on the ethics of power and love
“The idea that there could exist a state of communication that would allow games of truth to circulate freely, without any constraints or coercive effects, seems utopian to me. This is precisely a failure to see that power relations are not something that is bad in itself, that we have to break free of. I do not think that a society can exist without power relations, if by that one means the strategies by which individuals try to direct and control the conduct of others. The problem, then, is not to try to dissolve them in the utopia of completely transparent communication but to acquire the rules of law, the management techniques, and also the morality, the ethos, the practice of the self, that will allow us to play these games of power with as little domination as possible […] Power is not evil. Power is games of strategy.”
Michel Foucault, Vol. 1 Ethics, ‘The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom’, 298
“The contrast between Kingsley Hall and a contemporary mental hospital did not lie simply in the fact that the ‘staff’ of the former thought that hierarchy was bad in the abstract, or that it would be nice in principal not to exercise control over the “patients.” Something more substantial was at stake, which can be caught up in the Heideggerian contrast between enframing and revealing. Conventional psychiatry, one could say, already knows what people should be like, and it is the telos of this sort of psychiatry to reengineer – to enframe – mental patients back into that image. That is why a hierarchical system of social relations is appropriate. Power relations and understandings of the self go together. The Bateson-Laing line, of course, was that selves are endlessly complex and endlessly explorable, and the antihierarchical approach of Kingsley Hall was deliberately intended to facilitate such exploration in both the mad and the sane. This is the mode of revealing, of finding out what the world has to offer us. We can, then, name this contrast in social relations in terms of power and hierarchy, but that is not enough. The sociological contrast echoed and elaborated a contrast in ontological stances – enframing versus revealing – which is, I think, very hard to grasp from the standpoint of modernity.”
Andrew Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future, ‘Ontology, Power, and Revealing’, 211
The first quote is an idea that has been turning over in my head since I first read it a few months ago (and it’s really worth reading), while the second is the conclusion of the current chapter in the book I’m reading currently, which I think reflects productively on the first. As well as reflecting, at least in part, the Foucauldian ethics of power relations it also places it in a somewhat practical setting, of (anti)psychiatry (the quote from Foucault continues by discussing sexual relations and pedagogy.)
I recently started taking a class on Buddhist ethics, out of a desire to transfer my reading into a more collective (and social) setting, and one of the specific teaching of the group I’m having a problem with is the idea that we can operate in two distinct states of the ‘power mode’ and ‘love mode’. Which, aside from the superficial tweeness, conflicts with my adoption of the idea above that power relations are an integral and inevitable part of human relationships: that ethics is the “conscious [réfléchie] practice of freedom” on the basis of acknowleding power, not substituting it with another category; ethics is above power, not in place of it. Though the latter approach does allow for limited uses of the ‘power mode’, in a sort of firm but fair way - the whole thing being a case-by-case application of deontological/Kantian-type intentionality and karmic consequentialism, but that’s another issue. I’m more interested in trying to reconcile Foucault’s idea of ever-present power relations in any “relationship in which one person tries to control the conduct of another” (and that basically being his definition of a relationship) with the quite enticing idea that trying to control others’ behaviour is manipulative and de facto unethical.