Page 198 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

POWER

Foucault’s theory of power was not based on scarcity,but plenty, and
not on fear of death but on the ‘plenitude of the possible’ (1984: 267).
He abandoned the idea of power as sovereignty. Instead, he introduced
the idea that power was ‘taking charge of life’:

Power would no longer be dealing simply with legal subjects
over whom the ultimate dominion was death, but with living
beings, and the mastery it would be able to exercise over them
would have to be applied at the level of life itself; it was the
taking charge of life, more than the threat of death, that gave
power its access even to the body.

(Foucault, 1984: 265)
The management of life required knowledge-power, not pain of death.
This kind of power was dispersed throughout the productive forces
and institutions of modernising societies; it was manifest not in
gallows and armies but in knowledge, and in the organisation and
administration of bodies. It was exercised in the techniques developed
in institutions and discourses to govern – and so make productive –
whole populations. Hence power could be seen in the minutiae of
everyday transactions, in private life, and in the technologies
mobilised to evaluate, measure, appraise, hierarchise – and so to
produce – ‘normal’ society. This was what Foucault called ‘govern-
mentality’.
Even the actions of those (including cultural critics) who sought to
oppose traditional (sovereign) power had to be understood within
these terms. For Foucault there was no ‘outside’ to power, a place from
which one could take a swing at those who ‘had’ it. But the exercise of
power in knowledge, discourse, institution, technique, administration,
management, bureaucracy, and the rest was never complete; it
generated its own resistances, and these needed to be understood for
worthwhile political contestation to occur. Politics was conducted at
the level of understanding howselves were formed and acted on
others, including intellectual selves.
In communication, cultural and media studies the Marxist and
Foucauldian conceptualisations of power have both been influential.
Marxist-derived approaches have focused on the adversarial aspect of
power: on ‘struggle’. Foucauldian approaches have focused on
knowledge, truth, discourse, self, sexuality and governmentality as
sites of power. Many commentators regard power as constitutive of

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