Through the differentiation, from one work to the next, of the relations between power and learning, between practices of discourse and practices of nondiscourse, in Foucault a notion of power is clearly outlined that has at least two characteristics of interest to us here: First of all, power is not only repression and prohibition, it is also incitement to discourse and production of knowledge; in the second place, as Barthes also indicates, power is not single, but is massive; it is not a oneway process between an entity that commands and its subjects.
In short this power is exercised rather than possessed; it is not the “privilege,” acquired or preserved, of the dominant class, but the overall effect of its strategic positions—an effect that is manifested and sometimes extended by the position of those who are dominated. Furthermore, this power is not exercised simply as an obligation or a prohibition on those who “do not have it”; it invests them, is transmitted by them and through them; it exerts pressure upon them, just as they themselves, in their struggle against it, resist the grip it has on them.*
Further still:
By power, I do not mean “Power” as a group of institutions and mechanisms that ensure the subservience of the citizens of a given state. . . . It seems to me that power must be understood in the first instance as the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organization; as the process which, through ceaseless struggles and confrontations, transforms, strengthens, or reverses them; as the support which these force relations find in one another, thus forming a chain or a system, or on the contrary, the disjunctions and contradictions which isolate them from one another; and lastly, as the strategies in which they take effect, whose general design or institutional crystallization is embodied in the state apparatus, in the formulation of the law, in the various social hegemonies.
Power must be looked for not in one sovereign center but in the moving substrate of force relations which, by virtue of their inequality, constantly engentler states of power, but the latter are always local and unstable. . . . Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything but because it comes from everywhere. . . . Power comes from below. . . . There is no binary and all-encompassing opposition between rulers and ruled at the root of power relations, and serving as a general matrix. . . . One must suppose rather that the manifold relations of force that take shape and come into play in the machinery of production, in families, in limited groups and institutions, are the basis for wide-ranging effects of cleavage that run through the social body as a whole.*
Now this image of power closely recalls the idea of the system that linguists call the given language. The given language is, true, coercive (it forbids me to say “I are him,” under pain of being incomprehensible), but its coercion doesn’t derive from an individual decision, or from some center that sends out rules in all directions: It is a social product, it originates as a constrictive apparatus precisely through general assent. Each individual is reluctant to have to observe the rules of grammar but consents and demands that others observe them because he finds his own advantage in such observance.
I’m not sure we can say that a given language is a device of power (even if, because of its systematic nature, it is a constituent of knowledge), but it is surely a model of power. We could also say that, being the semiotic apparatus par excellence or (as the Russian semioticians express it) the primary modelizing system, it is the model of those other semiotic systems that in the various cultures are established as devices of power, and of knowledge (secondary modelizing systems).
In this sense, therefore, Barthes is right in defining the given language as something connected with power, but he is wrong in then drawing two conclusions: that the given language is therefore fascist, and that it is the object in which power is inscribed, its threatening epiphany, in other words.
We can immediately liquidate the first, very clear error: If power is as Foucault defined it, and if the characteristics of power are found in the given language, to say that the given language is therefore fascist is more than a wisecrack, it is an invitation to confusion. Because fascism then, being everywhere, in every power situation, and in every given language, since the beginning of time, would no longer be anywhere. If the human condition is placed under the sign of fascism, all are fascists and no one is a fascist any longer. Whence we see how dangerous demagogical arguments are, which we find used abundantly in everyday journalism, and without Barthes’s refinement, for he at least knows he is speaking in paradoxes and using them for rhetorical ends.
The second misunderstanding seems to me more subtle: The given language is not that in which power is inscribed. Frankly, I have never understood the French or frenchified affectation of inscribing everything and seeing everything as if inscribed: To put it simply, I’m not quite clear as to what inscribing means.
It seems to me one of those expressions that resolve in an authoritative manner problems that nobody knows how to define otherwise. But even if we accept this expression as valid, I would say that the given language is the device through which power is inscribed where it establishes itself. I would like to make myself clearer, and for this reason I refer to the recent study of Georges Duby on the theory of the three orders.* Duby starts out with the Estates General, at the dawn of the French Revolution: Clergy, Nobility, and Third Estate. And he asks where this theory (and ideology) of the three estates came from.
And he finds it in very ancient Carolingian ecclesiastical texts, where the people of God is referred to as being divided into three orders, or parties, or levels: those who pray, those who fight, and those who work. Another metaphor in circulation during the Middle Ages was that of the flock: There are the shepherds, the sheepdogs, and the sheep. In other words, according to the traditional interpretation of this triple division, there is the clergy, which directs society spiritually, there are the soldiers who protect it, and there are the people, who support both. It is fairly simple, and you have only to think of the investiture conflict and the struggle between papacy and empire that we studied in school, to understand what is being discussed.
But Duby goes beyond the banal interpretation. In more than four hundred exceptionally closely argued pages, tracing the vicissitudes of this idea of the Carolingian period at the end of the twelfth century (and only in France), he discovers that this model of the ordering of society is never repeated exactly. It reappears often, but with the terms arranged differently; sometimes, instead of a triangular form, it takes on a four-point shape; the words chosen to designate this party or that are changed, sometimes milites are spoken of, sometimes they are called pugnatores, sometimes cavaliers; sometimes, instead of clergy, the word is monks; sometimes they speak of farmers, sometimes simply of workers, sometimes of merchants.
The fact is that over a period of three centuries numerous evolutions of European society took place, and different alliances came into play: between the urban clergy and the feudal lords, to oppress the populace; between clergy and populace to escape the pressure of the knights; between monks and feudal lords against the urban clergy; between urban clergy and national monarchies; between national monarchies and great monastic orders. . . .
The list could continue to infinity. To us Duby’s book is like what a study of the relations between the Christian Democrats, the United States, the Italian Communist Party, and the Italian Manufacturers’ Association in our century might seem to a reader in the year 3000. So you quickly realize that things are not always as clear as they look, that categorical expressions such as “opening to the left” or “economic development” take on different meanings not only as they pass from Andreotti to Craxi, but also within the confines of a Christian Democrat Party conference and in the space of two elections. Those medieval polemics which seemed so clear to us, with such well-defined party ploys, are actually very subtle. And the fact that Duby’s book is so dense, so fascinating and boring at the same time, so difficult to unravel, lacking immediately comprehensible summarizations, is almost justified, because it puts before us a flux of sticky maneuvers.
At a given moment, the Cluniac monk speaks of division among clerics, cavaliers, and peasants, but seems to stir up the specter of a four-part division, adding to the tripartite axis (which is concerned with earthly life) a binary axis that involves the supernatural life, and where the previous trio is set against the monks, who are mediators with the next world. The game is then ever so slightly altered and there is the hint of the domination that the monastic orders want to assume over the other three orders, in which the urban clergy would perform a purely vicarious function, and direct relations would be established between monasteries and feudal structure.
It happens that each of these formulas, so similar and
