Subpower
Subpower is a term coined by the French philosopher Michel Foucault that seeks to explain the relationship between the individual and the social order. Subpower should be understood as a "microscopic thread" of political power that runs through individuals. However, political power should not be understood as a power of the state apparatus or a class in power. Subpower describes a mechanism that is inherent in individuals and that causes them to bind themselves to an apparatus and act on its behalf.
example
One could say, for example: In order for a factory to produce profitable goods, the workers have to work. For those workers to work, they must first have a kind of consent to work. This is trained by existing institutions such as schools, prisons, lunatic asylums, and the family. In those institutions a will to work is formed within the individual, which this individual will continue to demand from his fellow human beings in the future. The norm of the "need to have the will to work" as a subpower pervades the individuals.
Foucault's difference to historical materialism
While the traditional Marxists assumed that it is the relations of production that form the basis of all (ideologized) sciences and world views, Foucault wants to go deeper with the concept of subpower:
- "It becomes clear that we cannot understand the human sciences [..] as an ideology that would merely be a reflex and expression of the relations of production in human consciousness Production relations and cannot be traced back to them. They are much more deeply rooted, not only in human existence, but also in production relations, because the production relations typical of capitalist societies set not only a series of economic determinants but also the described power relations and modes of operation of knowledge ahead. Power and knowledge are therefore deeply rooted in the relations of production and are not simply above them. "
Since the institutions that gave rise to the subpower assumed by Foucault preceded capitalist society historically, the subpower could not be an expression of the capitalist mode of production.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Stefanie Graefe: Autonomy at the end of life ?: Biopolitics, economization and the debate about euthanasia. (= Campus Research. Volume 923). Campus Verlag, 2007, ISBN 978-3-593-38432-0 , p. 126.
- ↑ Michel Foucault: Truth and legal forms. Suhrkamp Verlag, 1973, ISBN 3-518-29245-5 .