Lecture on Contours of Power

This lecture answers the following questions:

1.) What is power?

2.) What are the different facets of power?

WHAT IS POWER?

- talks about the ability to achieve a desired goal (Heywood, 2002)

o this view is problematic for it privileges the dominance of ability vis-à-vis exercise

- the conceptualization of power necessitates an understanding that will encompass the

fundamental elements of power

1. capacity

2. exercise

3. outcome

- this implies the eclectic conceptualization of power (conceptualizing power from the four faces

of power)

o power as prevailing in the decision-making process (DM)

o power as DM + agenda-setting (AS)

o power as DM + AS + preference-shaping or thought-control (PS)

o power as DM + AS + PS + forging of subjects

WHAT ARE THE DIFFERENT FACETS OF POWER?

Three Faces of Power (Digeser, 1992)

1. First -A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something that B would not

otherwise do.

-a response to the elite model of power.

-power resides with the elites.

-power as prevailing in our decision-making process

- power is a relation determined by the following:

-source

-means

-scope

-number of respondents

-change in probabilities

-element of comparability (whose decision prevailed?)

-CAPACITY

-Robert Dahl

2. Second -A has power over B if he can prevent B from doing something he/she wanted to do.

-a response to the pluralist view of power (first face of power)

-power for the pluralists means participation in the decision-making process

-pluralism tends to betray their ‘capacity focus’ by giving too much attention to

EXERCISE (doing something only!)

-power as agenda-setting

-power is determined by an indirect and covert action/inaction

-ability to distinguish (important and important items)

-element of limiting tendency (whose agenda is being set-off?)

-EXERCISE (which includes both acting and not acting)

-Peter Bachrach and Morton Baratz

3. Third -A has power over B even if B consciously wants to do what A desires (power is

exercised if B acts contrary to his/her objective or real interests).

-a response to the problem of unintended consequences and the lack of intentionality of

power.

-Whose interest or objective is being harmed?

-power as thought-control

-power is determined by its significance

-interests (i.e., preferences, conditions of welfare, or those that are constitutive

of well-being)

-element of congruency of interests

-Substantial EXERCISE

-Steven Lukes

4. Fourth face of Power (Foucault, 1982l; Digeser, 1992)

- Power as forging of subjects

- Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Michel Foucault)

- a response to the growing disillusionment toward the dominant thinking of power (first three

faces)

o sought to understand the transformation of the old pastoral power and the emergence

of modern institutions.

� Old Pastoral Power

• Assures the salvation in the next world (eternal life)

• Service-oriented (or willingness to sacrifice one’s life)

• Individualistic (one’s relationship with Christ or Christ-centered)

• Knowledge of the conscience

� New Pastoral Power

• New salvation (real world)

• Multiplicity of agents of power

• Knowledge of man—population and individual

o Basic features of modern-day institutions

� Art of distributions (space)

� Control of Activity (general time)

� The organization of genesis (specific time)

� Composition of forces (homogenizing tendency)

- Challenges the views of the three faces of power

-subject of power as social-construct

-What kind of subject is being produced?

- problems of the three faces of power

a. relational view of power (narrow sense of relations)

b. conflictual view of power

c. importance of consent

d. subjects of power are always given

- ‘forging of subjects’ is an effect of power

o Subjection (submission of oneself)

o Does the forging of subject affect our subjectivity?

- Claims that power is ubiquitous

- Wants to determine the source of our subjectivity – genealogy

- Intentions and interests may not be essential – critical of our individuality

- Intentionality and objective interest reversing the liberal notions of intentions and interests.

- Highlights the relationship between knowledge and power (power-knowledge/knowledge-

power)

- Disciplinary power – totalizing and individualizing

-constitutions as normalizing mechanism

- Panopticon

-Biopolitics – intrusion of the state into the life of its citizen.

- interconnection between life and power

- historical inversion of right to kill

- power to ‘make’ live

- homogenization of the citizens

- surveillance and training

- centralized biopolitical process

- productive tendencies of this governmentality.

- Resistance to biopower is usually unreflective

- Paradox of Difference ‘To possess a true identity is to be false to difference, while to be true to

difference is to sacrifice the promise of true identity’. ( the former implies the existence of the

ideal and the effort to reform the different; the latter on the other hand presupposes the

absence of the ideal and the effort to distinguish)

- Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and the Bare Life (Giorgio Agamben)

- Aims to make sense of the relationship between Foucault’s biopower and Agamben’s Sovereign

power.

- ‘sovereign power is not linked to the capacity to bear rights, but is covertly linked to bare life’.

- ‘Homo Sacer’ is an obscure figure in roman law that is banned, may be killed, and yet not

sacrificed in a religious ritual (negative sense of the concept of ‘sacred’)

- Problematized biopopower in its entirety.

- Revisited the concept of ‘sovereign power’ and its relationship to our life

-bare life vis-à-vis sovereign power

- Sovereign power as the source of biopolitical power

- What is sovereign power?

-influenced by the friend-enemy distinction of Carl Schmitt

-follows the logic of exception (inclusive exclusion-what is excluded is actually taken as

part of a totality)

- Paradox of sovereignty

- ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ compose the totality of sovereignty (they are one)

- decision on the exception or the suspension of the delineation (state of exception as

the source of juridical order)

- state of exception (the traces of threshold of delineation) is sovereign power

-ability to make distinction or a form inclusion and exclusion

- State of exception as the source of biopolitical power or rule/order

-nomos basileus as the sovereign law

-sovereign law is the point of indistinction between ‘violence and law’ (or simply the

absence of any justification for violence and law)

-the highest form of power – the one that produces the human laws or order

-resembles the state of nature

- Sovereign power over the citizens

-sovereign power creates its own subjects

-point of indistinction between those who are within and outside of its power

-‘citizenship’ as a symbol of being included (bearer of sovereignty)

- Conundrum of sovereignty – citizens as the homo sacer

-citizens (as included within the sovereign power) are placed at the mercy of the

sovereign’s ability for making distinction

-surrender of our bare life to the sovereign power

- Crisis of sovereign power (sovereign power no longer protecting our bare life)

-refugee (absence of citizenship)

-totalitarianism (totalizing power over our life)

- Concentration camp as the new matrix of power

-reveals how the sovereign state exercises its sovereignty (state of exception or a form

of inclusion and exclusion) to the people.

- Growth and prosperity of the Aryan race (included) at the expense of the Jews

(excluded) constitutes the sovereign power of the Nazi government in the concentration

camps.