Sovereign power, disciplinary power and biopower: resisting what power with what resistance?

Abstract

This article links Foucaultian power forms with its corresponding resistance. If resistance is a reaction to power, then the characteristics of the power strategy/relation affect the kinds of resistance that subsequently prevail. Accordingly, it becomes interesting to discuss what kinds of resistance emanate from what kinds of power. We discuss this relationship between power and resistance by drawing on Foucault’s ‘triangle’: (I) sovereign power; (II) disciplinary power; and (III) biopower. Thus, deviating from Foucaultian studies’ preoccupation with ‘power’, we utilise Foucault in order to focus on ‘resistance’. And by connecting to empirical examples from within the emerging field of resistance studies we argue that the peculiarities of power decide how resistance can be conducted.

Keywords:

• resistance
• Foucault
• biopower
• disciplinary power
• sovereign power

Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Swedish Research Council, which has awarded us bursary to undertake research on a project entitled Globalization of Resistance: Influences on Democracy Advocates in Civil Society in the South from 2011 to 2015 (project No. 2010-2298). We also want to thank Magnus Hörnqvist and the seminar participants at CSM (Forum for Civil Society and Social Movement Research) at the University of Gothenburg for helpful comments.

Notes

1. The only other attempt we have found is Death (2010) who makes an ‘analytics of protest’, modelled on Dean’s ‘analytics of government’.

2. Hardt and Negri (2004) make an unorthodox difference between the biopolitical (resistance) and biopower. They argue that biopower is a global production order. In their version of a global empire of biopower, they outline imperial and global regulation of the life of the world population, conducted by global capitalism, not a global state, through production of life, not regulation of it. To them ‘exodus’, or practices of escape, becomes a primary form of resistance.

3. However, even if this tactic of ’seize and reverse’ (Hoy 2004, p. 86) of the very mechanisms of power in order ‘to turn the system against itself’ (p. 85) is temporary successful, ‘power is insidious and … may be able to reverse this reversal in turn’ (p. 87).