...