These relationships of strength, however, would remain purely aleatory if they were not disciplined by a power structure in which everyone is consentient and prepared to recognize himself as part of that structure. To this end, there intervenes rhetoric, the ordering and modelizing function of language, which with infinitesimal shifts of accent legitimizes certain relationships of strength and criminalizes others. Ideology takes shape: The power born from it becomes truly a network of consensus, beginning from below, because the relationships of strength have been transformed into symbolic relationships.
At this point in my reading of texts so different, an opposition between power and strength is outlined, an opposition that seems to me totally erased in the talk we hear every day now, in the school, the factory, the ghetto, about power. As we know, since ’68 criticism of power and protest against it have greatly deteriorated, because they have become mass-produced. An inevitable process and we will not repeat (with a fine reactionary stance) that when a concept arrives within everyone’s grasp it crumbles, and so it should have remained the property of a few. On the contrary, it is precisely because it had to be within everyone’s grasp, though in the process it would risk crumbling, that the criticism of its degenerations becomes important.
So then, in mass political discussion of power there have been two ambiguous phases: the first, ingenuous, in which power had a center (the System, like an evil boss with a moustache who, at the keyboard of a maleficent computer, taps out the perdition of the working class). This idea has been sufficiently criticized, and Foucault’s notion of power intervenes, in fact, to show its anthropomorphic naïveté. A trace of this revision of the concept can be found even in the internal contradictions of various terrorist groups: from those who want to strike at the “heart” of the state to those who, on the contrary, unravel the strands of power at its edge, in the points I would call “Foucaultian,” where the prison guard, the petty merchant, the foreman are engaged.
But the second phase remains more equivocal; here strength and power are all too easily confused. I speak of “strength” instead of causality, which would come to me more spontaneously, for reasons that we will see; but we can begin at once with a fairly ingenuous notion of causality. There are things that cause other things: The stroke of lightning burns the tree; the male member inseminates the female uterus.
These relationships are not reversible: The tree does not burn the stroke of lightning, and woman does not inseminate man. There are, on the other hand, relationships where somebody makes somebody else do things because of a symbolic relationship: The man decides that in the home the woman washes the dishes; the Inquisition decides that heretics will be burned at the stake and assumes the right to define heresy. These relationships are based on a strategy of language that, once labile relationships of strength are recognized, institutionalizes them symbolically, achieving consensus from the dominated. Symbolic relationships are reversible. In principle the woman has only to say no to the man and he will have to wash the dishes, the heretics reject the authority of the Inquisition and they will not be burned.
Naturally, things are not that simple, precisely because the discourse that symbolically represents power must deal not with simple causal relations but with complex interaction of forces. Still this seems to me the difference between power, as symbolic fact, and pure causality: The former is reversible, the latter is only capable of being contained or bridled, it allows reforms (I invent the lightning rod; the woman decides to go on the pill, to renounce sexual relations, to have only homosexual relations). The inability to distinguish between power and causality leads to much childish political behavior. As we have seen, things are not all that simple. Let’s replace the notion of causality (onedirectional) with that of force.
A force is applied to another force: They form a parallelogram of forces. They do not cancel one another; they are composed, according to a law. The play among forces is reformist: It produces compromises. But the game is never between two forces, it is among countless forces; the parallelogram gives rise to far more complex multidimensional figures. To decide which forces must be set against which other forces, decisions are made which are dependent not on the play of forces but on the play of power. A knowledge is produced, of the composition of forces.
To return to Duby: When knights exist, when the merchants appear on the scene with their wealth, when the peasants start migrating towards the city under the scourge of famine, you are dealing with forces: The symbolic strategy, the formulation of convincing theories of the three orders or the four, and thence the configuration of power relationships come into play in defining which forces must restrain which others, and in what direction the consequent parallelograms must march. But in Duby’s book, at least for the idle reader, the play of forces risks disappearing in the face of the dominant argument, which is made up by the constant rearrangement of the symbolic figures.
We come to the last book in the pile, War in European History* Michael Howard’s study of weapons in the development of European history. We will speak of it only obliquely, inviting the reader to enjoy for himself this fascinating book that starts with the wars of the feudal period and arrives at those of the nuclear age, with a wealth of anecdote and unpredictable discoveries. In 1346, at Crecy, Edward III introduces, against the enemy cavalry, his longbow archers. These longbows, which shoot five or six arrows in the same time that a crossbow could fire only one of its large darts, engage a new force against the cavalry. They defeat it. From that moment on, cavalry is convinced that its armor must be heavier; the cavalry becomes less easily maneuvered and is totally useless when dismounted. The force of the armed cavalier is annulled.
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
