Musings on Foucault, Power, and Resistance

In response to my professor's question:

Foucault writes, “We must not look for who has
power . . . and who is deprived of it . . . HS, 99).
Oppression is real: men oppress women; capital
oppresses labor. Is Foucault saying that there are
no seats of power and places of the oppressed in
a given society? Is he also stating that directly
resisting oppression is futile?

I am still trying to find a good way to articulate clearly what Foucault's argument about power is. The example that keeps sticking in my mind is this: If power is possessed by a group or entity such as "men" or "capital," then history would have been quite different; I imagine we would have had one group in power (royalty) and they would always have had the power and always will have it. Instead, we've seen many dictators and others come to positions of authority using unorthodox means. My impression is that this is an example of what Foucault means when he says that "power is exercised from innumerable points" (p. 94). However, it is not easy for me to use that example with confidence, because in The History of Sexuality, Foucault's pattern has been to make definitive statements such as "Power is not something that is acquired, seized, or shared" (p. 94, which would seem to refute my example) and then to qualify these claims: "Are there no great radical ruptures, massive binary divisions, then? Occasionally, yes. But more often one is dealing with mobile and transitory points of resistance [...]" (p. 96). More to the point, in the quotation above, Foucault suggests that we should not "look for who has power," but that we should look at the "process" of power, how it is exercised and perpetuated. I would argue that Foucault is not saying there are no positions of power and positions of oppression, but, as Jana Sawicki has argued in Disciplining Foucault, "[Foucault] does not deny that the juridico-discursive model of power describes one form of power. He merely thinks that it does not capture those forms of power that make centralized, repressive forms of power possible, namely, the myriad of power relations at the microlevel of society" (p. 20). It is clear, then, that Foucault is saying that there are seats of power and oppressed groups, but he is more interested in the subtleties and complexities of power. To put groups in a binary relation is reductive; for example, to say that men oppress women is to give those categories a monolithic quality and ignore intersections such as race and class and to put blinders on by focusing on one particular phenomenon, such as some radical feminists' critiques of pornography as the locus of men's oppression of women. Some women, in fact, are more able to exercise power than some men.

Setting forth Foucault's view of resistance is an even more tricky endeavor. Sawicki points out that Foucault's work itself is a testament to the fact that some space for agency and potential for social change are really there. She says that Foucault's historicizing and defamiliarizing concepts that we have hitherto taken for granted is "an emancipatory strategy" (100-101). His vision of some future society (starting on page 155) in which people will be amused at his project, if one interprets it as having not just a sardonic valence but also one of sincerity, is another such testament. He does not, of course, give us any kind of specific plan of revolutionary action, like Marx and others, but I definitely do not agree that he argues that resistance is impossible or futile. I interpret Foucault's recommendation for how to resist as engaging in historical analyses similar to The History of Sexuality, exposing discursive constructions that perpetuate power.