Sørensen (On Foucault)

Interestingly, it is not the people in power that initialize such marginalisation (though they may and often do benefit from it), rather the working of power comes from below, circulating amongst individuals without juridical or institutional power; it comes from a multitude of causes that happen to converge in the creation of certain structures and institutions. As these practices of recognition of structures and institutions are reiterated, they congeal as norms. Thus, the analysis of juridical power, which has the conscious interests of the sovereign in focus, departs decisively from the analysis of disciplinary power, whose origin is a complex set of relationships of force and whose workings may not be in line with that of the sovereign. This relation of exploitation is in any case not a necessary relation. However, since “there is no power that is exercised without a series of aims and objectives”5, what seems to often be the case is that the people ‘in power’ – the bourgeoisie – utilize the manifest normalisation practices. Intentionally, therefore, human bodies and their operations (time and energy) become an area of extraction and exploitation.

As a good example of this latter relation between disciplinary power and the extraction and exploitation of resources we find ‘health discourse’, which in recent years has put ever-greater demands on individuals to plan, organise, analyse and systematize their lives in order to optimize their overall health situation. Without judging whether this discourse intensification is a positive or negative phenomenon, Foucault gives us the tools for understanding how people speak in the name of power, of efficiency and optimisation of the population in general. How subjects are constituted as health-striving subjects due to the way power relations disclose possible fields of action for that subject, whereby it can obtain intelligibility (for self and others) only insofar as it conforms to the norm. To analyse such a case in relation to the ‘traditional’, juridical notion of power is, Foucault’s analyses show, insufficient to understand this societal self-inclusion in the efficiency striving agenda.

Mathias Klitgård Sørensen