Simple games have more to say than meets the eye.
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve investigated and reviewed Foucault’s translated and essential works. I will complete that task by reviewing Foucault’s last essential work, which is specifically on his studies of Power, this week.
The book, translated by James D. Faubion, begins with his lecture series titled Truth and Juridical Forms. Foucault begins this series by – contrary to very popular opinion – criticizing the Marxists’ approach to power. Foucault sees power as a set of games. His analysis, in theory, is also Nietzschean, not Marxist. Anyone claiming Foucault was a Marxist philosopher appears to have been unfamiliar with his work or they are liars. Power and Knowledge, according to Foucault, interact through a subject’s instincts (hence the Nietzschean basis for Foucault’s analysis of Power), emotions, and conflict, producing new knowledge forms (pp. 8-14). I think what should be understood by reading Foucault’s first lecture on Power is that the subject is as much a product of his circumstances as he shapes them, specifically as it relates to his knowledge domains and fields (p. 15). This conceptual relation between the subject, his environment, power, and knowledge will also be explored later in this analysis. Foucault’s main point for this lecture series can be summarized from this translated sentence: “What I intend to show in these lectures is how, in actual fact, the political and economic conditions of existence are not a veil or an obstacle for the subject of knowledge but the means by which subjects of knowledge are formed, and hence are truth relations.”
To demonstrate his thesis, Foucault begins by exploring the ancient Greeks’ power games. Firstly, he begins by suggesting that the first power game played by the ancient Greeks was “the testing game” (p. 18). This testing game is identified through the Homeric epic, the Iliad. The testing game is later transformed into a knowledge and power game. This power game of knowledge and power serves as the meat of Foucault’s analysis and emanates from his interpretation of Oedipus Rex (p. 23).
Foucault believes that Oedipus’ problem was that he knew too much. Oedipus acquired his knowledge by engaging with the world and inquiry. While he did come from humble beginnings, he ultimately uses his wisdom, knowledge, and the techniques he learns to achieve what other men could not, which enables him to ascend to the highest position within a polis: Oedipus becomes King. This knowledge – specifically his ability to see – defines him and is also his greatest weakness. Having gained power through knowledge, through his investigative techniques, he is dependent on it – he must know. Possessed with the desire to know and preserve his power, he discovers the truth; he is undone and falls from his throne, never to return (pp. 24-30). In this form, Oedipus represents Power-knowledge. When the two, Power and Knowledge, are brought together, Oedipus – the tyrant – is shown to be excessive. What Foucault argues is that the Oedipal figure, rather than representing some Freudian instinct, is an allegory for the sophists (pp. 30-32). As an ancient Greek figure, the tyrant opened up the way for the investigative, retrospective, and evidence-based analysis, which gave rise to the philosophers. It was these men, who under the Platonic tradition used their inquisitorial techniques to challenge the sophists, who were able to put the tyrant in his proper place. According to Foucault, this established a myth: where knowledge and science are found in their pure truth, there can no longer be any political power. Foucault seeks to dispel this myth via a Nietzschean analysis; i.e., by showing these are transformed by and the product of a power struggle.
The third section of Truth and Juridical Forms is perhaps one of the more complex but also essential sections of this lecture series. Foucault begins by showing that over time, the Inquisitorial methods of the Greeks fell out of fashion as the Roman empire collapsed, leaving in their wake the Germanic power games. The German power games, or legal games, were always private (no one represented the society generally), an act of war by one party against another, i.e., war by other means, and open to settlement (pp. 35-35). Having outlived the Roman legal games, the Germanic legal games served as the foundation for Feudal laws. The Feudal laws, at their beginning, like their Greek forebears, so Foucault claims, were also a test of truth. The Feudal laws were composed of social tests, formulaic or verbal tests, oath acknowledgments, and physical tests or ordeals, which were a continuation of war (pp. 37-38). The Feudal tests of truth also had the following characteristics: they were binary, i.e., either you accepted the test or you declined it, in the latter case, admitting defeat; either you obtained victory or you lost; the procedures were self-regulating; and might makes right, i.e., it was (again) an extension of war (pp. 38-39).
The rise of the monarchs established a new paradigm for these legal games (p. 42). The monarchs established top-down, procedural rules. Secondly, they established the prosecutorial role, which was a position that acted on behalf of society (making the games public spectacles rather than merely private) and ennobled political powers to take control of judicial procedures. Next, they established the infraction, which was a wrong against the state, which obligated the party at fault to compensate, as a punishment, the tortfeasor, which could also be Power or the state. The monarch established this new, top-down, procedural system because he could no longer engage in the testing game established through the old, Germanic traditions – he would’ve died. And so, he established the inquisitorial method of analysis to discover how to best navigate the power games at play within a society (pp. 44-45). To achieve this, the king appropriated the inquisitorial procedures established by the Church, specifically, their special and general inquisitorial procedures (e.g., The Domesday Book) (pp. 46-47).
The Germanic test and Church inquiry, Foucault notes, were not replaced by the judicial inquiry because Reason had triumphed (i.e., “acted upon itself”). Rather, it was Power responding to changing social conditions that required him to develop a new system for exerting his authority – if anyone is familiar with the work of de Jouvenel, this argument is remarkably similar to his (pp. 47-48). However, by establishing the judicial inquiry or inquisitorial procedures in the 12th Century, the monarchy sowed the soil for numerous fields and domains of knowledge to bloom. The development of these domains and fields of knowledge is rooted in the monarch’s need for information to rule his kingdom properly. Without adequate knowledge, without Oedipus’ eyes, the king would not have been an effective ruler and would have lost to anyone who was. Power, thus, depended on knowledge to preserve itself (pp. 49-50). Still, the ancient test of validity and strength did not disappear from knowledge domains. Alchemy, for example, remained and served as a test of knowledge between Man and Nature, Light and Darkness, and Good and Evil. The disputatio also remained, for a time – it primarily relied on appeals to authority and how many sources you could muster to defend your argument rather than any logical analysis. Eventually, the disputatio was overthrown by the University’s inquisitorial analysis (pp. 50-51).
What should be evident is that Foucault is establishing an apparent developmental pattern. The pattern exists as follows: Games of Might lead to Games of Analysis. What’s fascinating about Foucault’s analysis is that it suggests and outright states that the development of different schools of knowledge is rooted in the state’s or Power’s desire for control and command. The subjects of knowledge, thus, exist in an oscillatory and mutually dependent manner with Power.
In the fourth section of Truth and Juridical Forms, Foucault establishes his argument for the development of the panopticon, which is based on Jeremy Bentham’s penal theories. Starting with the penal code, Foucault argues that it established crimes as moral and religious transgressions, defined what was not and was useful for society, and defined crime as a social injury rather than a mere personal injury (pp. 53-54). The criminal becomes an enemy of the state through this penal code because his crime injures the state. As an enemy of the state, he could be punished in four different ways: exile, banishment, or deportation, for a start; humiliation, shame, or condemnation, secondarily; forced labor; and lastly, retaliatory vengeance. Many of these, however, did not work. So, what changed?
These penal procedures were replaced with the prison. Once the criminal was no longer punished through the traditional methods, the penal system couldn’t be interested in what a person had actually done, so Foucault argues, but became more interested in controlling people’s behavior. The system become more interested in controlling what people could do. In other words, if punishing them for what they did wasn’t effective, then it was best to control what they might do. The judiciary could not handle this problem on its own. Thus, they devised a separation of powers, as is established in Montesquieu’s work, The Spirit of Laws: i.e., the judiciary recruited the executive and legislative branches (pp. 56-57). At this moment in history, Bentham devises his utopic image to care for the prisoners, which Foucault argues became a reality: The Panopticon (p. 58).
The Panopticon is defined by at least two qualities: examination (rather than inquiry) and supervision. Within a society defined by the panopticon, the examiner or supervisor determines what is normal or not, acquiring and building stultified systems of knowledge around what they deem to be helpful behavior for the state (p. 59). The development of the supervisory system (like its Feudal inquisitorial system before it) is a product of changing social and economic circumstances. Religious, Para-Religious, and Paramilitary groups were the substrate from which the examination and supervisory system emerged, as well. Effectively, these groups needed to control the population and developed norms, based on their morals or needs, and procedures for doing so. Hence, Foucault’s insistence that the subjects of power are as responsible for their systems of subjectivization (or subjugation) as Power is in subjugating them (pp. 59-62). This process occurred in several shifts. The people begin by morally policing themselves to prevent themselves from being targeted by the state. Next, the nobles take the people’s norms and laws into their hands to acquire the power to morally police others for themselves. Then, the aristocrats, wishing to serve as an example, adopt the moral, surveillance practices of the people, and begin policing themselves, which enables Power to oust any of his rivals (pp. 62-63). This shift in the power game was distinctly English, however. In France, this bottom-up and then top-down process, Foucault argues, was driven by the use of the letters de cachet These letters served as a way to police someone’s moral or economic behavior and often led to their isolation or imprisonment. This produced a supervisory system. The prisoner was only replaced when their behavior had “normalized,” requiring an index of normalized behavior and knowledge of that normalized behavior (pp. 63-67).
Changing economic circumstances, according to Foucault, mostly drove these changes. The lower classes wanted to ensure their ability to produce and maintain capital in England, producing a moral system to ensure their economic development. This moral system was then picked up by the elite who were only too happy to acquire the ability to ensure their capital and control the population. In France, the situation was also rooted in economic conditions. The peasants were becoming a significant problem for the landed classes because France’s economy was no longer strictly agrarian. The peasant problem was an incentive for people to use the powers of the state, through the letters de cachet, to control the peasants. This power was later used from the bottom up and then the top down to control the lower classes by isolating and imprisoning them. (pp. 67-70).
What I think should be taken away from this lecture is that Foucault saw the development of power games as a bottom-up and top-down process rooted in the environmental and economic conditions of its players. From the development of the panopticon, as Foucault lays it out, and its need for knowledge of its subjects, it seems clear how something like psychology, sociology, and psychiatry could have developed.
In the last lecture on Truth and Juridical Forms, Foucault reaches his conclusion. What Foucault argues is that the social panopticon, its need to understand its subjects, required it to develop a system of individualization and isolation (pp. 70-71). The panopticon is interested in breaking people apart, individualizing them, and then surveying them at every level, creating a hierarchy of surveillance, to be a little more exact (pp. 72-73). What Foucault is interested in is establishing a history of the panopticon (p. 73). What Foucault does show is how the penal and prison system was carried over, into the factory system. This system then needed economic apparatuses to preserve its function because it produced the goods the society needed. I.e., the factorial prison system became a mainstay of society because it served the state’s demand for goods and services (p. 76). This system was concerned with attaching men to its apparatus, i.e., to the penal factories. It wanted to turn their time into labor, their bodies into laboring bodies, and justified this process of transmogrifying men into cogs through political, economic, and judicial applications of power (pp. 76-84). Most importantly, these systems required constant observation of the sequestered, individualized, laboring body, producing a corpus of knowledge about the individual and his needs and problems (pp. 83-84). Foucault argues these mechanisms led to the prison system, not as a place necessary to keep people who had committed a crime or were not functioning members of society, but as a place to keep people could be bad for a system’s economic functions or were trouble for Power (pp. 85-87).
This produces a kind of system of subjectivization through knowledge production:
In The Politics of Health in the Eighteenth Century Foucault shows how this circuit that feeds and enables Power was used to establish medical administrations. First, the social development of the 18th Century produced the health apparatus of the state (pp. 90-91). This health apparatus developed out of Power’s need to produce and have healthy bodies for labor. Thus, a large emphasis was placed on the rearing and health of children and the population’s hygiene (pp. 96-101). The hospital developed out of these practices but its existence as an institution also caused significant problems for the population: it was a major center for disease proliferation. In response, the state developed multiple mechanisms to alleviate the problems caused by hospitals and to ensure that its population was cared for (pp. 101-105), ultimately seeking to ensure it had bodies to muster for labor and military expenditure. The hospital also became a sufficient and necessary cause of knowledge production. Knowledge was (or is) needed to build a network of healthcare facilities to prevent diseases but the centers for healthcare also served as loci of knowledge generation and education. The knowledge types produced from the state’s healthcare apparatuses can be seen as the precursor to the psychiatric, psychological, and sociological sciences; i.e., the human sciences (pp. 105-106).
In the Preface to Anti-Oedipus, what Foucault provides is an outline or guideline for the Left (although it’s not exclusively applicable to the Left) to resist the established panopticon and play power games with it to produce truths of its own. It is, essentially, an ethical power game (pp. 107-108). The enemies Foucault defines are the bureaucrats, individuals who reduce the world to an unnecessary binary, and Fascists, which Foucault does seem to recognize as those individuals who would unite the power of the state and market together, i.e., Socialists. His guidance, as he takes it from Anti-Oedipus, is (1.) to avoid being paranoid about everything that you do politically (you cannot live your life in fear); (2.) develop actions, thoughts, and desires via the use of the problematic (i.e., the conjunction of opposites); (3.) focus on differences rather than similarities, flow over unity, dynamic arrangements (ecologies) over systems, i.e., dynamic things are more productive than stultified and unitary things; (4.) face reality joyously; (5.) use your actions to develop your thoughts; (6.) aim for de-individualization; and lastly, (7.) do not become obsessed with Power, do not let it possesses you or become enamored with it (pp. 108-109). Foucault seems to have a problem with the individualization process, not because he doesn’t see people as individuals – if he advocates for focusing on differences rather than similarities, he obviously does. Yet, as Foucault noted in his work on Truth and Juridical Forms, the state and Power tend to use division, separation, and isolation to control and subjugate people. Thus, by forming effective groups that stick together, while recognizing differences within those groups, a political organization stands a better chance of winning the power game than a group that is made up of separate individuals or predicated on individualism.
Lastly, we can better understand where Foucault comes from in Truth and Power, i.e., what motivated him to develop these ideas. Firstly, Foucault clearly distinguishes himself from the Marxists. His research was not something they were interested in or dared to explore. From my reading of his work on aesthetics, methodology, and epistemology, and just from this interview, Foucault obviously wouldn’t have called himself a Marxist and distinguished himself from the Marxists (pp. 112-113). Still, Foucault sees the study of history as more than a task of language; i.e., a semiotic or Hegelian analysis. While he doesn't see language as meaningless, he does make it equivalent to dynamic struggles for power; i.e., he sees language as a product and tool for Power but this does not mean that language is invalid or meaningless (p. 116). Foucault was driven to explore Power because he wanted to know why normal individuals were being sent to internment camps. He recognized, through his investigations, that Power was imprisoning its dissidents to preserve its interests (p. 117).
In this interview, we can also see that Foucault doesn’t seem to have much use for ideology, and he doesn’t see power as inherently bad, either. This latter fact was also explicitly stated in his essential ethical works. Rather, he sees games of power as a way for groups to develop themselves (pp. 119-120). Foucault is not against using the state’s powers ultimately. Specifically, as was clear from his Preface to Anti-Oedipus, he wants to play power games with Power to ensure the state or Power benefits him (p. 123). In other words, it appears as if Foucault is arguing for the state and people to interact through power games to develop power knowledge that the state can use to subjugate its citizens more humanely.
This creates another kind of circuit, similar to the one established in Truth and Juridical Forms.
Lastly, Foucault believes intellectuals have a larger role to play in this process. The intellectuals, Foucault argues, should continue to work at the local level. They should also remain in their positions or occupations or find a position that makes them an essential component of the system. However, they should also battle for truth. This isn’t so much a battle against the production of truth, as if there’s no such thing as truth – Foucault doesn’t appear to be that kind of Postmodernist. Rather, it’s about the emancipation of truth from the institutions that abuse it (pp. 126-133). Thus, Truth as Power can shape the environment and subject and, thus, the subject would be wise to utilize it and develop forms of it.
I think there is a great deal of potential in Foucault’s work on power, which is not explicitly political and can, thus, serve as a tool for development. What I find fascinating, because it seems to mesh so well with my understanding of game theory, is Foucault's analysis of power as a series of games. I guess the question I would have to ask is: Why does this pattern of the game, even found if Homo Ludens, keep repeating itself? My guess is that complex human behavior is rooted in play. I do not think Foucault got this wrong and I even think it is supported by the work of neuroscientists like Jaak Panksepp, whose emphasis on the play mechanisms in rats was foundational for understanding the limbic or affective system in humans.
Foucault also places significant importance on the subject’s role in the evolution of power games. He clearly sees individuals as, in some sense, responsible for the situations they find themselves within. As I continue to review this work, I will show that this idea of responsibility that he gives the subject also affects his advocacy for people I do not necessarily have any affiliation with or sympathy for. Regardless, responsibility, personal responsibility, though not explicitly stated as far as I recall in any of the lectures, interviews, and papers reviewed in this paper, appears to be a recurring theme throughout Foucault’s work.
I do not think Foucault wanted people to feel powerless against the abominations they faced in the middle and early half of the late 20th Century. This is evident in his preface to Anti-Oedipus. However, as a follower of the Machiavellian tradition and a self-declared adherent, I have difficulty seeing much hope in these situations. The Machiavellians teach us about the necessity of pessimism, for optimism, of the sort found in Preface to Anti-Oedipus, can blind one.
Thus, there is a conflict between personal responsibility and futility. This conflict is precisely the kind that Nietzsche spoke of. Here, there is a clashing of instincts, sentiments, and feelings, i.e., a profound and magical conflict that can generate the spark of knowledge necessary to overcome one’s circumstances. Like Foucault, the sensible right should be courageous enough to live within and through the juxtaposition of these two feelings. Besides, is there anything more romantic than a hero fighting against all odds? Who knows what will happen? Perhaps he’ll die, maybe he’ll discover something in himself he never knew before that others can use, and maybe – though highly unlikely – he’ll win.
Bibliography
Foucault M. and Faubion J.D. (editor) (1994). Michel Foucault: Power. Edition Gallimard.
