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••• Foucault: Interpretive Analysis and the Social •••

A slave, therefore, is not in a power relationship, but one of physical constraint
(Foucault, 1982).
Foucault notes three types of struggle: (1) those against domination; (2) those
against exploitation; and (3) those against subjection and submission. The latter,
while rising in importance in the contemporary era, do not do so to the exclusion of
domination and exploitation as many of his followers have appeared to suggest. To
understand why particular actors enjoy more power than others, as opposed to see-
ing power as a ‘machine in which everyone is caught’ (Foucault, 1980: 156), an
account of resistance is needed. Because Foucault views freedom as part of the exer-
cise of power, he does not provide for such an account. Yet, in answer to a question
concerning ‘power as evil’, he spoke of the need to resist domination in everyday life:
‘The problem is rather to know how you are to avoid these practices – where power
cannot play and where it is not evil in itself’ (Foucault, 1991b: 18).
What makes Foucault’s overall theoretical work inspiring is how he animates and
locates problems of knowledge as ‘pieces’ of the larger contest between modernity
and its subjects. By downplaying the individual subject, Foucault shows how ‘bodies’
and ‘populations’ are sites were ‘human beings are made subjects’ by ‘power/knowl-
edge’ practices (Smart, 1983: 44). To look for a possible form of trangression in order
to change social relation, we must examine within contemporary arrangements the
possibility for it to be ‘otherwise’. We thus find, in Foucault’s later work, an insistence
upon the reversibility of discourses through ‘resistance’. Subjects of power are also
‘agents’ who can strategically mobilize disjunctures in discourses and in so doing,
open up the world of possibility in a world that seeks order through discipline and
surveillance. Now we begin to see how a situation of one-sided domination can give
way to a two-way dialogue without assuming an ‘essence’ to the other that relieves
us of the need to understand their world-view. At a time where dominance through
military power and money is such a routinized feature of global politics, what greater
urgency is there?

Conclusion

In his essay on Kant’s ‘What is Enlightenment?’ (Was ist Aufklärung?), Foucault writes
of his work as being an ‘historical ontology of ourselves’ through a critique of what
we do, say and think. He makes clear throughout the essay what this form of critique
is not: not a theory, doctrine, or body of knowledge that accumulates over time.
Instead, it is an attitude, ‘an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what
we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are
imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them’
(Foucault, 1984: 50). What is the motivation for this work? ‘How can the growth of
capabilities be disconnected from the intensification of power relations?’ (ibid.: 48).
There is no ‘gesture of rejection’ in this ethos. It moves beyond the ‘Outside-inside
alternative’ in the name of a critique that ‘consists of analyzing and reflecting upon

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