Strategy (78 page)

By the late eighteenth century, the soldier has become something that can be made: out of a formless clay, an inapt body, the machine required can be constructed; posture is gradually corrected; a calculated constraint runs slowly through each part of the body, mastering it, making it pliable, ready at all times, turning silently into the automatism of habit; in short, one has “got rid of the peasant” and given him “the air of the soldier.”

This was the basis for the disciplinary power which migrated into civil society where comparable forms of control were instituted.

This control did not require violence, as it taught forms of behavior that constituted a form of self-discipline.
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In this way, power and knowledge became one and the same, and Foucault referred to them together as “power/ knowledge.” Such power was not something owned or wielded, but an essential feature in all spheres of life, including the notionally most personal and intimate. It was diffuse rather than concentrated, discursive as much as coercive, unstable rather than fixed. There was no real “truth,” so it could neither be repressed nor excluded. Considerations of truth were really about power, about who was served by what, and the forms of domination and resistance to which it gave rise.

His approach to power therefore underplayed physical constraint and queried the durability of apparent consent. It was through discourse that the thought of others was shaped so that actions followed a particular view of the world. “Regimes of truth” set standards for what was true and false and the procedures by which they might be discerned. These became embedded in everyday discourses, ensuring that certain matters were taken for granted while others were given prominence. In this way, views of reality could take hold, reinforcing structures of power without it being realized, resulting in accommodating forms of behavior being adopted without the necessity of enforcement. For Foucault, strategy was inextricably linked with power. While he discussed strategy in a mainstream sense, referring to “winning choices” in overt struggles, his concept was much broader. Strategy was “the totality of the means put into operation to implement power effectively or to maintain it.”

Foucault's influence on the humanities came to be profound, its value still a matter for intense debate. His influence on thinking about strategy was also significant. First, his view of the ubiquity of power potentially turned all social relationships into arenas of struggle, touching the micro-level of social existence as well as the macro-level of the state. Second, he conveyed a sense of the continuity of struggle without end. There was confrontation, an apparent victory, and a stable period, but then it could all open up again. There was thus an ever-present possibility of resistance and so reversion. A victory might allow “stable mechanisms” to “replace the free play of antagonistic reactions,” but it would only be truly embedded when the other was reduced to impotence. There could then be “domination,” a “strategic situation more or less taken for granted and consolidated by means of a long-term confrontation between adversaries.” But even periods of apparent stability, sustained by the dominance of a particular discourse, could turn to struggle, following the opening up of the discourse.

In effect, between a relationship of power and a strategy of struggle there is a reciprocal appeal, a perpetual linking and a perpetual reversal. At every moment the relationship of power may become a confrontation between two adversaries. Equally, the relationship between adversaries in society may, at every moment, give place to the putting into operation of mechanisms of power.
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In an inversion of Clausewitz, he presented politics as a continuation of war.
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War was a “permanent social relationship, the ineradicable basis of all relations and institutions of power.” Social relations were thus orders of battle in which there was “no such thing as a neutral subject” and in which “we are all inevitably someone's adversary.” Taking sides meant it was “possible to interpret the truth, to denounce the illusions and errors that are being used—by your adversaries—to make you believe we are living in a world in which order and peace have been restored.” Therefore as much as the discourses of power were diffused throughout society, so too could be resistance, with forms of evasion, subversion, and contestation. In this respect, claims about knowledge were weapons in a struggle over truth. He wrote of “knowledges” (in the plural) in conflict “because they are in the possession of enemies, and because they have intrinsic power-effects.”
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Analyses of discourses, by exploring what appeared settled and non-contentious, could reveal their contingency and relationship to structures of power. This could have a liberating effect, offering the subjugated a way out. This was not a particularly new thought and was one of the themes of the intellectual currents circulating around the New Left. There was the same notion
of a form of unspoken warfare throughout society that had yet to manifest itself but might break out once the victims understood their situation. What was different with Foucault was that rather than focus on questions of class struggle and revolutionary politics, which he seemed to find passé, he focused instead on the “specific struggles against particularized power” of “women, prisoners, conscripted soldiers, hospital patients and homosexuals.”
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When lecturing in 1976, while the spirit of '68 was still fresh, he was impressed by the “dispersed and discontinuous offensives” within Western societies during the previous decade. The “increasingly autonomous, decentralized, and anarchistic character of contemporary forms of political struggle” suited his method. He referred to the “antipsychiatry movement” which had “helped in opening up the space of the asylum for social and political critique.” At this time he was becoming involved in a movement giving voice to prisoners. His project was about the “desubjugation and liberation of disqualified peoples and their knowledges.” One of Foucault's lasting impacts lay in the recognition that the plight of individuals at the margins of society, often in institutions where they had been placed for their own safety and that of society, were part of power relationships which could and should not be beyond challenge.

Foucault's theories made it possible to undermine established power structures without mounting physical challenges, but instead analyzing the “specificity of mechanisms of power … locate the connections and extensions … build little by little a strategic knowledge.”
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It could be argued, at least on the evidence of Foucaldian scholarship, that the language by which discourses were analyzed could obscure as much as illuminate, and be of little practical help to subjugated groups.
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Moreover, while this was a way into understanding power relationships, it raised its own difficulties by bypassing questions of agency and structure, the intent of individuals, and the role of force. So much was loaded on his concept of power, and indeed of strategy, that these concepts risked losing any precise meaning. When everything, whether a written communication or a pattern of behavior, could be considered as strategy, then nothing was worth considering because the term was losing its meaning. Playing down coercive power might be sensible for subjugated groups. Seeking a liberating discourse should be safer. But in the end, force could still be an arbiter of struggles.

The word which came to describe the essential instrument in the battles over ideas was not
discourse
but
narrative
. During the 1990s, this became
a requirement for any political project: explaining why a political movement or party deserved to be taken seriously and conveying its core messages. This was based on another set of ideas that could be traced back to the radical intellectual ferment in France of the late 1960s that saw the concept move from being literary and elaborate to elemental and at the heart of all social interaction. It gained traction from reflecting evident aspects of human behavior as well as the better understanding of the workings of the brain.

Until the late 1960s, narrative was still largely to be found in literary theory, referring to works distinguished by a character telling of an event (rather than a stream of consciousness or some interaction between personalities).
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It moved into wider theory under the influence of the French post-structuralists. They rejected the idea of meaning as a reflection of the intention of an author but instead insisted that texts could support a range of meanings, depending on the circumstances in which they were read. With every reading there could be a new meaning. A key figure in this group, with whom Foucault was linked, was the literary theorist Roland Barthes. He pushed the idea of the narrative to the fore, moving it away from purely literary texts into all forms of communication. There were, he wrote in 1968, “countless forms of narrative,” including “articulated language, whether oral or written, pictures, still or moving, gestures, and an ordered mixture of all those substances; narrative is present in myth, legend, fables, tales, short stories, epics, history, tragedy, drama … comedy, pantomime, paintings … stained-glass windows, movies, local news, conversation.” It was to be found “at all times, in all places, in all societies.” There had “never been anywhere, any people without narrative; all classes, all human groups, have their stories, and very often those stories are enjoyed by men of different and even opposite cultural backgrounds: narrative remains largely unconcerned with good or bad literature. Like life itself, it is there, international, transhistorical, transcultural.”

Not only were there an “infinite number of narratives,” they could be considered from many vantage points, including history, psychology, sociology, ethnology, and aesthetics. Barthes believed it possible to identify common structures through deductive theory.
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The next year another member of this group, Tzvetan Todorov, introduced “narratology,” which involved distinguishing the component parts of a narrative and considering the relationships between them. What was narrated was the story, a sequence of events with characters, held together by a plot line that gave it structure and explained causation—why the events occurred when they did. Discourse described the presentation of the story, what determined its eventual appearance to an audience.

By the late 1970s, there was talk of a “narrative turn” in social theory. A recollection of a conference at the University of Chicago in 1979 spoke of an “aura of intellectual excitement and discovery, the common feeling that the study of narrative, like the study of other significant human creations, has taken a quantum leap in the modern era.” It was “no longer the province of literary specialists or folklorists borrowing their terms from psychology and linguistics but has now become a positive source of insight for all the branches of human and natural science.”
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It was later reported how during the 1980s the social sciences became caught up in a “wave of theorizing about narratives,” inspired by the belief that analyzing the stories people told would provide vital insights into how they lived their lives.
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Narratives were often described as being interchangeable with stories, and stories could be extremely simple. The argument that anything could count as a story reflected their importance in basic human communication. Mark Turner argued that life would be chaotic without simple stories turning pieces of information into a coherent pattern. Even babies developed links between containers, liquid flows, mouths, and taste in a story that eventually became entitled “drinking.” With only partial information, these simple stories facilitated imagining the next step or what happened before. Narrative imagining, argued Turner, was fundamental both to our ability to explain and our ability to predict.
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William Calvin suggested a close relationship between our ability to plan and our construction of narratives. “To some extent, we do this by talking silently to ourselves, making narratives out of what might happen next and then applying syntax-like rules of combination to rate a scenario as unlikely, possible or likely.”
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Here was a concept that could explain how meaning was given to lives and relationships and how the world was understood. It fit in with theories of cognition and accounts of culture. The narrative turn therefore captured the uncertain confidence about what was actually known, the fascination with the variety of interpretations that could be attached to the same event, and the awareness of the choices made when constructing identity. It highlighted the importance of human imagination and empathy while challenging the idea of a perfect knowledge of an external reality.

Soon the academic interest in narrative found its way into the public domain. Psychologists used narratives as forms of therapy, lawyers employed them in their efforts to move juries, and claimants needed them when seeking redress. Over time, the self-conscious use of narratives extended to all types of political actors. Initially the major interest appears to have been among radical groups and others who were seeking to compensate for a lack of material resources. It was another way the weak could take on the strong: less
muscle but better stories. A battle of narratives was to be preferred to a real battle. Eventually any political project, from whatever part of the spectrum, demanded its very own narrative.

The narratives could have a number of functions: means by which support could be mobilized and directed, solidarity sustained and dissidents kept in line, strategies formulated and disseminated. Their role, not always particularly deliberate, could be detected in the movements coming out of the counterculture, such as those demanding rights for women and gays and other marginalized groups. Their use gained credence from Foucauldian type analysis, using stories of victimhood, humiliation, and resistance to let people in similar situations gain strength from being part of a wider movement, linking their private frustrations with a public cause.