(More paraphrastic notes on Deleuze’s Foucault, following this post and that one. My general aim is to explore Deleuze’s relationship to the linguistic turn and to understand his account of literature.)
Power and Force
The chapter, ‘Strategies or the Non-stratified: the Thought of the Outside (Power)’ begins with a simple question, ‘What is Power?’
Foucault’s great theses on power […] develop under three headings: power is not essentially repressive (since it ‘incites, it induces, it seduces’); it is practised before it is possessed (since it is possessed only in a determinable form, that of class, and a determined form, that of State); it passes through the hands of the mastered no less than through the hands of the masters (since it passes through every related force). A profound Nietzscheanism.
What is power?, Deleuze asks, and gives us an answer that recalls his own study of Nietzsche: it is a relation between forces, ‘or rather every relation between forces is a “power relation”‘. Forces are always found in the plural, Deleuze says; each force exists in relation to other forces.
Here, we must distinguish force from violence, which acts on specific bodies whose form it destroys or changes. Force, by contrast, takes as its ‘object’ only other forces, and does not exist apart from the relation. As Foucault puts it, force is ‘an action upon an action, on existing actions, or on those which may arise in the present or future’; it is ‘a set of actions upon other actions’. The relation between forces can be expressed, Deleuze suggests, by infinitives such as to incite, to induce, to seduce, to make easy or difficult, to enlarge or limit, to make more or less probable, and so on. In each case, it is a power relation that is at issue, as it names the effect of actions upon actions.
Power has to be understood, Deleuze says, in terms of affectivity. Force is to be understood in terms of its power to affect other forces to which it is related, and to be affected by other forces in turn. Inciting, provoking, producing etc. are examples of active affects; a reactive affect is given in terms of the capacity to be incited or provoked, or in being induced to produce.
This does not mean, Deleuze emphasises, that reactive affects are merely the passive side of active forces; they are to be understood in terms of an encounter between active and reactive forces that cannot be reduced to a simple dichotomy. Nevertheless, Deleuze does allow that spontaneity and receptivity, those Kantian terms he drew upon in his previous chapter, can be used to understand how every field of forces distributes those forces in terms of their relations, respectively to affect and to be affected.
For Deleuze, ‘the power to be affected is like a matter of force, and the power to affect is like a function of force’. This function is not formalised, and can be described as ‘pure’ insofar as it remains independent of the particular forms into which it is organised, as well as the aims it might be made to serve or the means upon which it would draw.
The Diagram
How should we understand the distribution of the power to affect and to be affected within a particular context?
This is best understood by way of an example. Deleuze explains that the role of the Panopticon in Discipline and Punish exists as a ‘pure function’, that of ‘imposing a particular taste or conduct on a multiplicity of particular individuals, provided simply that the multiplicity is small in number and the space limited and confined’.
Foucault is not focused upon the forms that determine the ends and means of this function, e.g. education, care, punishment, production. Nor is he interested in particular by the formed substances who are acted upon by the function, e.g, schoolchildren, the sick, prisoners, workers. Rather, Foucault points to the way in which the Panopticon ‘traverses all these forms and is applied to all these substances: it is this sense that a category of power exists, as a pure, disciplinary function’.
Foucault calls this the diagram – a function that must be understood in terms of its specific use, and as it is exercised over a specified substance. The diagram names the distribution of the power to affect and the power to be affected, understood as the function of force as it is found ‘beneath’, so to speak, a particular historical formation. It concerns the pure or abstract physics of action that operates in the context of a disciplinary function as it mixes with the ‘unformed pure matter’ that it acts upon. In each case, purity must be understood as a determination unique to a particular diagram (in this case, the panopticon) and the medium in which it operates.
Strategies
What is the relationship between knowledge and power as we find it in Foucault?, Deleuze asks. Power concerns forces, and knowledge forms – those formed matters (substances) and formalised functions that are given in terms of the more general formal functions of seeing and speaking. Power is given in a diagram as it mixes pure functions and pure matter; it is flexible. Knowledge is stratified and allows itself to be fixed in an archive; it is given a rigid segmentarity.
Power can be understood to pass though particular forces – as Deleuze presents it, through the particular points which on each occasion mark the application of a force, the action or reaction of a force in relation to others. As such, the diagram can therefore be understood to transmit or distribute particular features; power relations move from one point to another rather than emanating from a single central point.
These relations are always local, even if they are not localisable at a given moment; they are always mobile, shifting from point to point, darting suddenly within a complex field of forces. Marking inflections and resistances, power relations twist and turn without reference to a unitary sovereignty.
It is as such, for Deleuze, they can be understood in terms of what he calls a strategy (an anonymous cluster of strategies). Since power differs from knowledge as outlined, strategies must be understood to differ from stratifications, evading the stabilised forms of the seeable and the sayable; they are not known.
Then the practice of power cannot be reduced to knowledge. Power relations involve a different type of relations, to which we can attend only by that microphysics that can explore them in their irreducibility. Here, the prefix ‘micro-‘ must be understood as it refers to this specific domain – to what Deleuze calls ‘mobile and nonlocalisable connections’, rather than to a microscopic view of seeable and sayable forms.
At the same time, power and knowledge are not simply external to one another; they are also co-implicated in relations of presuppostion and capture. The human sciences are inseparable, as Foucault has shown on many occasions, from the power relations that are their condition of possiblity; the form of knowledge they propose depend upon a diagram of forces. In the case of prison in a disciplinary society, what matters is the diagram of the Panopticon that reveals itself in the prison, as it does in other institutions.
Institutions and Integration
As such, we must not understand power monolithically. The features in question are not integrated in a single seamless whole; there is, Deleuze writes, ‘a multiplicity of local and partial integrations’, each of which must be understood in terms of its ‘affinity’ with relations or points. Institutions themselves – Deleuze gives as examples the State, but also the Family, Religion, Production, the Marketplace – and even, Art and Morality each depend upon integrating factors, upon ‘agents of stratification’.
Lacking essence or interiority, institutions are practices that locally ‘fix’ power, presupposing its relations. As such, the source of power does not lie in the State or in Morality; power merely lends itself to a local and specific determination, which may reproduce itself across the social field. As Deleuze succinctly puts it, ‘There is no State, only state control, and the same holds for all other cases’. Granted, there are State-forms in particular historical formations that have captured power relations, but this is only because something analogous to ‘continual state control’ was already produced in the realms of education, law, the economy, the family and in sexual domains.
The State, in this case, implies the power relations whose source it appears it is. The function of governmentality precedes the State, so long as government is understood as ‘the power to affect in all its aspects’ – the govenment of children, criminals, the sick, families, etc. Molecular or microphysical relations precede and give rise to particular molar agencies – the sovereign or the law; the father; money, gold or the dollar; God; sex and so on.
Thus in The History of Sexuality, Foucault explores Law and Sex, showing how desire is normalised by the hystericisation of sexuality. But beneath these molar agencies, there is that molecular sexuality, those thousand tiny sexes that precede and outstrip the integration of particular sexes. Forms of knowledge [savoir] are found at the level of molar agencies, e.g., the ‘scientia sexualis‘ Foucault details.
How, though, does an institution effect integration?
Foucault claims an institution has two poles or elements – apparatuses and rules. Deleuze paraphrases this remark by reintroducing his distinction between seeing and saying – an institution, he says, organises visibilities and systems of statements. The integration effected by a system operates by actualising these elements in their divergency.
It operates as, in his words, ‘a system of formal differentiation’, distributing a form of receptivity that constitutes the visible element, and a form of spontaneity that constitutes the articulable element. The forms in question are derived from the two basic aspects of affect or force – the receptivity of the ability to be affected and the spontaneity of power’s ability to affect, but do not coincide with them.
The power relation, says Deleuze,
establishes contact between unformed matter (receptivity) and unformalised functions (spontaneity). On the other hand relations of knowledge, on each side, deal with formed substances and formalised functions by using the receptive kind of visible element, or the spontaneous kind of articulable element.
This recalls discussion in the previous chapter. Visibilities reveal formed substances, and the statement reveals formalised or finalised functions. This is why we can distinguish the affective categories of power – inciting, provoking, etc. from the formal categories of knowledge – educating, punishing, etc. Formal categories pass through saying and speaking in order to actualise affective categories; knowledge actualises particular constellations of power.
In this way, a particular institution can integrate power-relations as it constitutes particular forms of knowledge. Each time, the power relations are actualised, modified and redistributed as part of the production (or reproduction, considered from the perspective of the social field) of visibilities and statements that allow them to appear as political, legalistic, economic, educational etc.
The mechanism of integration and actualisation must be understood precisely. In The Archeaology of Knowledge, Foucault discusses the ‘regularity’ of a statement as a curve that joins, as on a graph, individual points, producing a rule. These points were produced by particular relations between forces; the curve that connects them is different to them, since the points were outside the statement. Granted, the statement may resemble them – the statement QWERTY resembles the keys on the typewriter, but there is a vital difference between them.
In the case of visibilities, however, there is a difference – they are external to the statement, but are not its outside. Visibilities do have a relationship to the outside which they actualise, but they do so in a different way to statements.
Statements, then integrate into language the intensity of affects, understood as the relations between forces. As curves, they organise particular features of power, potentiailities. Visibilities organise the same features, the same differential relations between forces, into light. Visiblities fix relations between forces, regularising particular points, and, to use a favourite term of Foucault, constitute scenes that, Deleuze explains, ‘are to the visible element what a statement is to the sayable or readable’.
In summary, the scene (or the description-scene, as Deleuze will call it) is the regulation that belongs to visibilities, and the statement that which belongs to sayabilities. The diagram of forces gives itself in description scenes and in statement-curves. The seeable and the sayable are thus thoroughly intertwined. Visibilities entail statements and vice versa, even as they cannot be confused with one another.
An Aside on Literature
This is what reveals itself, Deleuze says, in literature. ‘[S]trictly literary analysis, even as its very heart, is likely to rediscover the difference between scenes and curves: descriptions may be verbal, but they are none the less different from statements’. He then writes a brief, dazzling passage on Faulkner, describing the ‘fantastic curves’ statements trace in his work as they pass through ‘discursive objects’ and ‘mobile subject-positions’; at the same time, says Deleuze, these descriptions
conjure up a host of scenes which create reflections, flashes, shimmerings, visibilities varying according to the time and the season, which distribute the descriptions in a light-being, a reunion of all the light to which Faulkner holds the secret (Faulkner, literature’s greatest ‘luminist’).
How should we understand these lines? It is best to look elsewhere in Deleuze’s oeuvre, to his collection Critique and Clinic, where Deleuze raises the question of the outside of language. Here, he refers to the limit of language, the outside, in a useful analogy from Bogue, being analogous to the outer surface of a sphere.
The outside is in contact with the non-linguistic, allowing them to communicate along the sphere’s surface. As such, the limit can be considered as a kind of membrane, as a ‘permeable limit common to inside and outside’. In Deleuze’s own writings on literature, notably his essays on T.E. Lawrence and Beckett, the limit of language is presented in terms of nonlinguistic visions and auditions, which are rendered possible through language. I will return to this account in much more detail on another occasion.
The Outside, the Emergence of Forces
What is the relationship between the seeable and the sayable, between scenes and curves?
The seeable and the sayable constitute two forms of knowledge that are then integrated and thereby enter into an indirect relation with one another. There remains a divide between them that is analogous to the Kantian schematism – spontaneity and receptivity remain forms irreducible to one another with respect to the forces they organise. Deleuze expresses this by borrowing from Blanchot the idea of a relation without relation – a ‘non-relation’ that exists between statements and visibilities, curves and scenes.
(Note that the ‘relation without relation’, which Blanchot develops in conversation with Levinas, is put to an entirely different use by Deleuze.)
The two forms, the visible and the articulable, as strata or historical formations, are different to the microphysics of power, which operates outside of strata. Note, however, this is not a transcendence or a beyond of the strata – Foucault is not pointing us to what lies outside strata, transcending their sphere so to speak, but to what forms the outside of strata, the permeable surface of the sphere, as it brings into contact inside and outside. As such, relations between forces remain historical; their aprioricity does not place them outside history, but as the outside of history. Each historical formation refers back to the temporary set of relations of the diagram of forces that is its outside.
Diagrams are in a perpetual state of turbulence even as must also be considered as a priori elements. Famously, Foucault will attempt to lay bare the diagrams that underlie particular historical forms of society through the account of the operation of particular categories of power as they are marshalled to produce particular effects – controlling the body, say, or the population in our time. Older, sovereign socieities saw those categories working in a different sense – as bestowing life or death, rather than administering it, and applying levying in actions and products.
But diagrams are less stable than this suggest; they can also be understood as communicating above, below or between particular strata. Deleuze gives the example of a Napoleonic diagram between sovereign society and disciplinary society. Doubling history – the official account of history – Deleuze says, ‘there is an emergence of forces’. Fixed and stabilised by a stratified formation, the diagram is nevertheless outside of the strata, and therefore grants the chance of mutation.
The Thought From Outside
The outside, as it is temporarily localised in a diagram, and then fixed in particular strata, directly concerns force. As Deleuze writes, ‘It is always from the outside that a force confers on others or receives from others the variable position to be found only a particular distance or in a particular relation’. Distinct from the history of forms is the emergence of forces as they operate as the outside.
Here, Deleuze takes us back to the theme of Foucault’s essay on Blanchot. Seeing and speaking are forms of exteriority, for Foucault, says Deleuze, and can be said to constitute forms of thinking. However, they are to be distinguished from the thought of or from the outside, which occurs in the interstice between them, in the disjunction, the ‘non-relation’ between seeing and speaking.
Thought pertains to the set of relations of forces that is the diagram. It is an attempt to reach that outside which comprises a diagram, and hence the possibility of mutation. Thinking in this way is difficult, since it is not merely the exercise of an innate faculty. Rather, thinking must become thought as it attends to the intrusion of the outside into the interval between the visible and the articulable.
What does it mean to think the outside? Take Foucault’s famous claim that man is a face drawn in the sand between two tides. Deleuze explains this claim as follows: the human being is a composition, a compound, that appears with the collapse of the classical past, and the future, already here, in which what has been called man enters into new compositions – perhaps with information technology, with silicon-based man-machine systems.
But the thought from outside has repercussions which are not simply theoretical. It also brings with it the possibility of resistance, to the extent that it is in contact with what is always broader in possibilities that the strata in which the human being is caught. It is in these terms that we might, Deleuze suggests, understand Foucault’s own political activism.
As such, the thought from outside bears witness to Spinoza’s famous claim that there is no telling what a human being might become. At the end of the chapter, Deleuze invokes Nietzsche’s superman, commenting that it is no more than the affirmation that ‘it is in man himself that we must liberate life, since man himself is a form of imprisonment for man’.
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