It is common to find a focus on the productivity of power amongst authors who draw from Foucault: Halley (2008), for example, sees Foucault’s relations of power as merely forces that produce effects. Power creates reality and domains of knowledge. It is always mobile, always transitory and elusive, moving in networks, operating through discourses, techniques and apparatuses that strategically support and are supported by knowledge (Wetherell et al., 2001).
Centring the productivity of power however, would apparently dismiss the notions of domination and subjugation or at least take our attention away from their occurrence.
According to Cooper (1995), the limitations of a focus in power only as a productive force lies in looking at it as merely causation. She proposes, instead, to explore power by centring the differential ability to cause, as well as questions of agency and intentionality. What this ultimately does is enable us to see, on the one hand, that power can be unevenly distributed, that access to power can be unequal and that certain subjects have the possibility to take actions that others are denied. But it also allows to keep in mind that power is not exclusively exercised by one social force and that actors have a capacity to transform the character of power, by negotiating and reshaping its operations. In effect, Foucault (1978) argues that discourses can transmit and produce power but they also open up the possibility of questioning, exposing and undermining power, that is, as Cooper (1995) puts it: “power can involve the creation and use of new forms of knowledge and discipline, or the reallocation of resources” (p. 26).
References:
- Cooper, D. (1995). Power in struggle: Feminism, sexuality and the state. New York: New York University Press.
- Foucault, M. (1978). The history of sexuality, volume I. New York: Vintage.
- Halley, J. (2008). Split decisions : How and why to take a break from feminism. Princeton, NJ, USA: Princeton University Press.
- Wetherell, M., Taylor, S., & Yates, S. (2001). Discourse theory and practice. London: Sage Publications.
