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-
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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
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.
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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