These are relationships of force. The reaction to them is an attempt to check the new force. In other words, the entire structure of the army is reformed. Through adjustments of this sort, the history of Europe proceeds, and armies become something different. Remember the lament of Ariosto’s paladins, complaining of the blindness of the harquebus? But now the new relationships of force, in reciprocally checking one another and in adjusting, create a new ideology of armed forces and produce new symbolic arrangements. Here Howard’s book seems to proceed inversely from Duby’s: from force, indirectly, to the new structures of power, whereas the other went from formulation of the images of power to the relations of new forces and old that underlay the images.
But if we don’t reflect enough on this opposition, we fall into forms of political childishness. We do not say to a force: “No, I won’t obey you”; we develop techniques of checking it. But we don’t react to a relationship of power with a mere and immediate act of force. Power is far more subtle and exploits a far more widespread consensus, and heals the wound received at that point, always and necessarily marginal.
This is why we are usually fascinated by the great revolutions; to posterity they seem a sole act of force, which, applied at an apparently insignificant point, turns the whole axis of a power situation: the taking of the Bastille, the attack on the Winter Palace, the coup at the Moncada barracks. . . . And this is why the aspiring revolutionary is eager to repeat exemplary acts of this kind, and is amazed when they don’t succeed. The fact is that the “historical” act of force was never an act of force, but a symbolic gesture, a theatrical finale that sanctioned, in a fashion also scenically pregnant, a crisis in power relationships that had been spreading, in a grass-roots way, for a long time. And without which the pseudo-act of force would again be a mere act of force, without symbolic power, destined to become adjusted in a little local parallelogram.
But how can a power, composed of a consensus network, disintegrate? This is the question Foucault asks, also in The History of Sexuality. “Should it be said that one is always
’inside’ power, that there is no ’escaping’ it, that there is no absolute outside where it is concerned, because one is subject to the law in any case?” If you think about it, this is Barthes’s assertion when he says that we can never escape from language. Foucault’s answer is:
This would be to misunderstand the strictly relational character of power relationships. Their existence depends on a multiplicity of points of resistance: These play the role of adversary, target, support, or handle. . . . Hence there is no single locus of all rebellions, no pure law of the revolutionary. Instead there is a plurality of resistances, each of them a special case: resistances that are possible, necessary, improbable; others that are spontaneous, savage, solitary, concerted, rampant, or violent; still others that are quick to compromise, interested, or sacrificial. . . .
The points, knots, or focuses of resistance are spread over time and space at varying densities, at times mobilizing groups or individuals in a definitive way, inflaming certain points of the body, certain moments in life, certain types of behavior. . . . But more often one is dealing with mobile and transitory points of resistance, producing cleavages in a society that shift about, fracturing unities and effecting regroupings, furrowing across individuals themselves, cutting them up and remolding them. . . .*
In this sense power, in which we are, sees the crumbling of its fundamental consensus rise from its own inner being. What I want to point out most, within the limitations of this essay, is the homology between these continuous processes of breakdown described (in a fairly allusive form) by Foucault and the function Barthes assigns to literature inside the system of linguistic power. Which would lead us perhaps also to make some reflections on a certain aestheticism in Foucault’s view, just as he (compare the 1977 interview in the appendix of the volume just mentioned) declares himself opposed to the end of the writer’s activity and to the theorization of writing as eversive activity. Or to wonder if Barthes (when he says that it is a possibility open also to the scientist or to the historian) is not making literature an allegory of the relationships of resistance and criticism of power in the wider context of social life.
What seems clear is that this technique of opposition to power, always from within and widespread, has nothing to do with the techniques of opposition to force, which are always external, and specific. Oppositions to force always obtain an immediate reply, like the clash of two billiard balls; those against power always obtain indirect replies. We will venture an allegory, something like a good old American film of the ’30’s. In Chinatown a gang sets up a laundry racket. Acts of force. They come in, ask for money, and if the laundry doesn’t fork over, they smash the place up. The proprietor of the laundry can oppose force with force: He punches a gangster in the face. The result is immediate. The gangster has to exercise greater force the next day. This game of forces can lead to some changes in the restriction of the neighborhood life: iron bars on the laundry doors, alarm systems.
But gradually the inhabitants of Chinatown adjust to the atmosphere: The restaurants close earlier, the inhabitants stay home after dark, other storeowners agree that it’s more reasonable to pay up than be harassed. . . . A relationship of legitimization of the gangsters’ power has been established, and everyone collaborates, including those who would prefer a different system. Now the gangsters’ power is beginning to be based on symbolic relationships of obedience, in which the obedient are as responsible as the obeyed. In a way, each finds something in it to his own advantage.
The first breakdown of the consensus could come from a group of young people who decide to organize a celebration every evening with firecrackers and paper dragons. As an act of force it could perhaps hinder the passage or the flight of the gangsters, but as far as that goes the action is minimal. As an aspect of resistance to power, the celebration introduces an element of self-confidence, which acts to disrupt the consensus dictated by fear. Its results cannot be immediate; and, furthermore, there can be no result unless other marginal attitudes correspond to the celebration, other ways of declaring, “Count me out.” In our film it could be the courageous act of a local reporter. But the disrupting process could also abort. The tactics would have to be immediately denied, if the racket system were capable of absorbing them into the local folklore. . . . We will stop the allegory here before, being a movie, it obliges us to find a happy ending.
I don’t know whether this festivity with the paper dragon is an allegory of literature according to Barthes or whether Barthes’s literature and this festivity are allegories of the Foucaultian crises of the systems of power. Also because at this point a new suspicion arises: To what degree does Barthes’s given language obey mechanisms homologous to the systems of power described by Foucault?
Let us posit then a given language as a system of rules: not only grammatical ones, but also those that today are called pragmatic. For example, the conversational rule that a question must be answered in a pertinent way, and whoever breaks this rule is judged, depending on the situation, rude, silly, provoking; or else it is assumed he is hinting at something else he doesn’t want to say. Literature that cheats with the given language is presented as an activity that breaks down the rules and imposes others: temporary, valid in just one instance and for one current; and especially, valid in the context of the literary laboratory.
This means that Ionesco cheats with the given language, making his characters speak the way they do in The Bald Soprano, for example. But if in a social relationship everyone spoke like the bald prima donna, society would break down. Mind you, there would not be a linguistic revolution, because revolution involves an upset of power relationships; a universe that talks like Ionesco wouldn’t upset anything, it would establish a kind of nth degree (the opposite of zero, an indefinite number) of behavior. It would no longer be possible even to buy bread from the baker.
How does the given language defend itself against this risk?
Barthes tells us, reconstructing a power situation faced by its own violation, absorbing it (the anacoluthon of the artist becomes common norm). As for society, it defends the given language by reciting the literature, which questions the given language’s position, in certain set places. Thus it happens that there is never any revolution in a language: Either it is a pretense of revolution, on the stage, where all is licit, and then you go home speaking in a normal way; or else it is an infinitesimal movement of continuous reform. Aestheticism consists of believing that life is art and art, life, confusing the areas. Deceiving oneself.
The given language, therefore, is not a scenario of power, in Foucault’s sense. Very
