POULANTZAS AND FOUCAULT ON POWER AND STRATEGY

Bob Jessop

After the May events in 1968, many French intellectuals proclaimed a 'crisis of

Marxism'.1 The first such crisis was declared by Masaryk at the end of the nineteenth

century and other crises have been announced regularly ever since. But the post-68

crisis appeared more serious and many doubted that it could be resolved through a

simple revival or revision of traditional Marxism. Indeed, May 1968 triggered a strong

theoretical reaction against Marxism in both its orthodox and structuralist forms (Ferry

and Renaut 1985). Its most extreme expression was the virulently anti-Marxist, post-

gauchiste, post-modern, nouvelle philosophie (Dews 1979; Resch 1992). More

temperate were the attempts to rescue Marxism from its alleged over-identification with

orthodox Communism and Stalinism by drawing on other theories. These were

existentialism, structuralism, post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, theories of language,

and the work of Michel Foucault (Poster 1984: 20-40; for Foucault’s reflections on May

1968 for the changing intellectual climate, see 1983a [Ethics: 125], DE2 1348; 1984c

[Ethics: 115], DE2 1414).

Foucault, who had already left the PCF in 1953 after three years’ inactive membership

and later rejected official Marxism as simplistic and partisan (Macey 1993: 40; Sheridan

1980: 5), took a different route, claiming that the May events had enabled him to

sharpen questions he had already been posing and had also given them a new political

significance (Foucault 1977a: 142). Thus he first turned his attention to issues of rupture

and discontinuity, power-knowledge and resistance, then to governmentality and state

strategy, and, later still, to the self. He also began to display a more positive but still

ambivalent relationship to Marxism. On the one hand, he continued to criticize a wide

range of Marxist positions that he deemed to be theoretically inadequate and/or

politically unacceptable. These included vulgar Marxism; academic (or university)

Marxism; ‘endless commentaries on surplus-value’; intense interest in the nature of

class and neglect of the subjects, stakes, and modalities of ‘class’ struggle; its concern

with consciousness and ideology rather than the materiality of the body and anatomo-

politics; epiphenomenal analyses of infrastructure and superstructure relations; the

sterilizing constraints of the dialectic and the logic of contradiction; para-Marxism;

Freudo-Marxism; Marxist hagiography; the ‘hypermarxification’ of social and political

analyses; and ‘communistology’.2 On the other hand, ‘Foucault maintained a sort of

"uninterrupted dialogue" with Marx, [who] was in fact not unaware of the question of

power and its disciplines’ (Fontana and Bertani 2003: 277). Thus it is not hard to find

increasingly sympathetic but generally covert references to some core themes in Marx’s

own work, some of them deliberately and provocatively undeclared, and to some more

sophisticated currents in contemporary Marxism (Poulantzas EPS: 74; Balibar 1992;

Lemke 2003).

These different reactions to the alleged crisis of Marxism provide a good basis for

comparing Michel Foucault and Nicos Poulantzas. For, while Poulantzas also reoriented

his theoretical and political analyses in several steps after May 1968, he never

abandoned his fundamental commitment to Marxism. Nonetheless, like others at the

time, in seeking to reinvigorate Marxism, he recommended resort to other disciplines

and approaches. These included linguistics, psychoanalysis, and the work of Foucault

(see Poulantzas 1979a: 14-5; 1979b; 1979c). But he largely ignored psychoanalysis,

paid limited attention to linguistics, and took only Foucault seriously. Even then he

distinguished Foucault as an epistemologist and general theorist from Foucault as an

analyst of specific techniques of power and aspects of the state form. For, while

Poulantzas rejected Foucault’s general epistemological and theoretical project, he found

his critique of discipline, power, and knowledge useful (citing both SP and VS with

qualified approval in his own magnum opus, L’État, le Pouvoir, le Socialisme (SPS: 66-

68, 69; EPS: 73-5, 76, 298n). This rejection makes sense on both counts. On the one

hand, Foucault’s epistemology is incompatible with Marxism (see Lecourt 1972); and,

more particularly, he had dismissed Marxian political economy as part of the ‘Classical’

episteme and even accorded Ricardo greater weight than Marx in this regard (Foucault

1969: 268-71). Moreover, while Foucault had rejected the temptations of state theory as

one would refuse an invitation to an ‘indigestible meal’ (Foucault 1979b),3 Poulantzas

aimed to develop an autonomous Marxist political science within the framework of

historical materialism and eventually claimed to have completed Marx’s unfinished

theory of the state (1978b). On the other hand, Poulantzas recognized that this work of

completion needed to go beyond his own initial Althusserian and Gramscian

perspectives and to develop a more general, and resolutely relational, account of

power.

Despite their very different philosophical approaches and theoretical trajectories, there

are some fascinating parallels between the two thinkers. These are most obvious during

the ten years following May 1968, when Foucault and Poulantzas both moved beyond

their respective earlier theoretical approaches and focused increasingly, each in his own

distinctive way, on the complexities of power, resistance, and their strategic codification

in the modern world. Indeed, the confused political and theoretical conjuncture of 1972-

1977 was an especially creative period for both thinkers (on Foucault, see Gordon

1980: ix). Thus my contribution will explore the convergences, divergences, hidden

parallels, and shared problems in the work of Foucault and Poulantzas on power and

strategy.

Poulantzas and Foucault

Whereas Foucault’s work still generates debate, interest in Poulantzas’s work

diminished rapidly after his death. This neglect illustrates the contemporary crisis of

Marxism and deserves to be remedied. Thus I will first comment briefly on Poulantzas.

He was a Greek political and social theorist who taught in Paris and was active in

French as well as Greek intellectual and political life. He initially worked within a

‘Western Marxist’ framework and was strongly interested in the state and state power in

advanced capitalist societies. His principal theoretical influences were French

philosophy (Sartre, Althusser, and, later, Foucault), Italian political theory (Gramsci and,

later, the left Eurocommunism associated with Ingrao), and bourgeois constitutional

theory (and its Marxist critique). His key theoretical contribution came in the 1970s with

his development of the argument that state power is a social relation that is reproduced

in and through the interaction between the changing institutional form of the state and

the changing character of political class forces. Accordingly, he increasingly

emphasized the nature of the state as a system of structurally-inscribed strategic

selectivity and the nature of political struggle as a field of competing strategies for

hegemony. In both respects he argued that power should be studied in terms of the

changing balance of class forces mobilized behind specific strategies in various political

conjunctures (for a detailed account, Jessop 1985). In addition to his overriding concern

with the state as the strategic terrain in, on, and through which political class domination

is secured, Poulantzas also considered its role in providing certain key conditions for

capital accumulation and in reproducing the capitalist form of the mental-manual

division of labour. His last major work, EPS (1978), extended these accounts to include

the state's role in organizing the social body (its territoriality, its temporal organization,

its cultural life) and the individual body (through violence, law, citizenship, language,

health-care, etc.). Poulantzas’s indebtedness to Foucault's analyses is especially clear

here but there are also other, less visible Foucauldian influences within his overall

account of the state and its position in contemporary social formations (see below).

Foucault’s own work on power emerged in initially unacknowledged ways. He

sometimes claimed in interviews that an implicit interest in power informed his

archaeological studies, began to surface with his genealogical studies, and gained full

expression with Surveiller et Punir (1975a) and la Volonté de Savoir (1976a). It is these

two books that most influenced Poulantzas. Foucault stressed three major themes in his

self-described ‘nominalist’ analytics of power in this third period: the immanence of

power in all social relations, its articulation with discourses as well as institutions, and its

polyvalence (in the sense that its impact and significance depend on how these

relations and their associated discourses and institutions are integrated into different

strategies). In this context he also focused on technologies of power, the relations

between power and knowledge, and diverse strategies for the structuring and

deployment of power relations. In developing this analytical approach, Foucault rejected

any attempt to develop a general theory of power that rested on assumptions about its

essential unity, its pre-given functions, or its global strategic deployment by a master

subject. Instead, its study should begin from below, in the heterogeneous and dispersed

microphysics of power, to explore specific forms of exercise of power in different

institutional sites and to investigate how, if at all, these were articulated to produce

broader and more persistent societal configurations.

Foucault typically rejected any a priori assumption that different forms of power were

linked together to produce an overall pattern of class domination. This is consistent with

his more general rejection of attempts to provide a total or totalizing interpretation of

social events. This holds especially for the emergence (or genealogy) of various

technologies of power and disciplinary techniques but Foucault also recognized that the

selection of some technologies and practices rather than others and their subsequent

retention are more likely to be linked to broader strategies of state and/or class power.4

Thus he noted that the disciplinary techniques of the modern state originated in

dispersed local sites well away from the centres of state power in the Ancien Régime

and that they were only later taken up and integrated into a coherent global strategy of

bourgeois domination (SP, VS). Nonetheless such strategic codification and/or

structural coherence are by no means guaranteed – for different techniques can also be

disjointed and contradictory. This said, whereas Surveiller et Punir was more concerned

with the dispersion of the mechanisms of power, Volonté de Savoir began to explore

how different mechanisms were articulated to produce social order. This interest in the

macrophysics of power is even more evident in Foucault's three courses at the Collège

de France entitled ‘Society must defend itself’ (1976), ‘Security, Territory, and

Population’ (1978), and ‘The Birth of Biopolitics’ (1979). The second and third volumes

of the Histoire de Sexualité (1984a, 1984b) marked a further shift, however, to the

emergence of the sexual subject and the formation of the self and self-identity more

generally. Mechanisms of power were given less prominence and more weight was

given to ethical discourse about the self.

My analytical strategy is to consider the relations between the work of Poulantzas and

Foucault and distinguish their positions in what is largely a shared approach to social

and political order. I will take the arguments of Poulantzas as my main reference point

for two reasons. First, despite frequent attempts to counterpose Marxist and

Foucauldian approaches to power and strategy and the occasional use of Poulantzas

as a proxy for Marxism in this regard, Poulantzas was far less of an orthodox 'Marxist'

and far more 'Foucauldian' than many of his critics suggest. And, second, if this is the

case, it is because he consciously related his work to that of Foucault both positively

and negatively. Thus he not only appropriated some of Foucault's concepts and

arguments but also distinguished his own theory and its political implications from

Foucault's more general approach. However, because he is not always the best guide

to his own relation to Foucault, I will also qualify Poulantzas’s account, revisit Foucault's

approach, and comment on the individual and shared limitations of both approaches.

We can relate Poulantzas and Foucault in four main ways. First, there are Poulantzas's

direct and explicit borrowings from Foucault and his colleagues. This was largely a one-

way traffic, however, since Foucault himself never, as far as I know, referred to

Poulantzas’s work.5 Second, there are marked similarities and even unstated bilateral

convergences. For, having rejected vulgar Marxism and Freudo-Marxism in the 1960s,

Foucault grew more sympathetic towards Marxist analyses in the 1970s. Indeed, he

claimed that one could not write history without using a whole range of concepts directly

or indirectly related to Marx's thought and situating oneself on an intellectual terrain

defined by Marx (1975c [P/K: 53]; DE1: 1621). Third, despite these unilateral

borrowings and shared positions, Poulantzas also directed some trenchant criticisms at

Foucault. These helped him differentiate his position theoretically and politically in

relation to the current intellectual mood in France. Interestingly, Foucault later modified

his own position along parallel lines – although this owed more to his own disjunctive

theoretical development than to Poulantzas’s criticisms. And, fourth, despite these

clearly stated differences, there are also hidden parallels in their respective accounts of

power and the state. Exploring these will help us understand some key limitations to

both thinkers’ approaches to power and strategy.

Some Unilateral Borrowings

Poulantzas's key contributions to Marxist theory concern the state, state power, classes,

and class struggle and his position on these issues remained resolutely Marxist in its

general orientation (see Jessop 1985). But he also discussed ideology, the role of

intellectuals, and the mental-manual division of labour. Poulantzas borrowed from

Foucault or, at least, moved towards his positions in all three of these areas. Regarding

the ideological domain, Poulantzas drew directly on Foucault's distinction between

'specific' and 'universal' intellectuals and, more significantly, on his discussion of 'power'

and 'knowledge'. 'Specific' intellectuals are experts in particular disciplines relevant to

specific areas of social life; 'universal' intellectuals are dilettantes whose influence

depends on their general literary or intellectual position (Foucault 1977a [PK: 126-33];

DE2: 154-160). Poulantzas used this distinction to criticize the role of intellectuals in

Greek and French politics and to urge a more active role for specific intellectuals. More

generally, Foucault related the role of intellectuals to the relations between power and

knowledge. He argued that 'there is no relation of power without the correlative

constitution of a field of knowledge, no knowledge which does not presuppose and

constitute at the same time relations of power' (DP: 32; SP: 00). Poulantzas extended

this analysis by linking it to the capitalist division between mental and manual labour

and also notes that Marx developed similar ideas about this link in his work on

production and political domination (SPS: 55, 89-90; EPS: 60, 98-99). Indeed he even

suggested that the capitalist state is the institutional embodiment par excellence of

intellectual labour separated from manual labour. Turning to broader issues, on the

state as such, Poulantzas used Foucault's ideas on disciplinary techniques,

normalization, and panopticism as well as his views on 'anatomo-politics' and the

recomposition of the body politic (SPS: 66-67, 69-70, 75, 81; EPS: 72-73, 76, 82, 88).

He also endorsed Foucault's account of new social movements as a response to the

growth of disciplinary techniques.

Even when directly borrowing from Foucault's work, Poulantzas typically modified it.

This can be seen in his interpretation of the relation between 'power' and 'knowledge',

his account of disciplines and normalization, and his discussion of the political

constitution of corporality, and his continual references to parallel, if not superior, ideas

in the work of Marx himself. This process of insertion-modification was made easier by

the convergences that had developed between their arguments and analyses. These

provided points of articulation and enabled Poulantzas to draw on Foucault's work

without falling into simple eclecticism.

Eight Shared Positions or Bilateral Convergences

There are eight main areas where Poulantzas and Foucault developed similar

arguments. First, they both had long-standing interests in the nature and mechanisms of

individualization. Both denied the existence of originating subjects and both examined

the mechanisms in and through which acting and knowing subjects were constituted.

This is particularly clear in Poulantzas's early analysis of the juridico-political production

of the 'isolation effect' (i.e., the experience of class relations as relations among so

many formally equal individuals with competing private interests) and its role in shaping

struggles over political hegemony around competing definitions of the national-popular

interest. This recognizes the productive as well as coercive nature of the juridico-

political and its contribution to the political disorganization of the subordinate classes.

Foucault did not start out from the existence of classes defined by the relations of

production, of course, but he was also strongly interested in the nature and mechanisms

of individualization and normalization and their role in shaping bodies as well as minds

in different historical periods and different sites of power. These studies had a

significant impact on Poulantzas’s later work and, indeed, he willingly conceded that

Foucault's analyses of normalization and the state's role in shaping corporality were

better than his own account of the 'isolation effect' (SPS: 70; EPS: 76).

Second, related to this was the shared analysis of the relationship between sovereignty

and individual citizenship. Poulantzas rooted the specificity of the capitalist type of state

in the constitutive (defining) absence of a formal monopoly of power for the

economically dominant class over the dominated classes. For the normal capitalist state

had the distinctive juridico-political form of a unified, centralized, sovereign apparatus

that exercised constitutionalized authority over its individual citizen-subjects (PPSC:

132-134, 188-189, 275-277; PPCS-I: 139-140; PPCS-II: 102-103). This was the

institutional matrix within which different social forces struggled to develop specific state

and hegemonic projects that could secure social cohesion in a class-divided society

(PPSC: 140-141, 188-193, 214-215, 274-279; PPCS-I: 147-148; PPCS-II: 7-11, 35-37,

102-107). This matrix involved not only the repressive state apparatus but also a

plurality of ‘ideological state apparatuses’ (ISAs) located both within and beyond the

state’s formal, juridico-political boundaries. These ISAs included education, trade

unions, the mass media, the family, and a wide range of institutions connected with the

welfare state (FD: 195-196, 299-309; CCC: 24-25, 27-28, 30-32; CSC: 28-29; 31-36;

SPS: 28-34; EPS: 31-38; cf. Althusser 1995: 107-109). Foucault likewise came to argue

that ‘modern society, from the nineteenth century up to our own day, has been

characterized on the one hand, by a legislation, a discourse, an organization based on

public right, whose principle of articulation is the social body and the delegative status of

each citizen; and, on the other hand, by a closely linked grid of disciplinary coercions

whose purpose is in fact to assure the cohesion of this same social body’ (1976b [P/K:

106]; DE2: 187-188).

Third, both theorists adopted a relational approach to power and explored the links

between power and strategies. Poulantzas was ahead of Foucault here too but he later

incorporated Foucauldian ideas into his own analysis whilst retaining, contrary to

Foucault, an emphasis on the class nature of the state. Pouvoir Politique et Classes

Sociales treated power as the capacity to realize class interests in a specific

conjuncture and defined such interests in terms of the changing range of feasible class

objectives. He denied that the state could wield power in its own right and stressed that

state power was a specific, institutionally mediated expression of class power.

Moreover, even in PPSC, Poulantzas argued that class interests could not be derived in

a priori fashion from the position of class agents in the relations of production. They

could only be established in terms of the isolation effect and class strategies. He

emphasized that power is not a fixed quantum that can only be allocated in a zero-sum

manner so that losses and gains cancel each other out. He also identified many

potential disjunctions between economic, political, and ideological capacities, interests,

and actual power relations. His later work examined the complex links between class

interests, class power, and class strategies (for more detailed discussion, see Jessop

1985: 340-343). The relational approach to power is especially clear in EPS, in which

Poulantzas provides his most elaborate argument that the state itself is a social relation.

It is not a subject that acquires power for itself by depriving classes of power; nor is it an

instrumental depository of the power held by a dominant class subject located beyond it

(SPS: 146-8; EPS: 160-162). Instead it should be understood as the material

condensation of the balance of class forces in struggle. In this context, Poulantzas also

reinforced his earlier arguments (dating from PPSC) that local class struggles and

issue-oriented social movements operating at a distance from the state may have

significant ‘pertinent effects’ from the bottom up on the exercise of state power.

Fourth, Poulantzas and Foucault both insisted that power is always correlated with

resistance. Poulantzas initially made this claim in terms of the antagonistic character of

the social relations of production in class-divided societies and the resulting struggles

over economic exploitation and political and ideological class domination. He later

coquetted with Foucauldian language to extend this claim. For example, Foucault

argued that, 'where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently,

this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power' (HS1: 95).6 In this

sense power and resistance are coeval: power always engenders resistance, resistance

always elicits counter-resistance. Likewise Poulantzas argued that 'there are no social

classes prior to their opposition in struggle: they are not posed "in themselves" in the

relations of production only to enter into struggle (become classes "for themselves")

afterwards and elsewhere' (SPS: 27; cf. 45, 141, 145). ‘Il n’existe pas de classes

sociales préalables à leur opposition, c’est à dire à leurs luttes. Les classes sociales ne

sont pas posées “en soi” dans les rapports de production, pour entrer en lutte (classes

“pour soi”) seulement après ou ailleurs’ (EPS: 30; cf. 50, 155, 159). Hence class

struggle is never in a position of exteriority to class relations: they are coeval.

Fifth, Poulantzas and Foucault concurred in treating power as productive and positive

rather than simply repressive and negative. This is another area where Poulantzas

seems to have anticipated Foucault. For the latter only rejected the ‘Nietzschean

hypothesis’ that power is repressive in the mid-1970s. Foucault then seems to have

rejected all accounts of power that treated it as purely repressive, censorious, and

negative and emphasized instead its productive, normalizing, and positive functions

(DP: 23-8, 209-16, 296-306; HS1: 5-10, 41-8, 82-9, 97, 136, 144; 1976b [PK: 88-96,

102-8]; DE2: 169-174; 183-189; 1977a [P/K: 119-23]; DE2: 148-151; 1977e [P/K: 140];

DE2 423-4). Poulantzas had already treated power in these terms for several years

before Foucault’s conversion. Indeed in treating the state as the factor of social

cohesion in a class-divided society, he clearly emphasized its productive role rather

than the Marxist-Leninist idea that it comprises 'special bodies of armed men, prisons,

etc.' (Lenin 1917: 292). Poulantzas later paid even more attention to the state's positive

role in reproducing relations of production, organizing material concessions, unifying the

power bloc, assigning a specific class-pertinence to non-class relations, producing

knowledge, shaping the spatio-temporal matrix of capitalist societies, and so forth.

Foucault also rejected those liberal and Marxist approaches to power that assimilated it

to the commodity and/or suggested that it is always subordinate to economic

imperatives. Similarly Poulantzas was always concerned with the state's role in securing

political class domination. He had long criticized the 'échangiste' approach of some

Italian Marxists (who derived the necessity of the state from its functions in commodity

circulation); and he also criticized 'capital logic' approaches that derived the state form

and activities from its overall economic functionality. In short, even before he was

directly influenced by Foucault's analyses of the techniques of power, Poulantzas

avoided the serious faults that Foucault claimed to find in other analyses of power.

A sixth convergence concerns the close links between power and knowledge. This is

evident from Poulantzas's dual appropriation of Gramsci’s analyses of hegemony and

Althusser’s views on ideological state apparatuses, and, more importantly here, can

also be seen in his own accounts of the role of the mental-manual division of labour in

reproducing political and ideological class domination. Thus CCC interprets this division

as a concentrated expression of the coupling of political and ideological relations to the

relations of production (1974: 233, 240; CSC: 248-9, 255-6). It is directly linked to the

'secrecy of knowledge' and excludes the working class (and the more 'proletarianized'

layers of the new petty bourgeoisie) from the centres of bourgeois power (1974: 31,

180, 237, 249, 255, 274-5, 322-3; CSC: 35, 194-195, 252-3, 265, 271, 292-3, 345-6).

Poulantzas also suggested that basic research, technology, management, and

bureaucratic organization are always closely interwoven with the dominant ideology and

added that this involves specific material practices of ideological domination as well as

ideas (1974: 181, 236-8, 240, 255, 258; CSC: 195, 251-4, 255, 271, 274-5). Foucault is

especially well known, of course, for his explorations of the power-knowledge couplet in

the 1970s.

Seventh, both theorists noted the continuity between liberal democracy and fascist and

Stalinist forms of totalitarianism. Both stressed the common matrix of statehood, the

social construction and variability of the public-private distinction, the individualization of

political subjects, and the role of nationalism in the modern state – institutional factors

that shaped both political struggles in liberal democracies and in the totalitarian state

(FD 1970: 320-324; SPS: 72-74; EPS 79-81; Foucault Interviews). We should also note

that Foucault claimed that the ‘nonanalysis of fascism is one of the most important

political facts of the last thirty years’ – and that Poulantzas had made a special study of

the historical specificity of fascism following the Greek coup d’état in 1967 and claims

about the creeping fascisation of the French state after 1968 (Foucault 1977e [P/K:

139]; DE2 422; Poulantzas 1970). Poulantzas was also critical of Stalinism as a political

current from an early stage in his political development and, in later analyses of state

socialism, criticized the totalitarian nature of the Soviet state and the failings of the

command economy (SPS: 251-256; EPS: 277-283). Likewise, during the late 1970s,

both thinkers examined the restructuring of the postwar welfare state, new authoritarian

tendencies, and the rise of neo-liberalism (Foucault 1977a; Poulantzas EPS: 179-222).

Eighth, Poulantzas and Foucault both became interested in 'micro-revolts', rank-and-file

movements, and what Poulantzas termed ‘struggles at a distance from the state’.

Poulantzas's interest was stimulated by the role of popular movements in the

decomposition and collapse of the military dictatorships in Southern Europe in the

1970s and was reinforced by the growing politicization of branches of the state

apparatus in France in the same period as its personnel struggled in and against the

state (notably the police, magistracy, and lawyers) (CD: passim; 1976: passim).

Foucault's interest in micro-revolts was stimulated by the proliferation of protest

movements outside the workplace in the aftermath of May 1968 and he was notably

involved in the prison reform movement, women's liberation, the struggle for gay rights,

and the anti-psychiatry movement. Moreover, while Poulantzas criticized Foucault for

insisting that micro-revolts could only succeed if they remained dispersed and un-

coordinated, Foucault later accepted that different forms of resistance would need to be

readjusted, reinforced, and transformed by global strategies of societal transformation

(HS1: 96; 1977b [PK: 159]; DE2 201-2; 1977c [P/K: 203]; DE2 306-7; PTS: 60). Thus

both thinkers came to stress the need for a complex but coherent strategy towards new

social movements.

3. Eight Criticisms of Foucault and Some Possible Responses

Poulantzas and Foucault were by no means in full agreement. This can be seen in

Poulantzas’s explicit criticisms of Foucault in occasional incidental remarks and some

detailed comments. This is most striking in the criticisms developed in areas where the

above-noted convergences occurred. In contrast, Foucault made no direct references to

Poulantzas's work – or, indeed, to other contemporary Marxists, since he preferred

general problematization to detailed critique.7 This is reflected in regular attacks on

vulgar Marxism for its economism, its claim to have identified the origin of power in the

economy and/or class relations, and its view of the state as a sovereign political subject

that possessed and wielded a definite quantum of power from the top down (SP and

VS). He also attacked Marxism’s more general claims to scientificity at the expense of

alternative forms of knowledge (e.g., 1976b [P/K: 85-89]; DE2: 166-170). But his later

work also involves some interesting, if generally unacknowledged and perhaps

unintentional, convergences toward more sophisticated Marxist positions, including

Gramsci and Poulantzas.

I now present a synopsis of Poulantzas's criticisms, arranged in terms of seven of the

above-noted convergences between their positions. This approach abandons

Poulantzas's own fragmented order of presentation and also neglects Foucault's

positive contributions. But it should facilitate the subsequent argument. Before

proceeding, however, we should note that Poulantzas criticized the analytics of power

developed in Surveiller et Punir and Volonté de Savoir, which were published three and

two years respectively before l’État, le Pouvoir, le Socialisme (1978). Poulantzas did not

(or could not) take account of the lectures at the Collège de France (1976-79) in which

Foucault turned his attention to governmentality. These are especially interesting

because several lectures contain Foucault’s self-criticism for committing some of the

errors that Poulantzas identified in the two earlier texts (and for others that Poulantzas

did not identify). It would be very risky, if only for reasons of timing, to assume that

Foucault was responding to Poulantzas’s criticisms here.8 It is enough to note that these

self-criticisms and corrections occurred and led to greater convergence between their

respective positions than either thinker might have suspected.

First, Poulantzas criticized Foucault for relating the form of the modern state to its role in

individualizing the social and political body over which it exercised power. This meant,

according to Poulantzas, that Foucault ignored the state's real foundations in capitalist

relations of production and the class struggle. These foundations provided the key

element, of course, in Poulantzas's own account of the capitalist type of state (SPS: 75;

EPS: 82). Foucault would probably have responded that his earlier work had been

mainly concerned with the disciplinary normalization of the conduct of persons who

were not directly involved in capitalist production (e.g., asylums, prisons, schools,

barracks); that he had noted how the disciplinary techniques first developed in this

context were later deployed in factories to control the division of labour; that a key

aspect of the new anatomo-politics was to bind men to the productive apparatus and

facilitate a capitalist political economy of time based on abstract labour;9 and that the

rise of the modern state was certainly bound up with the problem of ‘population’ in its

relation to territory and wealth as reflected in the new science of ‘political economy’ (cf.

Foucault, 1977b [P/K: 161]; DE2 203-4; 1978b [F/E: 217-219]; DE2: 652-655)

Second, Poulantzas identified important differences on the question of power. He

criticized Foucault for arguing that power has no bases beyond the power relation itself

and therefore consists purely in the modalities of its exercise. He also criticized Foucault

and his followers for emphasizing the dispersion of powers at the expense of their

codification and condensation in and through the state. He insisted that class

domination is not inherent in the power relation as such but has precise bases in

economic exploitation, in the place of different classes in the various power apparatuses

and mechanisms outside the state, and in the state system itself. This means, according

to Poulantzas, that class power is determined in the first instance by the contrasting

positions occupied by different classes in the social division of labour. It is further

determined by their different forms of organization and their respective strategies in the

different fields of class struggle (SPS: 44, 147; EPS: 49, 161-162; cf. PPSC: 95, 105-7;

PPCS-I: 97, 108-111).

Whilst this critique might well apply to Foucault’s early analytics of power in Surveiller et

Punir, it does not hold for his later comments. For he argued, first, that his work on

technologies of power was not reducible to a metaphysics of Power with a capital P.

Thus, criticizing ‘some French "Marxists" [who] maintain that power for me is

"endogenous" and that I would like to construct a real and true ontological circle,

deducing power from power’, Foucault claims that he ‘always tried to do just the

opposite' (1978a: 185; DE2: 630). More specifically, he argues that power always

operates on pre-existing differentiations and can involve different media and

mechanisms, different objectives, different forms of institutionalization, different

rationalizations (1982: [Power: Essential Writings: 337, 344-5]; DE2: 1053; 1977b: [P/K:

164]; DE2 206). He likewise argued that relations of power are interwoven with other

kinds of relations (production, kinship, family, sexuality) for which they play at once a

conditioning and a conditioned role (Pouvoirs et Stratégies, 1977/2001: 425). And he

argued that types of power vary according to how these different aspects are

articulated. Thus Foucault distinguished four different models of power: an emphasis on

power and obedience (e.g., the monastery, penitentiary), on goal-directedness (e.g., the

workshop or hospital), on communication (e.g., apprenticeship), or saturation by all

three objectives (e.g., military discipline) (1982 [Power: Essential Writings: 338-339];

DE2: 1053-4; cf. 1973 [Power: Essential Writings: 83]; DE2 1486-88). Second, on state

power, whilst still arguing for the dispersion of powers, insisting that the state, for all its

omnipotence, does not occupy the whole field of power relations, and claiming that the

state can only operate on the basis of other, already existing power relations, Foucault

also conceded that the State invests and colonizes these other power relations in a

conditioning-conditioned relationship to generate a kind of ‘meta-power’ that renders its

own functioning possible (1977a: [P/K: 122-3]; DE2 150-1). Indeed, ‘power relations

have been progressively governmentalized, that is to say, elaborated, rationalized, and

centralized in the form of, or under the auspices of, state institutions’ (1982: [Power:

Essential Writings: 345]; DE2 1059-1060). This explains why Barret-Kriegel could later

note that 'Foucault's thought opened the way to a return to the study of the State and

the law' (1992: 192).

Third, Poulantzas argued that Foucault's analyses privilege 'power' over resistance.

Power is essentialized and absolute, resistances are reduced to secondary reactions to

power. Foucault could not, therefore, explain resistance. At best he understood it as the

product of a natural, primordial plebeian spirit of resistance that seeks to escape from all

power relations but is always re-absorbed as soon as the 'plebs' adopts a specific

power strategy. In contrast, for Poulantzas, the limits to power are inherent in its very

mechanisms. For these mechanisms always incorporate and condense the struggles of

the dominated classes without being able to fully integrate and absorb them. Indeed,

Poulantzas insisted that the class struggle always has primacy over the institutions and

apparatuses of power (SPS: 149-52; EPS: 163-165). Again, Foucault might have

responded that he had moved away from a reliance on plebeian instincts to explain

resistance because his work on assujettissement and technologies of the self had

shown how independent bases might develop from which to resist the exercise of power

(0000). He also argued that Revolution involves the subversive codification of a whole

number of power relations same relations (1977a: [P/K: 122-3]; DE2: 150-1).

Fourth, Foucault allegedly committed two complementary errors in analyzing power.

For, while he stressed only the repressive, prohibitive side of law, he stressed only the

positive, productive side of disciplinary (state) power. In contrast, argued Poulantzas,

law and the state both organize repression and police measures and both are actively

involved in defining social relations and winning mass support. These errors led

Foucault to exaggerate both the general significance of disciplinary techniques in the

modern state and their particular role as a productive and positive force in securing

compliance. This meant in turn that he ignored the continued importance of violence,

legal-police networks, and law more generally in backing up these techniques. In

particular, Foucault ignored the positive roles of constitutional and administrative law in

codifying and regulating the exercise of organized public violence and of law more

generally in providing a framework for pursuing interests in a peaceful, consensual

manner. Likewise, in arguing that disciplinary normalization operated through

internalized repression, Foucault ignored the indirect role played by coercion in

sustaining the web of disciplinary and ideological mechanisms. He also understated the

continued importance of overt violence in the state's activities and therefore

exaggerated the break between the feudal and modern states (SPS: 77-78; EPS 84-

87).

Once again, Poulantzas’s criticisms were well directed at Foucault’s earlier analytics of

power but did not (or could not) take account of Foucault’s later rejection of such

positions. Thus Foucault went on to concede that he had overemphasized disciplinary

power in adopting the Nietzschean repressive hypothesis and so began to focus on the

‘art of government’ (the conduct of conduct) as a means of securing the active

complicity of the subjects of power in their own self-regulation. When we consider

Foucault’s later analyses of liberalism, the Ordo-liberals, and the Chicago School, for

example, it becomes clear that he, too, is aware of the complex articulation and mutual

implications of direct repression, constitutional law, police measures, and self-

regulation.

Fifth, Poulantzas argued that the significance of the link between power and knowledge

should not be overstressed. For Poulantzas himself these merely complemented and

reinforced the primary and spontaneous forms of ideology secreted into the state

system and/or into political practices from the capitalist relations of production and the

social division of labour (SPS: 66; EPS: 72). In particular, he gave much greater weight

to the general role of the mental-manual division of labour than did Foucault (SPS: 59-

62; EPS: 59-68). Given his views on the science/ideology distinction and his preference

for the analysis of truth regimes, this is one area where Foucault could not move

towards Poulantzas’s theoretical positions.

Sixth, Poulantzas argues that Foucault’s analyses are ultimately descriptive and, worse

still, functionalist. In this context, he cites SP on the panopticon’s role in functioning on

behalf of power (SPS: 67-68; EPS: 74-5). Foucault addresses such claims (not

necessarily as leveled by Poulantzas), however, in his rather disingenuous insistence in

a couple of interviews that he had never described Bentham’s Panopticon as a practical

model for the exercise of power. On the contrary, it was an ideal-typical construction

that was never implemented (references to follow). But Poulantzas might well have

responded that, whatever the historical status of Bentham’s design, Foucault certainly

did describe the genealogy of ‘panopticism’ as a distinctive technique, technology, or

diagram of power that could be found in many different institutional sites, that came to

characterize the nineteenth century disciplinary society, and that, whatever its complex

genealogy, was subsequently mobilized in the service of industrial capitalism (see

below).

Seventh, Poulantzas claimed that Foucault neglected the spatio-temporal matrix of the

state (SPS: 69; EPS: 75-77). This claim can be readily conceded because the state was

never central to Foucault’s analyses but, pace Poulantzas, we should note that Foucault

was a spatially sensitive theorist (see especially Elden 1999) and was also interested in

the temporal dimensions of the art of government.

Finally, Poulantzas criticized Foucault's approach to political strategy. Foucault had

once insisted that micro-revolts could only succeed if their supporters refused to be

incorporated into the state and instead concentrated on subverting it from the outside.

Indeed new social movements should also resist any coordination by overarching

political organizations (such as political parties) since this could lead to their re-

absorption into the state system. For Poulantzas it was essential to combine new social

movements and struggles for direct democracy with radical changes in the

representative institutions of the state system. He claimed that it is impossible to locate

oneself outside (state) power because popular struggles necessarily have an effect on

the state (and other power mechanisms) even when the masses are physically

excluded from (political) participation. He also claimed that an abstentionist strategy

might simply clear the path to an enhanced statism. Poulantzas's preferred strategy

involved participation inside the mechanisms of power to intensify their internal

contradictions and conflicts. This need not result in complete absorption and loss of

autonomy. For whether or not the dominated classes are integrated into these

mechanisms depends on the specific strategies they pursue and does not follow simply

from the fact that they have adopted a strategy of involvement. Provided that these

strategies are designed to maintain the autonomy of the masses they will never be fully

integrated. But Poulantzas added that the masses should also pursue struggles at a

distance from the state. They should develop direct, rank-and-file democracy and

introduce self-management networks and this would facilitate a democratic transition to

democratic socialism (SPS: 153; EPS: 168-169).

Some Hidden Parallels

I now turn to the hidden parallels between the work of Poulantzas and Foucault. These

are all the more interesting and significant precisely because Poulantzas was so critical

of much of Foucault's work on the analytics of power. Parallels can are found in the

following areas: their insistence on the ubiquity of power and the state; their insistence

on the immanence of power within social relations and of the state inside the mode of

production; their approach to diachronic relations in terms of a primitive source of

resistance in plebeian qualities or 'class instincts'; and, finally, their inability to provide a

satisfactory account of the relation between what they themselves treat as the 'micro-'

and 'macro-levels' of power.

1. Ubiquity of Power and/or the State

Foucault held that power is immanent in all social relations. He insisted that 'relations of

power are not in a position of exteriority with respect to other types of relationships

(economic processes, knowledge relationships, sexual relations), but are immanent in

the latter' (HS1: 94). Elsewhere he argued 'that power is "always already there", that

one is never "outside" it, that there are no "margins" for those who break with the

system to gambol in' (PK: 141). Poulantzas also argued that all social relation are

relations of power and firmly rejected a 'topological image of exteriority' in examining the

relation between the state and other fields (SPS: 17, 25-7, 35-9, 44, 146-8, 167) (‘une

figure topologique d’extériorité’, EPS: 18, 28-30, 39-44, 49, 160-162, 184). More

significantly still, he claimed that, 'once the state is admitted, we cannot imagine any

social phenomenon (any knowledge, power, language, or writing) having a primitive,

pre-political existence: all social phenomena always occur in relation to the state and

class division' (SPS: 39, corrected translation; cf. 37, 43) (‘on ne peut penser, une fois

l’État posé, un reel social quelconque (un savoir, un pouvoir, une langue, une écriture)

figurant un état premier par rapport à l’État, mais un reel social toujours en relation avec

l’État et avec la division en classes’, EPS: 44; cf. 41-42, 48). In short, once given class-

divided societies, the state is inscribed in all social relations.

2. Diagram and Mode of Production

Foucault and Poulantzas emphasized the hidden unity of social relations achieved

through the dominance of a given form of power. For Poulantzas, the structural matrix of

the dominant mode of production pervaded all social relations and it was the state's

special responsibility to invest the different sites of power and assign them appropriate

class pertinence. In contrast, Foucault deployed the concept of the 'diagram'. This refers

to a distinctive formula for power, a specific technology of power, a definite mode of

political domination (or sur-pouvoir). Thus Foucault contrasted the monarchical formula

of medieval society with the 'panopticism' of the disciplinary society. He considered

Bentham's design for a modern, disciplinary penitentiary (the Panopticon) as 'the

diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form ... a figure of political

technology that may and must be detached from any specific use' (DP: 205). And he

argued that the panoptic scheme spread throughout the social body. In this sense the

‘prison form’ can also be found in hospitals, workshops, schools, barracks, and, indeed,

to any social space. The panoptic diagram thereby became 'the general principle of a

'new political anatomy' whose object and end are not the relations of sovereignty but the

relations of discipline' (DP: 208; cf. 215-6, 223).

In this sense, although Foucault emphasized the multiplicity of dispersed micro-power

relations, he also argued that they typically involve the same forces, means, or

techniques of power. This poses a problem for Foucault similar to that in Poulantzas's

claim about the all-pervading nature of production relations. Thus, whereas Poulantzas

risked reducing every social relation to a class relation through its subsumption under a

dominant mode of production, Foucault risked denying the specificity of different social

relations by emphasizing their use of the same technique of power. Thus, while

Poulantzas tends to treat all social relations as capitalist relations, Foucault tends to

reduce capitalist relations (e.g., in the labour process) to disciplinary relations (1982

[Power: Essential Writings: 337-342]; DE2 1051-1057) (on this latter tendency, see

Ewald, 1975: 1240-6). This is reflected in how the two theorists understood struggles.

Foucault argued that 'the main objective of these struggles is to attack not so much

"such or such" an institution of power, or group, or elite, or class, but rather a technique,

a form of power' (1982 [Power: Essential Writings: 331]: DE2 1046). Likewise

Poulantzas tended to argue that struggles are ultimately class struggles because they

are rooted in the social division of labour and seek to transform it (SPS: passim; EPS:

passim). Thus, if capitalist relations of production were Poulantzas’s principal point of

reference, the main reference point in Foucault’s analyses was the technology of power

(on Foucault's concept of diagram, see: Deleuze 1975).

3. Plebeian Spirits and Class Instincts

Another parallel occurs in these theorists' accounts of power and resistance. In

attempting to explain resistance Foucault was forced back to 'something in the social

body, in classes, groups, and individuals themselves which in some sense escapes

relations of power ... an inverse energy, a discharge ... a plebeian quality or aspect'

(1977e: [P/K: 138]; DE2: 421). This remark shows a clear debt to the nouveau

philosophe, André Glucksmann (1975, 1977), who had already demoted the role of the

proletariat and Marxist intellectuals in favour of the revolutionary potential of the plebs.

Later, in Volonté de Savoir, Foucault grounded resistance in the simple celebration of

bodies and pleasures in the plural, in their specificity; and, more generally, in

genealogies and historical knowledge to provide a link between power and subjugated

knowledge (cf. Lemert and Gillan 1982: 89, 91). Poulantzas scorned resort to a spirit of

refusal that was treated as an essence, as absolute, and as external to any specific

power relation (SPS: 150; EPS: 166). He preferred to ground class resistance in the

contradiction or antagonism between the exploiting and exploited, oppressing and

oppressed, classes (SPS: 27, 36, 38, 44-5, 148, 174; EPS: 30, 40, 42, 49-50, 162-3,

192-3). But, when Poulantzas tried to explain the origins of such class resistance, his

answer was no more satisfactory than Foucault's.

Poulantzas claimed that subordinate classes can be contaminated by the dominant

ideology and adopt positions inconsistent with their own class interests. Thus even the

working class risked being permanently absorbed into the web of bourgeois domination.

Yet Poulantzas argued that 'even under the effects of bourgeois ideology, there still

always breaks through in the working class what Lenin referred to as "class instinct"'

(CCC: 288; cf. 16-17, 31, 276) ‘sous les effets mêmes de l’idéologie bourgeoise dans la

classe ouvrière pointe toujours ce que Lénine désignait comme “instinct de classe”’

(CSC: 308; cf. 19-20, 36, 294). For Lenin the concept of 'class instinct' was basically

descriptive. Poulantzas tried to provide a stronger basis for class instincts in what he

described as the constant resurgence in working class practices of a structurally-

determined opposition to its exploitation in the factory and material production (CCC:

16, 288; CSC: 19, 308). But this appears to resurrect the discredited economistic and

teleological claim that a 'class-in-itself' will eventually emerge and/or to assume a

philosophical anthropology in which men naturally react against exploitation and

oppression. Such arguments are little different from Foucault's views on plebeian spirits.

Elsewhere Poulantzas emphasized the role of ideology in determining even the

'spontaneous' revolt of the dominant classes. This suggests that it is wrong to posit an

essential and absolute 'class instinct' of resistance external to any specific class

relation. For resistance can never exist outside ideology and is thus always contingent

and relative. Poulantzas seems to concede this when he writes that, 'in the context of

the rise of fascism, this "class instinct", cut off from Marxist-Leninist ideology and facing

these particular forms of petty-bourgeois ideology (sc. anarcho-syndicalism,

spontaneism, and the cult of violence), foundered under the influence of the latter'

(1970: 146). In short, insofar as Poulantzas seeks to move beyond a notion of 'class

instinct', he is forced to admit the contingency, relativity, and variability of class struggle.

This would force him to provide historical accounts of specific class struggles and

thereby adopt a more Foucauldian, genealogical approach. Moreover, regarding new

social movements and non-class struggles, Poulantzas did not even offer an 'instinctual'

explanation for resistance to non-class forms of oppression.

4. Micro-Diversity and Macro-Necessity

A fourth parallel concerns the attempts to bridge the gap between diversity at the

micro-level and relative unity at the macro-level of social relations. Poulantzas and

Foucault adopted the same basic distinction – treating the micro-level in terms of

specific institutional sites of power and equating the macro-level with individual societies

whose boundaries coincide with those of a nation-state. In this context, Foucault's

starting point was the multitude of dispersed micro-powers and technologies of power.

He cautioned against a priori judgments about their underlying unity in a massive and

primal condition of domination; and he was particularly critical of the view that a central

instance, such as the state, could secure their unity. Poulantzas certainly did start out

from a massive and primal condition of domination – the social division of labour and

class struggle. Moreover, although he recognized that non-class relations could be

secondary sites of power and resistance, he always stressed their links to class

struggle. The state has a crucial role here because it invests all other areas of society

with ‘class pertinence’ and is the central site for the exercise of power in regard to class

and non-class struggles alike. For other domains of power could be only substantially

modified when the state had been transformed (SPS: 44; EPS: 49).

The contrast here is doubly deceptive. For, on the one hand, Poulantzas came to see

the state as an ensemble of distinct circuits of power, networks, and apparatuses that

pursue a multiplicity of diversified micro-policies. Indeed, in describing how class

contradictions are reproduced in the state apparatus and depicting its various

mechanisms of structural selectivity, Poulantzas continually drew attention to the

prodigious incoherence and chaotic character of state policies (SPS: 132, 135-6, 229;

EPS: 144, 148-9, 254-255; cf. 1970: 329-30; CD: 49-50, 84; CD: 51-53, 86-87). This

appears to confirm Foucault's claim that power should be studied in terms of the

'microphysics of power' rather than some overall principle of class domination and

undermines the assumption that the state embodies a binary structure of class power.

Indeed Poulantzas once confessed that he had turned to Foucault in EPS in an attempt

to break with the dogmatic Marxism found in Althusserian structuralism. Agreeing that

he had adopted a new language, he explained that 'I am approaching some new

problems and am thus at a stage of exploration'. He added that 'it is especially in

discussing the theses of Michel Foucault that I have been led to “coquette” my language

and this is particularly true when it comes to the analysis of the techniques of power'

(Poulantzas 1978b).

Nonetheless Poulantzas still tried to explain how micro-diversity culminates in the

macro-necessity of bourgeois domination. He treated the state as 'a strategic field and

process of intersecting power networks ... traversed by tactics which are often highly

explicit at the restricted level of their inscription in the state: they intersect and conflict

with one another, finding their targets in some apparatuses or being short-circuited by

others, and eventually map out that general line of force, the state's policy, which

traverses confrontations within the state' (SPS: 136) (‘un champ et un processus

stratégiques, où s’entrecroisent des noeuds et des réseaux de pouvoir … Ce champ

stratégique est traversé de tactiques souvent fort explicites au niveau limité où elles

s’inscrivent dans l’État, tactiques qui s’encroisement, se combattent, trouvent des points

d’impact dans certains appareils, se font court-circuiter par d’autres et dessinent

finalement ce qu’on appelle “la politique” de l’État, ligne de force générale qui traverse

les affrontements au sein de l’État’, EPS: 149). This general line of force does not

emerge automatically from the institutional logic of the state system. Nor is it due to the

successful application of a coherent global project formulated at the apex of the state

and known in advance (SPS: 33, 136; EPS: 36, 149). Indeed, even though the state

might openly discuss the strategies and tactics required to reproduce political class

domination, the best strategy often emerges only ex post through the collision of

mutually opposed tactics (SPS: 32-33, 135-7; EPS: 36, 148-150). In this sense, the

general line of force is a complex resultant of interaction between the state's institutional

structure and the clash of specific strategies and tactics.

On the other hand, while Foucault certainly suggested beginning with the specificities of

different mechanisms of power at the lowest levels, he increasingly focused on their

investment and annexation by ever more general mechanisms and integrated into

global forms of domination (1976b [P/K: 99]; DE2 180-1; cf. PTS: 39; HS1: 94, 99-100;

1991, 2003). Indeed, he recognized that the interconnections among the different forms

of power

delineate general conditions of domination, and this domination is organized

into a more-or-less coherent and unitary strategic form; that dispersed,

heteromorphous, localized procedures of power are adapted, reinforced and

transformed by these global strategies, all this being accompanied by numerous

phenomena of inertia, displacement, and resistance; hence one should not

assume a massive and primal condition of domination, a binary structure with

'dominators' on one side and 'dominated' on the other, but rather a multiform

production of relations of domination which are partially susceptible of

integration into overall strategies (1977e: [P/K: 142]; DE2 425; cf. HS1: 94).

dessine des faits généraux de domination, que cette domination s’organise en

stratégie plus ou moins cohérente et unitaire; que les procedures disperses,

hétéromorphes et locales de pouvoir sont réajustées, renforcées, transformées

par ces strategies globales et tout cela avec des phénomenènes nombreux

d’inertie, de décalages, de resistances; qu’il ne faut donc pas se donner un fait

premier et massif de domination (une structure binaire avec d’un côté les

“dominants” et de l’autre les “dominées”), mais plutôt une production multiforme

de rapports de domination qui sont partiellement intégrables a des strategies

d’ensemble (DE2 245).

Moreover, in addressing this emergent pattern of domination, Foucault referred to the

'general line of force that traverses local confrontations' and links them together (HS1:

94; paraphrased in SPS: 136; EPS: 149). And, in describing this general line, Foucault

invoked concepts such as 'social hegemonies', 'hegemonic effects', 'hegemony of the

bourgeoisie', 'meta-power', 'class domination', 'sur-pouvoir' (or a 'surplus power'

analogous to surplus value), 'global strategy', and so forth (e.g., HS1: 92-3, 94, 1977b

[P/K: 156]; DE2 199; 1977a [P/K: 122]; DE2 151; 1977f [P/K: 188], DE2 232; DP: 223;

and PTS: 60). He also gave a privileged role to the state as the point of strategic

codification of the multitude of power relations and the apparatus in which hegemony,

meta-power, class domination, or 'sur-pouvoir' are crystallized (e.g., PTS: 39; HS1: 92,

141; Two Lectures [PK: 101] DE2 182-184; 1977a [P/K: 122], DE2 151; 1977c [P/K:

199-200]; DE2 303). In short, in developing his political anatomy of power, Foucault

allowed for a relatively unified pattern of domination across dispersed micro-powers that

is secured through ‘the strategic aims of the state apparatus’ (Sheridan 1980: 219; cf.

Foucault 1977c [P/K: 199-200]; DE2 303). This becomes even more evident in his work

on the periodization of different forms of statecraft, distinguishing between pastoral

care, the disciplinary society, and liberal governmentality (Foucault 1991; 2003).

The paradox of outspoken opposition to vulgar Marxism and implicit adoption of Marxian

(and, by implication, Poulantzasian) positions is similar to the contrast between

Poulantzas’s rejection of Foucault as an epistemologist and general theorist and his

tactical adoption of ideas from Foucault as an analyst of power. This is why Balibar can

advance the following general ‘hypothesis’ on the Marx-Foucault relation:

this strategic complexity follows a general format, which is repeated several

times, in which a movement is made from a break to a tactical alliance, the first

involving a global critique of Marxism as a "theory"; the second a partial usage

of Marxist tenets or affirmations compatible with Marxism. One might even

suggest that the latter become at the same time more and more limited and

more and more specifically Marxist. Thus, in contradictory fashion, the

opposition to Marxist "theory" grows deeper and deeper whilst the convergence

of the analyses and concepts taken from Marx becomes more and more

significant. It should be added that it is not when Foucault most often quotes

Marx that he most uses him, nor is it when he has been reading Marx most

clearly that Foucault puts forward the most radical critiques of him' (Balibar

1992: 53).

This movement is also seen in Foucault's changing views on micro-revolts and political

struggle. For, whilst he did celebrate the infinite dispersion of scattered resistances and

micro-revolts, he later conceded the need for resistances to be readjusted, reinforced,

and transformed by global strategies of transformation. Foucault noted that resistances

needed co-ordination in the same way that the dominant class organized its strategies

to secure its own 'sur-pouvoir' (or political preponderance) in diverse power relations

(HS1: 96; PK: 159, 203; PTS: 60). Thus we find him moving closer to positions

advanced by Poulantzas in EPS and this means that Poulantzas's critique of Foucault

therein was misdirected or, at least, given Foucault’s continuing theoretical

development, premature.

Thus, despite their contrasting starting points at different ends of a micro-macro

continuum that they nonetheless conceived in more or less identical terms, Poulantzas

and Foucault seem to have agreed that the overall unity of a system of domination must

be explained in terms of a strategic codification of power relations. This process is both

intentional and nonsubjective. It is intentional because no power is exercised without a

series of aims and objectives, which are often highly explicit at the limited level of their

inscription in local sites of power (HS1: 94; cf. Poulantzas's paraphrase in SPS: 136;

EPS: 149). Foucault refers here to explicit programmes for reorganizing institutions,

rearranging spaces, regulating behaviours (1980: 9). But it is non-subjective because

the overall outcome of the clash of micro-powers cannot be understood as resulting

from the choice or decision of an individual, group, or class subject (cf. Foucault HS1:

94-5; Poulantzas SPS: 32-3, 136; EPS: 35-36, 149). Things never work out as planned

because 'there are different strategies which are mutually opposed, composed, and

superposed so as to produce permanent and solid effects which can perfectly well be

understood in terms of their rationality, even though they don't conform to the initial

programming; this is what gives the resulting apparatus (dispositif) its solidity and

suppleness' (Foucault 1980: 10). Or, as Foucault expressed it in another place: 'the

logic is perfectly clear, the aims decipherable, and yet it is often the case that no one is

there to have invented them, and few can be said to have formulated them' (HS1: 95).

Likewise, for Poulantzas, the state's policy is still decipherable as a strategic calculation

– but this is not the result of the rational formulation of a coherent global project but

stems from the conflictual coordination of explicit and diversified micro-policies and

tactics (SPS: 33, 136; EPS: 36, 149).

Beyond Poulantzas and Foucault

A useful starting point for moving beyond Poulantzas and Foucault is the work of the

self-professed post-Marxist theorists, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. In using

some of their ideas below I do not mean to endorse all of their theoretical and political

arguments (for critiques, see Jessop, 1982: 191-202; and 1990: 288-302). But their

approach to articulation remains highly relevant to the concerns of Poulantzas and

Foucault. For they treat the general field of the interdiscursive as a complex series of

'elements' available for integration into specific discourses. The latter fix the meaning of

these elements in relation to an overall discursive system and thereby transform them

into relatively fixed 'moments' in that discourse. But they also argue that no discourse

can totally fix the meaning of these moments (there is always polyvalence and a surplus

of meaning) and that no element is totally without some points of articulation with

discourses (1985).

In these terms, whereas Foucault started from the fluidity of the 'elements' in a

polyvalent and unstable series of micro-relations of forces, Poulantzas began from the

fixity of the 'moments' of a class-based division of labour. In focusing on fluid 'elements',

Foucault could find no solid base for power structures, interests, or resistance. Thus he

oscillated between (a) a sociological amorphy in which resistance was grounded in a

philosophical anthropology of 'plebeian instincts' or, later, the celebration of bodies and

pleasures and (b) a crude class reductionism in which stable societal structures derive

from the global strategies of the bourgeoisie and/or from the imperatives of capital

accumulation (see particularly DP and PK: 156). Conversely, in focusing on the fixed

class 'moments' Poulantzas could only ground power structures, interests, and

resistance in the relations of production. Thus, although he tried to integrate greater

complexity into his analysis, he could only do so by elaborating the concepts of class

analysis in ever-greater profusion and introducing ever more incoherence into the

mechanisms of political class domination. In short, the distinction between 'elements'

and 'moments' enables us to identify why Foucault and Poulantzas tended to return to

their respective starting points.

The same distinction also suggests a way forward. For it enables us to question both

the necessity of a given macro-social order and the apparent contingency of the micro-

relations on which it is constructed. The solution to the problem of micro-diversity and

macro-necessity sought by Foucault and Poulantzas can be found in the non-necessary

correspondence among different elements that have been integrated into global projects

and thereby transformed into relatively stable moments of a macro-social order. This

implies that there are a variety of possible macro-social orders (each with its own

surplus of meaning and range of relatively unincorporated elements) rather than one

uniquely necessary macro-social order (that links all the elements in a society as stable

moments of an integrated society). It also implies that the diversity of micro-social

relations has its limits. For, although individual relations or institutions can be

considered in isolation as polyvalent elements without any fixity, they are typically

integrated into longer chains and systems of elements, which restrict their fluidity and

lability. Specific practices must exploit the polyvalent potential of individual relations – to

deconstruct some chains of meaning and power and construct others. Not all such

attempts at disarticulation and rearticulation will succeed. This is where notions such as

the strategic selectivity of specific institutional ensembles, the balance of forces, and

strategies of domination can be deployed as part of the analytic of power in order to

understand the nature and limits of political projects.

Foucault and Poulantzas seem to have been moving in this direction in their final work.

Thus Poulantzas's account of state power as a social relation examined the state form

as a strategic terrain and the role of strategies themselves in transforming the balance

of forces. In Volonté de Savoir, Foucault had already observed how relations of force

constitute their own organization by forming relatively fixed chains and systems (HS1:

92-3). Later he noted that an analysis of power relations must establish four key points:

(a) a system of differentiations that permits a given agent to act on the actions of others;

(b) objectives held by those who so act; (c) means of bringing power relations into

being; (d) institutional sites; and (e) degrees of rationalization of the strategies (1982:

223-4). The first item is particularly significant. For, in dealing with difference, it points to

the discursive construction of difference (the transformation of elements into moments)

as the basis of a stable exercise of power. At the same time Foucault's reference to

means and institutional sites helps him avoid reducing power relations to a set of mere

decisions or acts of will.

Indeed Foucault noted two ways in which diverse micro-elements can be linked into an

overall project:

On the one hand, there is a process of functional overdetermination, because

each effect -- positive or negative, intentional or unintentional -- enters into

resonance or contradiction with the others and thereby calls for a readjustment

or a re-working of the heterogeneous elements that surface at various points.

On the other hand, there is a perpetual process of strategic elaboration. ... This

is what I call the strategic completion (remplissement) of the apparatus (1977c:

[P/K: 195, 196]).

Processus de surdétermination fonctionelle, d’une part, puisque chaque effect,

positif et négatif, voulu ou non voulu, vient entre en resonance, ou en

contradiction, avec les autres, et appelle à une reprise, à un réajustement, des

elements hétérogènes qui surgiessent ça et là. Processus de perpetual

remplissement stratégique, d’autre part. … Voilà ce que j’appelle le

remplissement stratégique du dispositif’ (1977c, DE2 299, 300).

Gordon provides a useful insight on Foucault’s definition of strategy:

‘the minimum force of rationality pertaining to the exercise of power in general

which consists in the mobile set of operations whereby a multiplicity of

heterogeneous elements (forces, resources, the features of a terrain, the

disposition and relation of objects in space-time) are invested with a particular

functionality relative to a dynamic and variable set of objectives. Strategy is the

exploitation of possibilities which it itself discerns and creates' (Gordon 1991:

39).

This comment brings out clearly the interaction between strategic discourses and

strategic terrains and their implications for the relative fluidity or fixity of the elements in

the play of power and strategy.

In adopting such an approach, however, one should note that global projects are only

tendential attempts at totalization. Global strategies have no abstract unifying function

but must always be related to specific technologies of power, sites of strategic

intervention, and particular policies. In turn societies must be understood as products of

a dispersed plurality of practices with no necessary centre or unifying principle. In this

sense neither Poulantzas nor Foucault went far enough. Each implied that societies

could be considered as a global site (the 'macro-level') and should be analyzed 'as if'

there were a global strategy. They both argued that social order at this level could be

understood as a process of strategic calculation without a calculating subject. This

involves two basic problems. It assumes a macro-site of social relations that is located

at the level of societies and then treats this as the focus of a global strategy. But,

without a global calculating subject, can one really posit a global strategy; and, if there

are doubts whether societies really exist and are endowed with a distinctive unity, can

one assume that there is a privileged global site of strategic calculation?

An alternative approach would adopt a strictly relational approach to global strategies

(cf. Wickham 1983). From this perspective, a global strategy attempts to subtend and

articulate a number of smaller sites of power relations within its orbit. In Foucauldian

terms, it attempts to structure the possible field and scope of action on the smaller sites

(Foucault 1982 [Power: Essential Writings: 341]; DE2 1056). These smaller sites

nonetheless continue to have an independent existence (to enjoy their own relative

autonomy, if you like) and to constitute potential sites of structural recalcitrance and/or

social resistance to the global strategy. Different global strategies will seek to articulate

different smaller sites so that the global sites on which these strategies operate will also

differ. In this context the notion of global must be understood relatively, that is, a

strategy is global only in relation to its own smaller sites. A global strategy may itself

constitute a 'smaller' site for an even more ambitious strategy (Wickham 1983).

This means that there is no macro-necessity in social relations and no reason to

privilege societies as the essential site of macro-social order. All we have are attempts

to constitute contingently necessary global systems on different sites and in relation to

different sets of smaller power relations. Alternative global strategies will condense and

transform different sets of conflicts and contradictions in and through a state system

whose precise nature will vary with the problems it confronts. In turn this means that we

must think of a plurality of possible global strategies even within the framework of one

nation-state – whose precise nature, social boundaries, cohesive capacities, and

dynamics will differ according to which global strategy (if any) becomes dominant.

Such an approach also offers a better understanding of resistance. For it is in the fixing

of differences and the articulation of different subject positions that the antagonisms that

produce resistance originate. Crucial to understanding these mechanisms is the

distinction between the general field of the discursive and the specific fields constituted

by particular discourses. This is reflected in the distinction between floating elements in

the self-identities of persons and groups (as empirical referents) and the attempts to fix

these elements into a particular system of differences. Resistance is rooted in the first

instance in the availability of alternative meanings in the elements and in agents'

attachment to meanings that are contrary to those which are being imposed through

particular meaning systems. There is no primal source of resistance, whether in

plebeian or class instincts: resistance is always a contingent effect of contrary or

contradictory attempts at specifying subjects, their identities and interests (for an

analogous attempt to rescue Foucault's approach to resistance, see Philp 1983).

Finally, in developing this approach we can also provide an account of interests. One

must reject attempts to root interests in a material substratum of relations (e.g., class

interests, gender antagonisms grounded in patriarchal domination) with all the problems

this poses for explaining the movement from latent to manifest conflicts of interest.

Instead interests should be introduced as secondary effects of resistance-engendering

differences. They are secondary because interests are always relative, relational,

conjunctural, and strategic. They are relative because a given situation is only ever

more or less in one's interests than some specified alternative(s) (cf. Barry 1965). They

are relational because the opportunity to advance or defend one’s interests depends on

the relations of force that obtain in a given context. They are conjunctural because

different conjunctures will entail different sets of alternatives among which to assess

interests. This implies that they are related to specific spatio-temporal horizons of action

(e.g., in the contrast between short- and long-term interests or between individual and

national interests). And they are strategic because different conceptions of strategy

imply different conceptions of interests, alliances, tactics, and so on. Thus a

thoroughgoing strategic-relational approach involves a basic reformulation of the key

concepts involved in power analysis.

This focus on macro-micro issues could be seen as marginal in various ways. First,

Richard Marsden, adopting a critical realist reading of Foucault has suggested that:

'Marx explains "why", that is, he describes the imperative of the social structure that

facilitates and constrains social action, but he does not explain "how", Foucault explains

"how", that is, he describes the mechanisms of power; but he does not explain "why",

the motive or purpose of disciplinary power' (Marsden 1999: 149; on the distinction

between why and how [comment et pourquoi], see also Foucault 1982: [P/K: 336-7],

DE2 1051-2). But this can easily be rephrased in micro-macro terms. For Foucault’s

answer to the ‘how’ question provides some of the micro-foundations necessary to

sustain Marx’s answer to the ‘why’ question of the macro-dynamic of capital

accumulation. Second, and more pointedly, Étienne Balibar has commented that, if

there is an irreducible divergence between Foucault and Marx, it does not lie in the

contrast between the microphysics and macrophysics of power (local and global) but in

the opposition between the Marxian logic of contradiction (in which the power relation is

only a strategic moment) and Foucault’s logical structure of power relations (in which

contradiction is but one possible configuration) (1992: 52). This would be a powerful

criticism if one could readily subsume the dynamics of social order entirely under the

logic of capital accumulation and its contradictions. It is less persuasive, however, if one

accepts, with Poulantzas, that the struggle for hegemony (and a key role for the state in

this regard) articulating non-contradictory social relations with the changing imperatives

of capital accumulation. This introduces a degree of contingency into the ensemble of

social relations and leaves it open whether the contradictory logic of capital

accumulation is always the principal aspect of all social formations or whether there are

alternatives principles of societalization. This is a question for which both Poulantzas

and Foucault provide us with fruitful but partial conceptual toolkits.

Conclusions

There are major differences between the work of Foucault and Poulantzas that

persisted over their intellectually productive years. Poulantzas was a committed Marxist

theorist, reflected deeply on the problems of Marxist theory, was especially concerned

to develop a theory of the capitalist state and state power, focused on a distinctive,

capitalist type of state rather than the modern state more generally, was more interested

in this type of state after it had been consolidated than its genealogy, and, even when

interested in other topics, related them closely to the nature of the state as a social

relation. In contrast, Foucault rejected Marxism as a grand theory that claimed an

exclusive scientific status but occasionally flirted with Marxist notions, reflected deeply

on the arbitrariness of claims to theoretical truth but changed his approach to this

problem over the years, experienced a succession of theoretical ruptures in his

theoretical object and methodological assumptions, focused on the genealogy of the

state in emergent capitalist societies, and generally prioritized other topics over the

analysis of the state. Nonetheless, as Foucault’s theoretical interests shifted from the

micro-physics of the disciplinary society and its anatomo-politics to the more general

strategic codification of a plurality of discourses, practices, technologies of power, and

institutional ensembles around a specific governmental rationality concerned with the

social body (bio-power) in a consolidated capitalist society, we can identify a growing

convergence in his work towards ideas and arguments that can be found in Poulantzas.

Conversely, as Poulantzas’s theoretical interests shifted from the attempt to develop an

autonomous Marxist science of politics towards the state as the institutional

condensation of a changing balance of social forces, he became increasingly interest in

the relevance of Foucault’s work on power and strategy to his own state-theoretical

project.

Poulantzas was more strongly influenced by Foucault than is recognized in accounts of

his work that read him as a structural Marxist. This influence involves more than a

simple flirtation with Foucault's language. For he and Foucault came to share crucial

assumptions about power and strategy and the sources of the relative unity and

cohesion of social formations. They do not invoke power as a principle of explanation

external to specific social relations but as a relational phenomenon that itself needs

explanation. In developing this approach, they highlighted in their different ways the

strategic nature of power relations and the important role that the articulation of different

sites, modalities, and rationales of power plays in stabilizing (or destabilizing) individual

sites. This rules out any general theory of power in favour of specific historical accounts

of the contingently necessary construction of particular patterns of social order and

disorder. But neither analyst recognized the problems involved in starting from a micro-

macro continuum whose twin poles are defined as specific institutional sites and a

society whose boundaries are defined by the nation-state. Thus, while they emphasized

one or other pole of the continuum respectively, each thinker oscillated in his

arguments. Only by reformulating the poles of the continuum along which they moved

can one eliminate their inconsistencies. It is essential to question the necessary fixity of

the macro-level and the apparent fluidity of the micro-level. This broadens the space

within which the sort of analyses of power and strategy favoured by Poulantzas and

Foucault can be applied. It undercuts Poulantzas's tendency to explain all social

relations in terms of a necessary class domination and Foucault's tendency to deny the

existence of macro-social order in favour of a nominalist emphasis on the diversity of

the micro-social. Global strategies can then be seen as means of reducing the

complexity of social relations and fixing them in a temporary, provisional, and always

unstable way. As means for the self-description and self-identity of societies such

strategies necessarily simplify the real pattern of social relations and thereby

marginalize alternative interpretations and strategies. Thus a surplus of meanings and

practices is always available for articulation into new strategies and power relations that

can exploit the polyvalence of the dominant patterns. Such an approach to structure and

strategy enables one to go beyond the limited answers of Foucault and Poulantzas.

Bibliography

Althusser, L. (1995) Sur la réproduction, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

Balibar, E. (1992) ‘Foucault and Marx: the Question of Nominalism’, in T.J. Mitchell, ed.,

Michel Foucault, Philosopher, London: Routledge, 38-56.

Barret-Kriegel, E. (1992) ‘Michel Foucault and the police state’, in T.J. Mitchell, ed.,

Michel Foucault, Philosopher, London: Routledge, 192-97.

Barry, B. (1965) Political Argument, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Deleuze, G. (1975) ‘Écrivain non: un nouveau cartographe’, Critique, 31, 342-65.

Dews, P. (1979) ‘The Nouvelle Philosophie and Foucault’, Economy and Society, 8 (2),

127-171.

Eribon, D. (1989) Michel Foucault: 1926-1984, Paris: Flammarion.

Eribon, D. (1994) Michel Foucault et ses contemporains, Paris: Fayard.

Eldon, S. (2001) Mapping the present: Heidegger, Foucault and the project of a spatial

history, London: Continuum.

Ewald, F. (1975) ‘Anatomie et corps politique’, Critique, 31, 343-70.

Ferry, L. and Renaut, A. (1985) La Pensée 68: Essai sur l’anti-humanisme

contemporain, Paris: Gallimard.

Fontana, A. and Bertani, M. (2003) ‘Situating the Lectures’, in M. Foucault, “Society

must be Defended”. Lectures at the Collège de France 1975-1976, New York:

Picador, 273-93.

Foucault, M. (1969) Archaeology of Knowledge, London: Methuen.

Foucault, M. (1974) ‘Truth and Juridical Forms’, in Power: Essential Writings, London:

Allen Lane, 1-89.

-- -- ‘A verdade e as formas juridicas‘ in Dits et Ecrits I (Quarto Edition, 2001), 1406-

1513.

Foucault, M. (1975a) Surveiller et Punir, Paris: Gallimard. [Discipline and Punish,

London: Tavistock, 1979)]

Foucault, M. (1975b) ‘“Des supplices aux cellules” (entretien avec R.-P. Droit)’, Le

Monde, no. 9363, 21 février, p 16 (in Dits et Ecrits II, 1584-1588).

Foucault, M. (1975c) ‘Prison Talk’, in Power/Knowledge, 37-54.

-- -- ‘Entretien sur la prison: le livre et sa méthode (entretien avec J.-J. Brochier)’,

Magazine littéraire, no 101, juin 1975, 27-33 (in Dits et Ecrits I, Quarto edition,

2001,1608-1622).

Foucault, M. (1976a) La Volonté de savoir, Paris: Gallimard [History of Sexuality, vol 1,

Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978].

Foucault, M. (1976b) ‘Two Lectures on Power’, in idem, Power/Knowledge, Brighton:

Wheatsheaf, 1980, 78-108.

-- -- ‘Cours du 7 Janvier 1976', in Dits et Ecrits II (Quarto Edition, 2001), 160-174

-- -- ‘Cours du 14 Janvier 1976’, in Dits et Ecrits II (Quarto Edition, 2001), 175-189.

Foucault, M. (1977a) ‘Truth and Power’, in Power/Knowledge, 109-133.

-- -- ‘Verité et pouvoir, entretien avec M. Foucault’ (réalisé par A. Fontana et P.

Pasquino, en juin 1976), in Dits et Ecrits II (Quarto edition, 2001), 140-160.

Foucault, M. (1977b) ‘The Eye of Power’, in Power/Knowledge, 146-165.

-- -- ‘L’oeil du pouvoir’, Dits et Écrits II (2001 Quarto edition), 190-207.

Foucault, M. (1977c) ‘Confession of the Flesh’, in Power/Knowledge, 194-227.

-- -- ‘Le Jeu de Michel Foucault (entretien sur l’Histoire de la sexualité)’, in Dits et

Ecrits II (Quarto Edition, 2001), 298-329.

Foucault, M. (1977e) ‘Power and Strategies’, in Power/Knowledge, 134-145.

-- -- ‘Pouvoirs et Stratégies’ in Dits et Ecrits II (Quarto Edition, (2001), 418-428.

Foucault, M. (1977f) ‘History of Sexuality’, in Power/Knowledge, 183-193.

-- -- ‘Les rapports de pouvoir passent à l’intérieur des corps’, in Dits et Ecrits II

(Quarto Edition, (2001), 228-236.

Foucault, M. (1978a) ‘Clarifications on the Question of Power’, in S. Lotringer, ed.,

Foucault Live: Interviews 1966-84, New York: Semiotext(e), 1989, 179-92.

-- -- ‘Precisazione sul potere. Riposta ad alcuni critici’, in Dits et Ecrits II (2001),

625-634.

Foucault, M. (1978b) ‘Governmentality’, in G. Burchell et al., The Foucault Effect.

Studies in governmentality with two lectures and an interview with Michel Foucault,

London: Harvester-Wheatsheaf, 1991, 87-104.

-- -- ‘Governmentality’, in Power: the Essential Writings, 201-222.

-- -- ‘La “governamentalità”’, in Dits et Ecrits II (Quarto Edition, 2001), 635-657.

Foucault, M. (1979) Power, Truth, Strategy, Brisbane: Feral Books.

Foucault, M. (1980) Power/Knowledge: Selected Writings and Other Interviews 1972-

1977, Brighton: Wheatsheaf.

Foucault, M. (1982) ‘The Subject and Power’, in H.L. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow, eds,

Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Brighton: Harvester, 208-

26.

-- -- ‘The Subject and Power’, in Power: Essential Writings, London: Allen Lane,

2000, 326-348.

-- -- ‘Le sujet et le pouvoir’, in Dits et Ecrits II (Quarto Edition, 2001), 1041-1062.

Foucault, M. (1983a) ‘Michel Foucault: an Interview with Stephen Riggins’, in Ethics:

Essential Writings, London: Allen Lane, 121-133.

-- -- ‘Michel Foucault: an Interview with Stephen Riggins’, Dits et Ecrits II (Quarto

Edition, 2001), 1344-1357.

Foucault, M. (1983b) ‘Structuralism and post-Structuralism’, Telos, 55, 195-211.

-- -- ‘Structuralism and post-Structuralism’, in Dits et Ecrits II (Quarto Edition, 2001),

1250-1276.

Foucault, M. (1984a) L'usage des plaisirs. Histoire de la sexualité, tome 2, Paris:

Gallimard.

Foucault, M. (1984b) Le souci de soi. Histoire de la sexualité, tome 3, Paris: Gallimard.

Foucault, M. (1984c) ‘Polemics, Politics and Problematizations’, in idem, Ethics: the

Essential Writings, London: Allen Lane, 111-119.

-- -- ‘Polémique, politique et problématisations’, in Dits et Ecrits II (Quarto Edition,

2001), 1410-1417.

Foucault, M. (1994) Remarks on Marx: Conversations with Duccio Trombadori, New

York: Semiotext(e).

Foucault, M. (1994) Dits et Écrits, tomes I-IV, Paris: Gallimard.

Foucault, M. (2001) Dits et Écrits, tomes I-II, Paris: Gallimard (Quarto Edition).

Foucault, M. (2001) Power: Essential Writings, London: Allen Lane.

Foucault, M. (2003) “Society must be Defended”. Lectures at the Collége de France

1975-1976, New York: Picador.

Gordon, C. (1980) ’Preface’, in M. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, New York: Pantheon,

vii-x.

Gordon, C. (1991) ‘Governmental Rationality: an Introduction’, in G. Burchell, C.

Gordon, and P. Miller, eds., The Foucault Effect, London: Routledge, 1-51.

Gordon, C. (1996) ‘Foucault in Britain’, in A. Barry, T. Osborne, and N. Rose, eds,

Foucault and Political Reason, London: UCL Press, 253-70.

Jessop, B. (1982) The Capitalist State: Marxist Theories and Methods, Oxford: Martin

Robertson.

Jessop, B. (1985) Nicos Poulantzas: Marxist Theory and Political Strategy, Basingstoke:

Macmillan.

Jessop, B. (1990) State Theory: Putting Capitalist States in their Place, Cambridge:

Polity.

Laclau, E. and Mouffe, C. (1985) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, London: Verso.

Lecourt, D. (1972) Pour un critique de l'épistemologie (Bachelard, Canguilhem,

Foucault), Paris: Maspero.

Lemert, C. and Gillan, G. (1982) Michel Foucault: Social Theory as Transgression, New

York: Columbia University Press.

Lemke, T. (2003) ‘Andere Affirmationen. Gesellschaftsanalyse und Kritik im

Postfordismus’, in A. Honneth and M. Saar, eds, Zwischenbilanz einer Rezeption,

Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 259-74.

Lenin, V.I. (1917) ‘The State and Revolution’, in idem, Selected Works in Three

Volumes, Volume II, Moscow: Progess Publishers.

Macey, D. (1993) The Lives of Michel Foucault, London: Vintage.

Marsden, R. (1999) The Nature of Capital: Marx after Foucault, London: Routledge.

Philp, M. (1983) ‘Foucault on Power: a Problem in Radical Theory’, Political Theory, 11

(1), 29-52.

Poster, M. (1984) Foucault, Marxism, and History, Cambridge: Polity.

Poulantzas, N. (1971) Pouvoir politiques et classes sociales, en deux tomes, Paris:

Maspero.

Poulantzas, N. (1970) Fascisme et dictature, Paris: Maspero.

Poulantzas, N. (1974) Les classes sociales et capitalisme d’aujourd’hui, Paris: Éditions

Seuil.

Poulantzas, N. (1975) La Crise des Dictatures: Portugal, Grèce, Espagne, Paris:

Maspero.

Poulantzas, N., ed. (1976) La Crise de L’État, Paris: PUF.

Poulantzas, N. (1978a) L’État, le pouvoir, le socialisme, Paris: PUF.

Poulantzas, N. (1978b) ‘Les théoriciens doivent retourner sur terre’, Les nouvelles

litteraires, 26 Juin.

Poulantzas, N. (1979a) ‘L’Etat, les mouvements sociaux, les partis’, Dialectiques, 28,

00-00.

Poulantzas, N. (1979b) ‘La crise des partis’, Le Monde Diplopmatique, 26 September.

Poulantzas, N. (1979c) ‘Interview with Stuart Hall and Alan Hunt’, Marxism Today, May,

198-205.

Poulantzas, N. (1979d) ‘Is there a crisis in Marxism?’, Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora,

6 (3), 7-16.

Poulantzas, N. (1980) Repères. Hier et aujourd’hui, Paris: Maspero.

Resch, R.P. (1992) Althusser and the Renewal of Marxist Theory, Princeton: Princeton

University Press.

Sheridan, A. (1980) Michel Foucault: the Will to Truth, London: Tavistock.

Somerville, J. (1980) 'Poulantzas, Class and Power: Review of State, Power, and

Socialism', Ideology and Consciousness, 7, pp. 107-25.

Wickham, G. (1983) ‘Power and Power Analysis: beyond Foucault?’, Economy and

Society, 12 (4), 468-98.

Endnotes

1 An early version of this paper was published in 1987 in the long-defunct journal, Ideas

and Production (issue 6, 59-87) and reprinted in my State Theory (1990: 220-247). This

version reflects the appearance of further work by Foucault and my own theoretical

development. Useful comments were provided by Grigoris Ananiadis, Ted Benton, Jim

McGeachey, and the editors of Actuel Marx. 2 See Foucault‘s comments on Marxism in his interviews in Dits et Écrits (1995). 3 Colin Gordon cited this in his 1996, at p. 263. In a recent personal communication he

confirmed the source as Lecture 4 of the 1979 Collège de France series, 31.1.1979.

This will be published in French in September 2004 (personal communication,

24.07.04). 4 Foucault’s early work on governmentality was more concerned with the pre-history of

the capitalist type of state or, phrased differently, the historical constitution of the

modern state and its distinctive technologies of power rather than with the formal

constitution of the capitalist state and its distinctive forms of political class domination.

Poulantzas commented only briefly on the historical constitution of the modern state

(noting differences between the English, French, and German trajectories) and focused

on the ideal-typical liberal bourgeois democratic state as the ‘normal’ form of the state

(PPSC). Thus both theorists tended to ignore the relationship between historical and

formal constitution due to their one-sided concern with one or other process. 5 Foucault once remarked that one ‘should have a small number of authors with whom

one thinks, with whom one works, but about whom one does not write' (1995: 703). But

Poulantzas is most unlikely to rank alongside Heidegger, Nietzsche (before Foucault’s

‘genealogical’ turn), Marx himself, and Althusser in this regard. Indeed, there is no

reference at all to Poulantzas in the comprehensive index of Dits et Ecrits (1994). 6 Poulantzas seems to deny this argument and thereby exaggerates the differences

(see EPS: 40, citing both Deleuze and Foucault). 7 On this preference, Fontana and Bernati note that 'Foucault did not, it appears, keep

any record of the books he read, and he was not fond of debates with individual

authors; he preferred problematization to polemic' (2003: 287). 8 The three major intellectual biographies of Foucault make no mention of significant

intellectual contacts with Poulantzas even though they were both employed at

Vincennes and shared occasional political platforms (e.g., in relation to the ‘Comité un

bateau pour le Vietnam’) (cf. Eribon 1989, 1994; Macey 1993). 9 Discipline was also used to control workers' bodies: 'it was not just a matter of

appropriating, extracting the maximum quantity of time but also of controlling, shaping,

valorizing the individual's body according to a particular system' (Power: Essential

Writings, 82).