Foucault and Power: A Critique and Retheorization

ABSTRACT

From the perspective of sociological theory, Foucault’s concepts of power, power-knowledge, and discipline are one-sided. While Foucault contends that there is no center of power, his account of power remains top-down or structural, missing the interactive and enabling aspects of power. A more balanced view would suggest that all exercises of power include meaningful agency (the ability to do something); social structures (not simply as constraints but as interactive creations); social knowledge (including both reifying truth claims and enabling truth or knowledge); and social-ontological being-in-the-social-world (both as enabling and dominating).

Keywords:

• Foucault
• agency
• domination
• power
• structure

Foucault was an impressively creative thinker, with many profound insights. However, his work is problematic from the perspective of sociological theory. His training was as a philosopher, and while he chose to confront many of the bread-and-butter issues of sociology, he did so without a sophisticated grounding in sociological theory.

In Power/Knowledge Foucault states that, since Descartes, the central problem for Western philosophy has been to understand of the essence of knowledge or truth. Philosophers ask, “What is knowledge?” or “What is truth?” However, Foucault further asserts that “since Nietzsche the question of truth” is no longer “‘What is the surest path to Truth?’ but ‘What is the hazardous career that Truth has followed?’… What is the history of this ‘will to truth’? ‘What are its effects?’ ‘How is this all interwoven with relations of power?’” (Foucault 1980, 66). He asks, “How is it that, in our societies, ‘the truth’ has been given this value, thus placing us absolutely under its thrall?” (Foucault 1988, 107). In other words, by identifying with Nietzsche, Foucault claims that the problem of truth and knowledge is how actors use truth claims. This constitutes a reframing of a philosophical problem of epistemology as a sociological problem pertaining to social practice.

Foucault’s empirical works on changing practices of knowledge, The Order of Things (Foucault 1970) and The Archaeology of Knowledge (Foucault 1989), have a strong resonance with Durkheim’s Elementary forms of Religious Life (Durkheim [1915] 1995). Particularly pertinent is the introduction to the latter (ibid., 1-20), where Durkheim makes it clear that it is his objective to criticize Enlightenment-inspired philosophical approaches to knowledge, specifically that of Kant. From a sociological perspective, the problem with the Enlightenment quest for truth was the mistaken assumption that the categories of Western knowledge are universal. Durkheim demonstrated that all knowledge is fundamentally a matter of social construction, particular to the specific collective consciousness of a given civilization (ibid., 8-10). For instance, while the categories of time and space may be found in all societies, as a prerequisite for social action, their specific forms are particular to each civilization (ibid., 10). To demonstrate this, Durkheim examined the thought of indigenous Australians and other non-Western cultures. For instance, Europeans use linear clock-time while indigenous Australians think in terms of walk-about-time, where time is relative to location in space.

Similarly, Foucault’s archaeological project questioned the purportedly universal character of the Enlightenment understanding of knowledge by demonstrating that the categories of thought are historically contingent social constructions. Rather than using anthropological data to back up this claim, Foucault used historical data. He argued that the categories of thought differed significantly across the Renaissance, Classical, and Modern epistemic epochs. In essence, Foucault replaced Kant’s universal a priori with a historical a priori (Foucault 1989). While the chosen data are different, the underlying method is the same; both anthropology and history reveal the contingent nature of social construction of supposedly universal categories of thought.

In some ways, given what we know from cognitive linguistics in the Chomsky tradition, Durkheim’s conclusions are more nuanced than Foucault’s. Both agree that the categories of thought are social constructions, but this leads Foucault to the more simplistic conclusion that they are entirely arbitrary, while Durkheim recognizes that categories such as time and space are necessary for cognition (in this sense, Kant was right), but that they can manifest themselves in radically different ways depending upon civilizational context (contrary to Kant, the particulars of European Enlightenment categories are not universal). Durkheim understood that relative to life forms, there was nothing arbitrary about categories of thought. It is only when divorced from context (for instance, when one civilization judges another as “irrational” or “less civilized,” the hallmark of Eurocentrism) that the particular categories appear arbitrary. In this regard, Foucault would have done well to pay attention to Durkheim’s pioneering work.

When we move to Foucault’s genealogical works, such as Discipline and Punish (Foucault 1979) and Society Must Be Defended (Foucault 2003), the relative absence of sociological reference is even more surprising. Genealogy is concerned with the emergence of the modern social subject through power, discipline, bureaucracy, and the state. In sociology, the insight that the modern social subject is socially constructed through discipline is the central theme of Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Weber [1905] 1976), a foundational text in sociology. Furthermore, the idea that power, bureaucracy, and the state are fundamental building blocks of modernity, including the economy, is at the heart of Weber’s magnum opus, Economy and Society (Weber 1978). Speaking from a sociological perspective, it is incomprehensible that anyone would approach this subject matter without in-depth reference to Weber. It is analogous to writing about relativity theory without reference to Einstein.

Foucault writes as if no one since the likes of Machiavelli, Hobbes and Nietzsche had written about power. But even after Weber, contemporaries of Foucault were conducting debates about the subject. There was the three-dimensional power debate, which ran from Robert Dahl (1957) to Peter Bachrach and Morton S. Baratz (1962) to Steven Lukes (1974). There was also the consensual power tradition, which argued, as Foucault did, that power is positive, not simply interdictive. The most well-known exemplar at that time was Talcott Parsons’ 1963 essay “On the Concept of Political Power” and Hannah Arendt’s short book On Violence (1970). Thus, while Foucault takes a sociological approach to power, knowledge, and subject formation, conventional sociological theory is absent, including the work of others, many of whom made similar arguments.

However, it might be argued that the fact that Foucault was not a trained sociologist allowed him to see things with fresh eyes. I think there is some truth to that defense. The fact that he appears blissfully unaware of the likes of Weber, Durkheim, and Lukes means that some of his insights are refreshingly original. For this reason, I aim to take what is interesting and insightful in Foucault and make it better by reframing some of his insights about power in relation to sociological theory and the power debates. However, before I do so, I wish to briefly sketch why Foucault’s innocence of sociological theory makes his analysis of power problematic, and therefore in need of improvement.

Agency and Structure

The relationship between agency and structure is the core problematic of sociological theory. In Rules of Sociological Method (1982), Durkheim argued that while a society is the product of the actions of individuals, social structure is sui generis, or greater than the sum of its parts. Because social structures are greater than individual acts, it is possible to think of these phenomena as things in themselves, which Durkheim termed “social facts.” However, it is crucial not to forget that these social facts are attributable to the actions of individuals. While they are typically not created intentionally, they are the product of intentional action. The key to balanced sociological theory is juggling the observation that social structure is sui generis with the indisputable fact that social structures are the outcome of social actors engaged in meaningful and purposeful social interaction.

French structuralism, however, as exemplified by Foucault’s mentor, Louis Althusser (1970), theorized social structure so as to render the actions of individuals epiphenomenal, the mere effects of structures. The same can be said for the functionalist works of Parsons (1951), in which the social system renders social actors as mere effects, or dupes, of the social system. In contrast, at the other extreme, rational-choice theory, for instance as expounded by Anthony Downs (1957), is an example of overly individualistic theory that loses sight of the sui generis aspects of social structure. The same can be said of utopian normative models of society, whether Plato’s vision of a republic or Marx’s vision of communism. Utopian normative thinking is premised upon the idea that social structures can be built and controlled to fit an ideal model. Social actors engaged in everyday social practices cannot create and maintain an intentional utopian social order, as their actions will always produce unintentional sui generis structural effects. While it must be acknowledged that actors can create new social institutions, such as the United Nations, these institutions always turn out differently than their creators intended because of unintended sui generis effects.

In New Rules of Sociological Method, a direct contemporary of Foucault, Anthony Giddens, re-theorized Durkheim’s classic work in a manner that brought to the fore the relationship between the actions of individuals, or “agency,” and the sui generis products of that action, social “structures” (Giddens 1976). This problematic was further developed in The Constitution of Society (Giddens 1984). In French sociology, the agency-structure problematic was equally central to the work of Pierre Bourdieu, as exemplified in his Outline of a Theory of Practice (Bourdieu 1977). Bourdieu treated the concept of habitus as key to understanding the structuring of structure through the action of strategic social subjects with specific dispositions derived from social practice (Bourdieu 1990, 52-65).

While Foucault did not engage with these theorists, in his own way, he was aware of the agent-structure problem. The most explicit acknowledgement of the problem is in the following passage:

Power relations are both intentional and non-subjective. If in fact they are intelligible, this is not because they are the effect of another instance that “explains” them, but rather because they are imbued, through and through, with calculation: there is no power that is exercised without a series of aims and objectives. But this does not mean that it results from the choice or decision of an individual subject, let us not look for a headquarters that presides over its rationality. … The rationality of power is characterized by tactics that are often quite explicit at the restricted level. (Foucault 1981, 94-95)

Here Foucault touches on the central problematic of agency and structure. Social subjects exercise their agency, their capacity to do things, with local strategic “calculation.” This local intentionality results in an aggregate set of sui generis power structures that are the unintentional effects of this individual action. While structures are the consequence of intentional actions, the overall aggregate result is not an intentional construct; hence there is no “headquarters” of power. Power structures are not the product of any further structures that “explain” them, as in structuralism, nor are they the effect of a power elite that pulls the strings behind the scenes. Social structures are the product of intentional action, but they are not themselves intentional (see Giddens 1984, 8-12, and Searle 1983). Thus, in this instance, Foucault articulates a theoretical position that is consistent with a balanced account of the relationship between agency and structure. Far more often, however, he makes statements that are overly determinist of agency, and his overall theory of power is overly structural, at least implicitly.

Thus, in Power/Knowledge, Foucault specifically sets aside the fundamental point that social structures are created by social actors, contending that the “individual should not be considered a sort of elementary nucleus, a primitive atom” (Foucault 1980, 98). In any balanced account of agency and structure the individual is, indeed, the basic unit, analogous to the atom in physics. The challenge is to link the doings of these “atoms” with structure and system but without constructing a simplistic theory where there is a “headquarters” of power. But Foucault does not seem to agree. When discussing the state, he argues that “the State can only operate on the basis of other, already existing power relations. The State is superstructural in relation to a whole series of power networks that invest the body, sexuality, the family, kinship, knowledge technology and so forth” (Foucault 1980, 122). The base-superstructure distinction is, of course, the basic building block of structural Marxism; Foucault is suggesting that power is a kind of base, analogous to the economy for Marx.

Foucault acknowledges that there is no such metaphysical thing as power in itself. It exists only when put into action in relational form (Foucault 1982, 219). Yet in many of his writings, there is sense that power is theorized as a metaphysical thing in itself or a deep structural phenomenon, which conditions social relations in a manner analogous to the economy in structural Marxism. In “The Subject and Power,” Foucault opens by allowing “that economic history provided a good instrument for [studying] relations of production; that linguistics and semiotics offered instruments for studying relations of signification; but that with power relations we had no tools of study” (ibid., 209). By “economic history” he means structural Marxism, and by “linguistics and semiotics” he means Saussurean structural linguistics, not those of Chomsky (see Foucault and Chomsky 2011). Thus, he uses structural models provided by Marxism and Saussureanism as analogies for power, with the consequence of overemphasizing structure at the expense of agency. The nexus of political economy, he maintains, is the process of exploitation, while the nexus of the process of power is “how human beings are made into social subjects” (ibid., 208). The social subject is the agent; therefore, any theorization should have conceptual space for the individual social actor. But in Foucault’s conceptualization, the social subject is an abjectly passive entity formed by power. In this vein he argues that “there are two meanings of the word subject: subject to someone else by control and dependence, and tied to his own identity by conscience or self-knowledge” (ibid., 212). For Foucault, the process of being made a social subject is, almost intrinsically, one of subjection: “The individual is the effect of power, and at the same time, or precisely to the extent to which it is the effect, it is the element of its articulations” (Foucault 1980, 98). The idea that power “articulates” social subjects is deeply structural, reminiscent of Althusser (1970), and deprives the social subject of meaningful agency.

Power and Resistance

In order to overcome domination, Foucault suggests that “maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are, but to refuse what we are” (Foucault 1982, 216). Essentially, Foucault advocates overcoming domination through resistance to the process of subject formation. However, from a sociological perspective, being a social subject is the only way for meaningful social interaction to take place with others, who are also social subjects. As we shall see, being a social subject is not equivalent to subjection; while it does entail accepting structural constraints, the successful performance of social life presupposes social subjects confronting and collaborating with other social subjects.

Foucault suggests that resistance comes from freedom, which is the other or opposite of power. He argues that “power is only exercised over free subjects, and only in so far they are free” (ibid., 221). This position leads him make the absurd statement that “slavery is not a power relationship” (ibid.). Following the principle of reflective equilibrium, where theory and empirical observation are tested against each other, it should be a rule of thumb that when a theory leads to absurd empirical conclusions, there is something wrong with the theory; not so for Foucault. The master-slave relationship is the ultimate extreme end of dominating power-over.

Foucault’s claim that power is only exercised over free subjects, while sometimes true, is not a plausible general rule. As Lukes asks, “Is it not the supreme exercise of power to get another or others to have the desires you want them to have—that is to secure their compliance by controlling their thoughts and desires?” (Lukes 2021, 32). In such situations, the social subject does not resist. At the extremes of domination the less powerful cease to resist, accepting their powerlessness as an inevitable fate, which is preordained by the order of things (Gaventa 1983).

Foucault assumes an opposition between power-cum-subject-position and freedom. While such an opposition makes sense within the language of normative political philosophy (cf. Butler 1993, Haugaard 2021), the hypothesis is at variance with sociological theory. Sociologically, freedom is only meaningful within membership of social community, which entails social integration, thus some subject positionality. An individual devoid of subject position, far from being free, is in a position of extreme anomie (Durkheim 1989). Furthermore, when power is understood to include power-to, then freedom actually presupposes power (Morriss 2009). Power-to is not exercised over free subjects. On the contrary, it gives subjects the power to have meaningful agency, thus freedom.

Part of the problem is that Foucault’s characterization of power is entirely one-sided. While he states that power is positive, he means this only in a limited, constitutive sense. He assumes that power equates to domination, for instance: “Domination is in a fact a general structure of power whose ramifications and consequences can sometimes be found descending to the most incalcitrant fibres of society” (Foucault 1982, 226). In contrast, once it is understood that power is positive in the power-to sense, that power-to is as fundamental as power-over, if not more so (see Pansardi 2012), it becomes clear that power sometimes facilitates empowerment, thus emancipation, and in other circumstances leads to domination (often both).

Foucault misses the fact that social actors seek to socially construct themselves as subjects as a way to empower themselves, to gain access to power-to resources within a context of social structures. As Giddens (1984, 9) observes, power is the articulation of agency. Agency-power is exercised by social subjects who actualise their capacity to transform the world through the performance of the subject positions that define their integration in the social system. We are interpretive beings who gain the capacity for collaborative interaction through the interpretation of others as meaning-given. When the social subject sees the other as, say, a police officer or teacher, that act of interpretation places the other in a specific subject position. If this interpretation correlates with the other’s perception of self, and both interact relative to the constituted rules of their respective subject positions, this results in successful interaction, which is both enabling and constraining for these social actors. Power is not a metaphysical force that produces individual social subjects. Rather, both power-to and power-over are the consequence of social interaction, where actors perform subject positions.

As I will explain later, subject position leads to social integration, which is a condition of possibility for the basic ontological security necessary for the being-in-the-world of social actors. If social actors were to systemically resist subject positions, as advocated by Foucault, they would suffer acute ontological security. As the ego psychologist Erik Erikson argued, neither society nor social subject can survive a community of wild eccentrics that resist all the structural constraints of social subject formation (Erikson 1995, 168).

In his account of subject formation through discipline, Foucault writes about the “disciplining of societies in Europe since the eighteenth century” (Foucault 1982, 229). Yet if there is no center of power, as Foucault maintains, who or what is doing the disciplining? The only plausible answer, consistent with a balance between agency and structure, relates to social actors’ strategic responses to their structural context. Social actors are not mere dupes of some super-structure; they are purposive agents who use discipline strategically to give themselves some perceived relational advantage in interactions with others.

Lukes (2005, 97) points out, against Foucault, that it is a sociological commonplace that when individuals are socialized, “they are oriented to roles and practices that are culturally and socially given.” Socialization entails the internalization of structural constraint, but this does not necessarily equate to domination. The key to understanding why social actors often voluntarily subject themselves to constraints is that these have enabling aspects. Power is Janus-faced: interactive power relations are both empowering and dominating. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault refers to Bentham’s suggestion that Panoptical discipline could be used in one school to teach children correct mathematics and astronomy, while in another they are disciplined to learn that “two and two do not make four or that the moon is a cheese” (Foucault 1979, 204). Yet while it would be a gross abuse of children to use Panoptical power to teach them that two and two do not make four or that the moon is a cheese, it is not a dominating use of Panoptical power to use discipline in order to teach them correct mathematics and astronomy. The Janus face of power entails that power techniques, including subject formation through discipline, can be used to create docile bodies (power as domination); but disciplinary practices can also be used to create social subjects who can defer immediate gratification (sitting and listening quietly, for instance) for the purposes of education (delivering agency or power-to).

In the account of the four dimensions of power that follows, we will reincorporate some of Foucault’s profound insights in a way that is consistent with a balanced approach to agency-structure, including the Janus face of power.

Foucault and the Power of Agency

Peter Digeser (1994) was the first theorist to add Foucault, as a fourth dimension, to the three-dimensional power debate. But we can, in addition, re-theorize the first three faces in a manner that focuses on the concepts of agency and structure in sociological theory. In brief, the first face of power corresponds to agency, as power-to and power-over; the second face corresponds to social structure; the third face to social knowledge or the epistemic underpinnings of social action; and the fourth face to social ontology, or the being-in-the-world of social subjects. As these phenomena constitute parts of all social interaction, the four faces of power should not be considered separate phenomena but different aspects of social interaction. They are like the four dimensions of an architect’s plan, which exist conjointly. I will go through each of the four faces or dimensions of power with a special emphasis upon the relevance to Foucault.¹

The first dimension corresponds to the agency level of power. A social actor exercises power by using resources to enable them to do something that they could not otherwise do. In the power debates, from Dahl (1957) to Lukes (1974), there is a generalized assumption that this dimension of power is equivalent to power-over, whereby A makes B do something that B would not otherwise do. Furthermore, as in Foucault, it is often assumed that power-over is dominating, which is not correct.

Foucault argues that power is not simply repressive, negative, or interdictive, but positive in the sense of constituting reality (Foucault 1979, 194; Foucault 1980, 119; Foucault 1988, 102; Foucault 1981, 83). Foucault’s emphasis upon the positive aspect of power is consistent with a different tradition of theorizing about power, which ranges from Parsons (1963) and Arendt (1970) to Barry Barnes (1988), Amy Allen (1999), Peter Morriss (2002), and Pamela Pansardi (2012). This literature suggests that power can be positive in three senses of the word: as power-to (not just power-over), as positive or constitutive, and as normatively positive. Foucault solely focuses upon the constitutive type of positivity.

Power-over is a subset of a wider power-to. As Morriss (2009, 55) contends, actors may choose to use their power resources to realize joint projects or alternatively to “kick others around.” Their power-over is a subset of their power-to capacity for action. More often than not, however, social actors use power resources to collaborate with others to achieve power-to do something, which they could not do without the agency of others. Power-to is the transformative capacity to change the world-out-there and is the fundamental aspect of power (Pansardi 2012). Furthermore, it is mistaken to assume that power-over always entails domination. A sports coach or teacher exercises power-over athletes or students (Allen 1999), and in democratic electoral contests, political parties exercise power-over each other.

Both power-to and power-over draw upon a number of resources that actors activate in order to exercise power. The three most significant of these resources are coercion, authority, and economic means.

Coercion is the crudest and theoretically least interesting form of power. Coercion works by deterrence, often the threat of violence, which adds costs to the deterred actions. In coercive relationships the less powerful obey out of fear of these costs but they resist whenever they can, such that coercive power potentially begets revolutionary responses. For this reason, modern political systems and elites have a strong incentive to base their power upon authority rather than coercion. Coercion remains a mere reserve in case of the failure of authority (Parsons 1963). Think of any complex system in contemporary society, such as the traffic system. The majority of people follow the rules of the road out of respect for authority and/or the realization that this constraint empowers them by giving them power-to.

While there is no explicit theorization of authority in Foucault’s work, he acknowledges that it is important. As he observes, “Medical statements cannot come from anybody: their value, efficacy, even their therapeutic powers, and, generally speaking, their existence as medical statements cannot be dissociated from the statutorily defined person who has the right to make them” (Foucault 1989, 51). Thus, medical statements are only taken seriously if backed by authority. Foucault appears to argue that such statements constitute performatives (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982, 45-70). Austin (1975) and Searle (1996) argue that certain speech acts bring certain events and social structures into being through performance. The response to a performance creates the status authority of the speaker. One might go so far as to argue that all social roles are authority positions that allow for the role player to make certain statements and not others, based upon the reaction of others. When a professor asks students to write an essay of a certain length for a certain date, students treat it as a reasonable request because it is made by someone with the authority power resources accruing to the subject position of a university professor. Were the professor to ask that the students take a cold shower in the morning the response would be puzzlement or laughter. The request to write essays is a felicitous performance of the subject position “university professor,” while requesting that students take showers is infelicitous.

While in everyday life we tend to think of authority as solely confined to high-status roles that confer political power, everyday authority permeates all aspects of everyday life. Primo Levi recounts the change of circumstances when he was deported from Italy to be a slave at Auschwitz. In Italy he had the subject position of a Jewish citizen of Italy while in Poland he ceased to be a citizen and the subject position “Jewish” entailed, for his captors, that he was sub-human. Thus, when he worked in an Auschwitz laboratory the cleaners used to sweep his feet as if they were part of the floor and refused to reply when he spoke to them (Levi 1991, 168). Slaves have no status authority (Patterson 1982, 10). If they were to speak with authority their speech would be ignored by others as infelicitous.

The absence of authority is one of the most extreme forms of domination and it has tremendously destabilizing effects. Most of the slave inmates of the concentration camps broke down psychologically even when they did not physically (Bettelheim 1960). However, in the modern world this total absence of authority is relatively exceptional (trafficked sex slaves would be an example). In general, social life hinges around social actors who constantly perform specific subject positions (female, male, customer, consumer, member of a union, and so on) that give them authority to act in certain ways.

Everyday authority is ubiquitous. When people greet each other with a casual “Hello, how are you?” the objective is to confer upon the other the status authority of social subject worthy of interlocution. For this reason, people find not being replied to insulting: their status authority as a speaker is denied. Similarly, people find it insulting to be spoken for, because it suggests that their social subject position does not confer on them the authority to speak. In many traditional societies, servants did not have the authority to speak with their employers on topics that did not concern their work. In contemporary society, such lack of authority is considered inconsistent with liberal citizenship rights, irrespective of one’s employment status.

Traditionally, all sorts of everyday subject positions, based on gender, class, race, sexual orientation and so on, had differentiated scopes of authority. In contemporary Western democratic societies this status hierarchy of authority is deemed less and less acceptable. A central theme of the #MeToo movement is the right of women to say “no” to sexual advances from men. It is not that women did not say “no” before. The point is that this “no” was not heard because they did not have the everyday authority to be taken seriously when saying it. The #MeToo movement constitutes a campaign to make the statement “no” a felicitous performance by persons occupying the status subject position of “woman.”

Much of identity politics constitutes conflicts over the authority relative to various subject positions. When people of color complain that they are not taken seriously when occupying social positions that otherwise have authority, they are essentially arguing that negative authority associated with their racial subject position makes statements by them appear infelicitous. However, it is important not to be deterministic about this; those who consider these performances infelicitous are social subjects doing something; social movements are vehicles by which social actors occupying less-powerful subject positions empower themselves as agents with authority. In general, social life is characterized by continual strategic struggles for authority by agents, relative to multiple subject positions.

Similarly, in the modern West, education is essentially a race to gain the qualifications necessary to increase authority. To use Foucault’s example, if you wish to make medical statements, you need to be able to perform the status position of “medical doctor.” In contemporary Western society, this subject position is performable by social actors with certain state-recognized qualifications. In this context, the state acts as a kind of reserve of authority validation, analogous to central banks with regard to the value of currency. Universities are printers of educational certificates that are backed by the state. However, this interlinkage of the state and authority applies only to a specific, albeit dominant, sector of society. In contrast, according to the Homeopathy Research Institute, over 200 million people use homeopathy on a regular basis and there are over 200,000 registered homeopathic doctors across the world, with 12,000 being added every year (Homeopathy 2022). These medical qualifications are authoritative among a subset of the world population but are not recognized by state power. Potentially, though, the state could licence homeopaths, which is a struggle for recognition that is currently being fought by many “alternative” medical practitioners. But Foucault tends not to see the fluidity of the authority power of subject positions, which applies not only to society as a whole but varies immensely within social subgroups.

Struggles for authority are struggles about knowledge and truth. What drives these struggles is not some metaphysical force—a deep structure called “power.” Rather, the motor of change is everyday struggles by individuals for the status authority of their subject positions. Such individuals are not effects of power but active agents negotiating various subject positions, acting strategically to occupy positions that have as much authority as possible and, furthermore, constantly trying to expand the authority of those subject positions. In doing so, they exercise power and seek more of it. Essentially, Erving Goffman’s (1971) account of the presentation of self in everyday life describes how social actors seek to make felicitous performances that strategically maximize their authority power.

The felicitous performance of authority position requires following certain rules and norms, which act as constraints. These constraints are enabling in the sense that conformity to them facilitates empowerment. The skill of a social agent lies in her ability to predict which performances will be deemed felicitous and will therefore confer power. This agency is not simply a will to power as domination over others; it is a will to obtain the power-to of self-expression and validation through interaction with others. In that sense, contrary to Foucault, the struggle for subject position authority is a struggle for freedom, a struggle to be able to have the authority to make statements and be heard.

Foucault and the Reproduction of Structure

In the work of Bachrach and Baratz (1962) and Lukes (1974), the second dimension of power concerns structural bias. In my work (Haugaard 2020 and 2021), I argue (following Giddens and Bourdieu) that social structures are not simply an external systemic context for social action; they are the stuff of social action.

Giddens (1984) argued that whenever social agents act, they structure social structures. However, what is missing from this model is the interactive, often conflict-laden aspect of structural reproduction, which I theorize through the addition of the concepts of confirm-structuration and destructuration.

When people use the term social structure in everyday speech, they often have in mind large systemic determinants, such as class structure. However, from the perspective of sociological theory, social structures are simultaneously a micro-phenomenon. When social actors buy cups of coffee, they reproduce myriad social structures, including money, weights and measures, shops, language, time, customer, and consumer. At the micro level, such social structures give meaning to any action. In the above we saw that all subject positions are essentially authority positions. We also saw that authority positions are continually subject to either felicitous or infelicitous performances. This refers to the structured content of any subject position. The meaning of, for instance, “consumer” refers to its structured content, which places the individual social actor within a systemic context (capitalism). A performance of any subject position is an act of structuration.

However, not all performances are felicitous, and it is the interacting other who either confirms or disconfirms the validity of any act of structuration. In response to structuration, a felicitous response is confirm-structuration, which reproduces the structure; an infelicitous response is destructuration and constitutes the imposition of constraint upon the agent (Javornicky 2020; Haugaard 2020, 38-39). To return to a previous example, “university professors” structure that authority position by asking “students” to submit essays; they also structure the meaning of the concept of “essays” and so on. When students respond to this as a reasonable request, they confirm-structure someone’s authority power as university professor (and they confirm-structure the meaning of “essay” and so on). However, if a request to take a cold shower in the morning is met with students’ laughter, the students have passed the verdict that the request was infelicitous, therefore destructured the authority power of university professor as a subject position that includes the authority power-over to request showering. While the subject position “university professor” delivers authority resources, thus power-over “students,” the position is highly structurally constrained. These constraints are performed and related to the knowledge of social actors; they are not some external, determinate force.

Foucault claims that to exercise power through government “is to structure the possible fields of action of other people” (Foucault 1982, 221) and that it is a form of “action upon action” (ibid., 222). Here Foucault would appear to be concerned with the structuring of social action, which is the stuff of the second dimension of power, but his account of structuration is one way and top down, not interactive. One actor structures the fields of action of another, one actor acts upon the action of another, which misses the interactive dimension of social action, which is central to the whole process.

On the other hand, Foucault claims that power is always accompanied by struggle or conflict, which he characterises as “antiauthority struggles” against subject positions and truth claims (ibid., 211; Foucault 1981, 96). This leaves out the fact that many exercises of authority receive voluntary confirm-structuration, but it is true that the potential is always there for destructuration. All social construction is contingent upon either struggle or acceptance. But just as Foucault fails to attend to interactive relationships, he groundlessly privileges struggle over agreement.

Social life is characterized by two levels of conflict. Relatively shallow conflicts can take place within the existing social structures. Deeper conflicts occur when actors do not wish to collaborate in structural reproduction. When Foucault reverses Clausewitz, arguing that peace is the re-inscription of the rules of war (Foucault 1980, 91), he is referring to what I would theorize as shallow conflict. Shallow conflicts are not to be dismissed as inconsequential. The democratic process is a shallow conflict in which social actors structure and confirm-structure a whole series social structures that essentially channel social conflict, so that interaction does not become deep conflict. Shallow conflicts require accepting a set of rules of the game as structural constraints, even when the outcome is an authority structure that is contrary to the outcome those agents desire. When the loser in a presidential election concedes, it confirm-structures the authority of the winner. When Donald Trump refused to do so, he was essentially destructuring the democratic process, entailing a deep conflict: an attack upon the process itself.

When Foucault juxtaposes war and structure he appears to suggest that the latter is no better than the former. That is a misrepresentation of the essential difference between deep and shallow conflicts. In deep conflicts, social actors are not bound by mutually shared perceptions of what are reasonable structural constraints. Any claim to authority then meets with destructuration. In that situation, the powerful can exercise power only through coercion or violence. European feudalism was essentially a world where coercion and violence were the norm. What happened from the eighteenth century onward, however, was a slow process whereby coercion and violence were gradually replaced by structured processes, including the democratic process, trade-union recognition, legal processes, and state bureaucracies that claimed to be neutral and staffed by appointees based upon meritocratic principles. Of course, none of these social structures was perfectly fair but there was a growing feeling among the mass of the population that they could be made fair, and therefore were legitimate or potentially legitimate; thus, a new economy of power came into existence. What we have seen over the past several hundred years is a rise the use of structured shallow processes as the norm of conflict resolution.

The execution of Damiens, as described by Foucault (1979, 3-7), was paradigmatic of a system of power that was largely based upon coercion, violence, and fear: politics as war. The rules of the game that replaced that state of affairs displaced coercion and violence from everyday life to the margins (the penal system), which, much as Foucault would deny it (ibid., 7 and 101), is more humane in the sense that the absence of violence is humane. However, contrary to Steven Pinker (2012), the emergence of these structures of conflict resolution was not simply reducible to the general acceptance of Enlightenment norms. Norms provided the discursive rationalization, but it was crucial to the acceptance of modern power structures that these forms of power represented a highly effective economy of power when compared to the more inefficient, coercive power structures of feudal society. Eric Williams (2022) argues that the demise of slavery was not due humanist values; rather, slavery was an ineffective mode of production. Analogously, I would argue that the demise of deep conflict as a normal state of affairs was not solely due to the acceptance of humanist values. Rather, the shallow conflict made possible by structured authority power is more effective than coercive power. If industrial workers are like slaves and obey only for fear of coercion, the moment their masters’ backs are turned, they resist, making them ineffective workers. Slavery, which is purely coercive production, contrasts with work in a complex modern workplace or citizenship in a complex modern state. Typically, contemporary workers in societies where unions have improved working conditions obey orders either because they consider the authority felicitous or because they wish to better their situation by promotion within the organization. If the latter, they obey authority to increase their own authority and material resources, giving them a greater stake and more power in the system. Similarly, the average citizen in a democratic state views the state structures of everyday life as enabling, at least in part. When the bourgeoisie was confronted with organized labor, it gave concessions rather than risk revolution. The same applied to the political process: as the franchise moved from being solely confined to male property holders, to all men, to women, to racial or ethnic minorities, the less powerful became empowered and, because they gained a stake in the system, ceased to be potential revolutionaries. The less powerful gained power, but so did the more powerful. Power, as Parsons (1963) put it, is variable sum. In coercive relations of power-over, the less powerful simply comply out of the fear generated by violent threats. In most coercive power relationships (there are exceptions), then, power is zero-sum. The gain of the powerful is entirely at the expense of the less powerful. However, in authority-based power relationships power is frequently positive-sum.

The contrast between deep conflict and shallow conflict is everywhere, at both the macro and the micro levels. At the macro level there are large collective political entities, such as Taiwan, Kurdistan, Catalonia, and Palestine, that attempt to (or would like to) structure the authority position of “sovereign state.” If felicitous, or confirm-structured, this would include the authority to vote in the UN. However, there are also powerful sovereign states that destructure these would-be sovereign states’ claims to status authority, which deprives these would-be states of their desired status authority, thereby disempowering them. (There are in-between cases that illustrate the contested nature of this subject position, such as Israel, which is a sovereign state as far as most Western states are concerned but not so in the eyes of several Middle Eastern states.) At the micro level, there are various identity protests claiming rights of authority. The claim by gay people to the right to marry is a claim to authority. One strategy to achieve that right is to demonstrate a wide consensus for confirm-structuring, or deeming felicitous, this authority claim. Gay-pride parades are a public performance of felicity. Once gay weddings became law, the first celebrations of these events were typically accompanied with significant publicity to publicly demonstrate that the authority of subject position “gay” included “marriage” as a possibility. When that happened, such acts of structuration became reasonable, which brings us to the third dimension of power.

Power, Knowledge, and Ideology

Lukes (1974) theorized the third dimension of power on the conceptual terrain of Marxist theories of ideology and false consciousness. In contrast, Foucault explicitly denied that his theorization of the relationship between power and knowledge was within that tradition of thought (Foucault 1980, 133). One must agree: the idea of false consciousness presupposes true consciousness on the part of the observer, which is theoretically indefensible (Haugaard 1997, 18-21).

Here is how I understand the important truth in Foucault’s view—the insight that requires us to add his perspective to the sociological understanding of power. In everyday life, we encounter what appears as the natural order of things. This natural order is a form of practical common sense, which is often socially constructed as the right thing to do in social situations. This is what Foucault had in mind when he claimed that “each society has its regime of truth, its generalized politics of truth” (Foucault 1980, 131). He was, I think, referring, at least in part, to taken-for-granted practical knowledge, which makes the status quo appear to be self-evidently right so long as it is not made discursive. Much of everyday interaction is structured unproblematically relative to this (supposedly) natural order of things. This includes social structures when they appear as objectively given, as could-not-be-otherwise phenomena. Social actors assume that the world-out-there is meaning-given (although it is they who confer meaning upon it). This assumption reinforces system stability.

Social actors have vast and complex practical knowledge of structuration practices that enables them to accomplish the practical business of going on in social life. Foucault’s epistemes (Foucault 1970 and 1989) describe the collective practical knowledge of a society, which Durkheim (1982) termed collective consciousness. Social structures essentially float in a massive sea of practical knowledge. On an individual level this knowledge is tacit and reflexive when drawn upon in interaction. Practical knowledge is not unconscious (as suggested by Bourdieu 1977, 77), in the Freudian sense of repressed, but the speed and complexity of routine interaction requires that most of a social actor’s social knowledge remains tacit under normal circumstances (Giddens 1984, 26). Think of the contrast between a native speaker’s knowledge of how to construct a sentence and that of someone who has just learned a language through formal instruction in grammatical rules. Grammatical rules embody discursive knowledge of a social practice, but the speed of fluent speech demands tacit, practical knowledge of grammar.

However, in critical social situations, when one does something that does not appear routine, or in situations where one becomes critical of social structure (for instance, when social structures appear unfair), social agents are capable of converting much of their practical knowledge into discursive knowledge. This capacity enables social actors to challenge the society into which they have been socialized, through the conversion of tacit practical knowledge into discursive knowledge that facilitates social resistance through critique. Sometimes this critique hits home by finding “resonance,” to use Hartmut Rosa’s felicitous terminology (Rosa 2019). Anyone who has attended an old-fashioned school will find that the discursive account of educational practices presented in Discipline and Punish resonates with their practical knowledge of schooling. Anyone who has had their performance of sexuality responded to as infelicitous or deviant will find that Foucault’s History of Sexuality resonates with their practical knowledge of negotiating their sexual orientation. Foucault’s histories are a form of social critique whose veracity is measured by their resonance with the practical knowledge of social actors who have experienced these forms of domination.

Foucault argues that it is the job of the critical intellectual to redescribe reality in such a way as to “show how that-which-is has not always been,” which has the consequence of demonstrating that “since these things have been made, they can be unmade” (Foucault 1988, 37). To put it in more sociological terms, he wishes to demonstrate that social structures are social constructions, therefore can be constructed differently.

However, the fact that social structures are socially constructed does not in itself mean that they are dominating or arbitrary. The structures of the democratic process are social constructions, yet they contribute to legitimate power-over, delivering power-to, and thus are far from arbitrary. When social actors realize that social structures are made, or socially constructed, it does not necessarily follow (as suggested by Foucault) that they should reject them as dominating. That said, much of the knowledge that is used to structure social life, once it is made discursive, reveals numerous biases in forms of power resources that cannot survive normative critique. Once the less powerful perceive that social structures are socially constructed, and thus could be constructed differently, they may want to destructure the status quo.

For the more powerful, who wish to maintain the status quo, the most obvious way to counter resistance is by means of coercion. But a more sophisticated way is to claim that these social structures are not socially constructed because they reflect some transcendent Truth. Reification is the process whereby social actors manage to make it appear that socially constructed structures are not socially constructed. In traditional societies this is achieved by claiming that social structures implement the laws of God. In the Abrahamic religions, God is prior to and the source of human norms. To continue with the example of gay rights, these religions forbid (or forbade) sodomy by claiming this prohibition was the will of God, and thus should not be changed.

Nietzsche’s death of God hypothesis is essentially the claim that with the advent of modernity, divine appeals cease to have a reifying effect (Haugaard 2020, 114-17). However, according to Nietzsche, rather than grasping the freedom to be able to socially construct social conventions as they wish, modern social actors have replaced the reifying function of God with the reifying function of Truth. When Foucault claims that since Nietzsche, the question of truth has been a question of power (Foucault 1980, 66), this is what he means. However, there is a performative contradiction in Foucault’s account in the sense that he writes about truth in general, as if all truth claims were reifying claims. Performatively, this means Foucault’s own theory is a reifying claim, a manifestation of a dominating will-to-power.

To avoid this contradiction, we need to distinguish truth claims from Truth claims. Small-t truth claims accept the fragility of knowledge. In making such claims, one accepts that they depend on norms that are conventions within the language game of science, that they are fallible, and that they are subject to falsification (Popper 2002, 32). In contrast, Truth claims mimic God claims in that they are presented as statements with transcendental or foundational referents and therefore are beyond dispute. Such claims presuppose knowledge of some kind of objective reality, or thing in itself, while truth claims are acts of interpretation of the world out there. Proper scientific practice makes modest truth claims by putting forward working hypotheses that are tested, while pseudo-science claims to represent an absolute Truth which is, as such, beyond falsification.

While ideally, science progresses by continually testing truth claims against possible falsifying instances, from the perspective of the social actor wishing to claim authority over others, Truth claims are much more tempting, as they foreclose debate. Sociologically, for strategically oriented agents, Truth claims are a way of ensuring confirm-structuration to their authority. For the less powerful to resist Truth can be socially constructed as entirely unreasonable—akin to madness, like arguing with the mind of God. In contrast, authority based upon truth claims invites the less powerful actor to test that (putatively authoritative) knowledge with other (putative) knowledge. Openly fallible truth claims invite the contestation of authority.

Rainer Forst observes that power is “the capacity of A to motivate B to think or do something that B would otherwise not have thought or done” (Forst 2015, 115, italics removed). To “exercise power means to be able—in different degrees—to influence, use, determine, occupy, or even seal off the space of reasons for others” (ibid., 116). Another way of putting it is to say that making Truth claims, as opposed to truth claims, seal off the other’s space of contested reason-giving. There is always a temptation for politicians to claim that their policies are based upon expert technical knowledge (Alasuutari 2018) that is, for practical purposes, absolute rather than to admit that expert knowledge is fallible.

Foucault’s work, however, goes further than merely noticing this tendency, as he characterizes power and truth as an invariant and systemic metaphysical pairing. He contends that “‘truth’ is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces, and which extend it. A ‘regime of truth’” (Foucault 1980, 133). While Foucault denies that the nexus of power and truth is one of “error, illusion alienated consciousness or ideology” (ibid.), he does not acknowledge a difference between modest truth claims that are motivated by a spirit of free inquiry and transcendental Truth claims about things in themselves. The latter reify, while the former do not. When modest truth claims are at issue, the relationship between power and truth can be severed by means of argumentation and the use of evidence on behalf of the less powerful.

The Ontological Dimension of Power

The fourth dimension of power concerns the ontology of the social subject. Foucault theorizes this in terms of the etymology of the word subject, which, he claims, has two meanings: “subject to someone else by control and dependence, and ties to his own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge. Both meanings suggest a form of power which subjugates and makes subject to” (Foucault 1982, 212).

Empirically, Foucault analyzed the creation of social subjects by disciplinary institutions such as the prison, the school, and the workhouse (Foucault 1979). Paradigmatic of these institutions was Bentham’s design for the panopticon. The inmate of the panopticon was socialized into a state of “consciousness and permanent visibility that ensures the automatic functioning of power” (ibid., 201), because the building was designed in such a way that the inmate could be observed at any time, in principle, regardless of whether there was actually, unbeknownst to the inmate, an observer in the watchtower. The inmate “is totally seen, without ever being seen” (ibid., 202). “The Panopticon works as a kind of laboratory of power” (ibid., 204), as inmates must behave as if they are constantly being observed, inducing a consciousness of self as perceived in the eyes of other. Seeing oneself from the perspective of the other makes one modify one’s behavior relative to the disciplinary norms of the prison. It is not just that the individual is repressed, “rather that the individual is carefully fabricated” by the institution (ibid., 217).

The panopticon is not only an architectural device; it is a metaphor for a process of governing, “governmentality”(Dean 2010). In the same period in which the panopticon was conceived, a vast bureaucratic machine of “hierarchical surveillance, continuous registration, perpetual assessment and classification” was created (Foucault 1979, 220)—based on a body of knowledge about how to normalize the subject through discipline.

Again, Foucault’s account suffers from one-sidedness. This kind of overt discipline is only part of a much wider process of the formation of social subjects. Seen from this vantage point, subjectivity is a source of agency, not merely a source of domination.

One can see this in theoretical terms by asking: Where does disciplinary power come from? The answer, in line with Foucault’s injunction not to theorize in terms of a center of power, cannot be power elites or social forces enacting their own telos. From a sociological perspective, then, we need to explore the active agency of social subjects who embrace discipline in order to realize certain strategic objectives rather than simply seeing these actors as the effects of power or structure. Indeed, while Foucault insists that there is no center of power, it is striking that all the institutions that he describes are state institutions. Contrary to his rhetoric, his works create a sense of an all-encompassing state beyond the visible state—a thing-in-itself center that disciplines society by creating docile subjects.

An alternative account that does not suffer from this problem is found in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Weber argued that there is an elective affinity between the self-discipline of Puritan Protestants and the spirit of capitalism. To summarize: the spirit of capitalism includes the capacity to work hard, the disposition to rationally plan the future of one's work along the measure of linear time, and the goal of reinvesting the profits of labor in capital rather than using them for consumption. Calvinism unintentionally produced social subjects who faced an omnipotent, judgmental, and unpredictable God alone, bereft of magical help from the clergy, who had, under Catholicism, instilled a sense of control over one’s fate. There was an “extreme inhumanity” in the Protestant doctrine, which resulted in “a feeling of unprecedented inner loneliness of the single individual” (Weber [1905] 1976, 104). However, this ontological insecurity was relieved when Calvinists interpreted worldly success as a sign of their election—encouraging them to work tirelessly to become economically successful. Inadvertently, then, ontological insecurity led to a drive for self-discipline and the avoidance of pleasure.

Protestant ontological insecurity is analogous to the ontological insecurity of subjects who constantly feel they may at any time be observed in the panopticon. However, Weber’s account of ontological insecurity does not blame it, tacitly, on a conspiracy by state actors or a metaphysical force of power. It is an unintended consequence of the actions taken by agents who were attempting to achieve the gift of salvation from a God whom they socially constructed as terrifyingly omnipotent and judgmental. The radical transformation of the being-in-the-world of the social subject, achieved through Calvinist self-discipline, did not occur because an outside agent subjectified the social subject as an object of domination.

Weber argues that the God-fearing subject was constantly seeking signs of election, which involved a constant measuring of self relative to others. Those who consider themselves God’s elect simultaneously consider themselves superior to the fallen. One may put this in Bourdieusian (1989) terms by saying that part of the attraction of disciplinarian religious faiths, in all their monotheistic forms, is a sense of status superiority, distinction, or social capital. Self-discipline and the self-denial it enables confer social capital upon the subject.

This is in distinct contrast to Foucault’s contention that modern power secularizes the old Christian image of pastoral power (Foucault 1982, 213-14; Dean 2013, 153). For Foucault, the shepherd guides the sheep, even now. However, sheep have no agency; the image is too top-down. To generalize beyond the Protestant Reformation, righteous Christians, Muslims, and Jews are active agents who constantly prove their social status to other members of their religious community by demonstrating their great propensity for self-discipline. Hence the social capital, and consequent authority capital, of prophets and saints who claim to put no value in material things, who do not require sexual gratification, and who limit themselves to Spartan diets (in some instances, claiming not to require food at all). For the followers of these disciplined sages, strict diets that avoid even readily available foods (Mennell 1987), mandatory fasting, the prohibition of comfortable clothing, and the avoidance of erotic pleasures confer social distinction and thus social capital.² As we shall see, the same applies to modern social subjects competing within contemporary capitalism.

Subject positions are not simply imposed: they confer social meaning on our lives. This has implications for resistance. The idea that one’s subject position, hence sense of self, is a social construction that could be otherwise and is “merely” a reflection of culture undermines social ontological security. Conversely, the reification of social structure by either theological or secular Truth claims creates ontological security. This is why nondemocratic political authority figures who reify by appealing to God or, in secular variants, the nation, historical destiny, or “the people” are often perceived as attractive. They are understood as giving meaning to life by restoring ontological security. Likewise, the natural assumption that there is a commonsensical normative order of things is threatened by a conception of freedom that suggests the self can be constructed entirely differently. Thus, if adopted as a general principle of social mobilization, Foucault’s injunction to “refuse what we are” (Foucault 1982, 216) would undermine ontological security. It is true that social subjects are capable of self-critique of the subject positions into which they have been socialized. But we must recognize that self-critique will always be limited and entails significant psychological costs that will make it a slow and incremental process. Often such self-critique will take the form of subtly moving from subject position to subject position (as there is no view from nowhere), reflecting on inconsistencies between subject positions. This change of self can be characterized as reflective equilibrium between subject positions.

Power, Discipline, and Modernity

Like The Protestant Ethic, Norbert Elias’s The Civilizing Process (1995) is a sociological account of how modernity is associated with a growth of self-discipline. Elias argues that the process of internalizing restraint (psychogenesis) associated with modernity was linked to a sociological (sociogenic) process of transformation of power structures. In the feudal period power was dispersed, and the psychological disposition appropriate to that social order was one of fight or flight, while the psychological disposition pertinent to a complex modern society involves self-restraint and forward planning. The contrast between these two social ontologies is best illustrated by the contrast between a twelfth-century highway and a modern one (Elias 1995, 446). In the twelfth century, the sight of a distant rider on a highway prompts the choice of getting ready for a fight or riding off the road to avoid that possibility. In contrast, on a modern road the sight of traffic junctions ahead prompts the decision to forward plan (make sure you are in the appropriate lane) while exercising the self-restraint to keep up with the flow of traffic. The social ontology has changed from basically threatening to basically safe, yet coupled with demandingly complex self-control.

Central to the process that made this transformation possible, according to Elias, was the movement from societies where power was dispersed, as in feudalism, to centralized court societies. In early-modern court societies, the aristocracy found itself in direct competition with the bourgeoisie for influence. In order to distinguish themselves from the bourgeois, who had “mere” money, aristocrats developed more complex manners, as a form of what Bourdieu (1989, 161) would call “distinction.” The bourgeois, as active agents, learned the manners of the aristocrats, who in turn actively tried to keep ahead by adding more nuance to their manners. Thus, a competition for status developed based around self-discipline.

In terms of self-reflection, the person at court was in an analogous position to the prisoner in a panopticon. The key to success was the capacity to see oneself through the eyes of the other—in this case, not just the king but other aristocrats and successful bourgeois, who were on the lookout for social capital. However, while in Foucault’s account, seeing self in the eyes of other constitutes internalized domination, in Elias’s account, social subjects realize agency through self-restraint derived from the pursuit of social capital.

During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the manners of court society became widely generalized. All classes joined in the race for distinction. The process continues in our time. The ability to “network,” for example, presupposes subjects who are acutely aware of how to tailor their behavior to gain status and social capital within the complex settings of their careers. Young academics at an international conference, busily getting to know those regarded as authorities in their field, require constant self-restraint and self-monitoring: they must choose how to present the self to the other: what to say, even how to dress in order gain power-authority within a world of complex interdependence. In this example the dynamic of self-discipline comes from the academic pursuit of agency and power, not top-down panoptical domination.

Foucault presents discipline as opposed to freedom. In reality, in complex interdependent societies, self-discipline is the vehicle of socially constrained freedom. In the modern workplace, where technology, information, and best practices change constantly, success depends upon a lifetime preoccupation with gaining diplomas, certificates, and degrees. These serve as educational capital that is rewarded by promotion in the workplace. The constantly deferred gratification that this requires stems from the agency of the subject in pursuit of authority power. Of course, there is a bureaucratic disciplinary matrix adjudicating these pursuits. Nevertheless, the Foucauldian image of pastoral power does not capture the resulting dynamic. For all the bureaucratization of the modern world, its subjects are not dupes of higher powers. Nor is internalized self-discipline necessarily unjust.

Many university staff are now encouraged or required to take the Harvard Implicit Association Test (IAT) (Harvard 2022), which aims to measure precisely, through timed pauses, the capacity of social actors to bracket inessential qualities of the other. For instance, if it takes someone longer to associate women and leadership than men and leadership, this is interpreted as cognitive bias. Yet social actors are not born with the capacity to avoid this bias: it is a skill acquired through mental self-discipline. While the IAT is administered bureaucratically, many staff voluntarily take the test (myself included) to prove how well they can do at this bracketing, which has become a source of both cultural capital and self-worth. In this instance, however, self-discipline is not only a path to power and authority but to justice and fairness—a possibility that entirely escaped Foucault.

*  *  *

In sum, actors act because they want to do something; they want to exercise power-to, which often entails power-over others (the first dimension of power). The most subtle and theoretically interesting way to do this is to use authority as a resource. However, such authority is always structured (the second dimension). In this theorization, structural constraint is not the top-down force exerted by a power elite or by power itself. Structural constraint works through the reaction of others to one’s own actions.

This theorization of constraint allows us to understand the difference between deep conflict, where structural collaboration does not take place, and shallower conflict, where exercises of power-over take place within a shared structural context. Whether to collaborate or to contest the reproduction of social structure requires social knowledge, which brings us to the third dimension of power. Collaboration presupposes extensive practical knowledge, which enables social actors to go on in social life. While practical knowledge is usually tacit, subjects are capable of social critique, either by articulating their practical knowledge into discursive form or by recognizing the resonance, relative to their practical knowledge, of such articulations by others.

The tacit nature of practical knowledge suggests that social conventions are part of the natural order of things, which reinforces domination. However, once made discursive, structures appear socially constructed, unnatural. Against this critique, other social actors will attempt to reify social knowledge, arguing (in effect) that certain conventions are not “mere” social constructions. However, this strategic use of Truth in favor of unquestioned authority is not intrinsic to fallible truth claims, which are not primarily claims to power-over as domination.

Social actors are themselves carriers of social structures through their dispositions and social ontology. In every society, there is a kind of being-in-the-world that confers ontological security and cultural capital. Social actors are fundamentally interactive beings, which necessitates the capacity to see the self from the perspective of others. Self-discipline for the purposes of impression management (Goffman 1971) is not some subtle ruse of panoptical governmentality; it is the stuff of competent social agency. In the modern world, this self-discipline involves massive forward planning and delayed gratification, which confer agency through authority and are not solely the effects of domination, contrary to the impression created by Foucault.

Notes

1 Readers who wish to understand the dimensions of power in depth, without the Foucauldian emphasis, might consult Haugaard 2020.

2 Suad Aldarra (2022, 70) describes how, during her childhood in Saudi Arabia, her peers competed to be the most disciplined adherents to local cultural-cum-religious precepts, conferring status distinction and social on themselves. She also relates that when, after moving the Europe, she discovered that many of the everyday constraints she had competed to observe in Saudi Arabia were “just a cultural habit” (ibid., 194), she was deeply unsettled.