Foucault’s power theory cannot assess changing balance of forces without ideology

Evidence

First, let’s take Foucault’s argument for the discursive as against the ideological. What Foucault would talk about is the setting in place, through the institutionalization of a discursive regime, of a number of competing regimes of truth and, within these regimes, the operation of power through the practices he calls normalization, regulation, and surveillance. Now perhaps it’s just a sleight of hand, but the combination of regime of truth plus normalization/regulation/surveillance is not all that far from the notions of dominance in ideology that I’m trying to work with. So maybe Foucault’s point is really a polemical, not an analytic one, contesting one particular way of understanding those terms, within a much more linear kind of base/superstructure model. I think the movement from that old base/superstructure paradigm into the domain of the discursive is a very positive one. But, while I have learned a great deal from Foucault in this sense about the relation between knowledge and power, I don’t see how you can retain the notion of “resistance,” as he does, without facing questions about the constitution of dominance in ideology. Foucault’s evasion of the question is at the heart of his proto-anarchist position precisely because his resistance must be summoned up from nowhere. Nobody knows where it comes from. Fortunately, it goes on being there, always guaranteed: in so far as there is power, there is resistance. But at any one moment, when you want to know how strong the power is, and how strong the resistance is, and what is the changing balance of forces, it’s impossible to assess because such a field of force is not conceptualizable in this model. … There are subordinated regimes of truth which make sense, which have plausibility, for subordinated subjects, while not being part of the dominant episteme. In other words, as soon as you begin to look at a discursive formation, not just a single discipline but as a formation , you have to talk about the relations of power which structure the inter-discursivity, or the intertextuality, of the field of knowledge. I don’t much care what you call it: ideology or not. What matters is not the terminology but the conceptualization. The question of the relative power distribution of different regimes of truth and social formation at any one time—which have certain effects for the maintenance of power in the social order—that is what I call “the ideological effect.” So I go on using the term “ideology” because it forces me to continue thinking about that problem. … By abandoning the term, I think that Foucault has let himself off the hook of having to re-theorize it in a more radical way: he saves for himself “the political” with his insistence on power but he denies himself a politics because he has no idea of the “relations of force.” — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 723

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘the ideological effect’ as the relative power distribution among competing regimes of truth, and distinguishes it from Foucault’s discursive regime concept.
• XREF: Connects to Marxist base/superstructure debates and Gramsci’s hegemony; also to Hall’s own model of articulation between discourse and social structure. — connects to: Foucault’s anti-economism leads him to erase class and rebellion — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 830