Does Power “Spread”? Foucault on the Generalization of Power

• Author: Jaeyoon Park
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00905917211046576
• Published date: 01 August 2022
• Date: 01 August 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/00905917211046576

Political Theory

2022, Vol. 50(4) 553 –574

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DOI: 10.1177/00905917211046576

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Article

Does Power “Spread”?

Foucault on the

Generalization of Power

Jaeyoon Park1

Abstract

This essay critically analyzes a common metaphor in political theory, which

figures the growth of power as a process of “spreading” or “diffusion.” It

argues that narratives that cast the generalization of power as a movement

of “spreading” often fail to furnish the specific type of historical evidence

that they imply, such that these narratives are frequently received as richly

suggestive yet ultimately unjustified. This essay develops an alternative

way of conceptualizing the generalization of power, one that rests on

rigorous yet speculative evidence of the sort that political theorists are best

positioned to find: not proof of literal extension or application of existing

powers to new domains, but accidental convergences, isomorphisms, and

ideal combinations among disparate practices that introduce large powers

into the world.

To do this, the essay revisits Foucault’s narrative of the generalization of

disciplinary power in modern Western societies, which is perhaps the clearest

source for the familiarity of the figure of “spread” in contemporary political

theory. It shows that Foucault’s incessant use of the “spread” metaphor

naturally invites the dismissive reading that Discipline and Punish received in

many quarters, for it implies a historical process that Foucault cannot justify.

Yet I argue that in a brief self-criticism, Foucault provides the rudiments for

a conception of power’s generalization far more useful and compelling than

the metaphoric of “spread.” I suggest that this alternative, if developed, is not

1University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA

Corresponding Author:

Jaeyoon Park, University of California Berkeley, 210 Social Sciences Building #1950, Berkeley,

CA 94720, USA.

Email: jaeyoonpark@berkeley.edu

1046576PTXXXX10.1177/00905917211046576Political TheoryPark

research-article2021

554 Political Theory 50(4)

just the proper frame for interpreting Foucault’s narrative, but a promising

practical resource for contemporary theorists of general powers.

Keywords

power, generalization, Foucault, narrative

Among the most precious objects of analysis for political theory are the pow-

ers that order and course through the social world in a general way—powers

such as neoliberalism and finance, police and bureaucratization, racial and

gender construction, all of which are vast in scope, traversing diverse

domains, and operate at many levels, working not just through state and

economy but by means of popular media, knowledge production, ethical

practices, and even intimate relations. Finance, for instance, is more than a

delimited sector or activity; it is a wide-ranging power insofar as it crafts a

logic and framing of value that informs contemporary understandings of self-

worth and trustworthiness, the objectives of state governance, personal orien-

tations to the future, and more (Ascher 2016; Feher 2009). Likewise “digital

power” refers not just to the functional capacities of newly popularized digi-

tal technologies but to a broader force, brought into being by such technolo-

gies, that is transforming practices of self-presentation, notions of identity,

and the vulnerability of ordinary individuals to the gaze and designs of others

(Harcourt 2015; Koopman 2019). These powers are general in that they

appear and act well outside their original or most obvious domains of influ-

ence. Naming and analyzing them thus promises both an encompassing

vision of contemporary existence and insight into how power shapes thought,

desire, and conduct in unintuitive and unnoticed ways.

This essay asks: how do we specify the kind of generality attributable to

such powers? My wager is that very often, the generality of power is figured,

in contemporary political theory, as the result of a method, technique, or log-

ic’s having disseminated or spread out across a wide range of domains.

Consider, for the sake of illustration, some recent treatments of the two pow-

ers cited as examples above. In his account of financialization, Ivan Ascher

conceives “the generalization of the security form” as a process that not only

expands the ambit of literal financial markets, but introduces financial think-

ing into new contexts, so that finance not only issues directives to people and

states but “set[s] the terms under which companies, governments, and even

households are now able to envisage the future and act in the present” (2016,

33, 35). Michel Feher describes the “rise of human capital as a dominant

subjective form,” and this in a financialized modality, as a movement that

begins with the “expansion” and “broadening” of the notion of human capital

“beyond the field of economics of education” where it emerged (2009,