“Power’s condition of possibility… must not be sought in the primary existence of a central point, in a unique source of sovereignty from which secondary and descendent forms would emanate; it is the moving substrate of force relations which, by virtue of their inequality, constantly engender states of power, but the latter are always local and unstable. The omnipresence of power: not because it has the privilege of consolidating everything under its invincible unity, but because it is produced from one moment to the next, at every point, or rather in every relation from one point to another. Power is everywhere, not because it embraces everything; but because it comes from everywhere…. One needs to be nominalistic, no doubt: power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attrib­utes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society” (Foucault, History of Sexuality vol. 1, p. 93).

“I’d like to mention only two ‘pathological forms’ — those two ‘diseases of power’ — fascism and Stalinism. One of the numerous reasons why they are, for us, so puzzling is that in spite of their historical uniqueness they are not quite original. They used and extended mechanisms already present in most other societies. More than that: in spite of their own internal madness, they used to a large extent the ideas and the devices of our political rationality” (Foucault, “The Subject and Power”).

Foucault in his earlier “archaeological” stage made an enormous impression on me in my youth. He began by questioning the tendency to assimilate similar or similarly named concepts from different times and places in history, as if the “same” concepts were always continuously at work. The metaphor of “archaeology” emphasizes a patient analysis of concrete raw materials of historical evidence as a kind of artifacts, with an emphasis on highlighting their diversity, over traditional history writing’s rush to construct simple, continuous, and uniform historical narratives. Larger historical unities — either the alleged uniformity of culture and attitudes at a given time and place, or alleged continuities of identical concepts persisting across time and space — should be established by evidence, and not simply assumed based on conventional wisdom or uses of the same words.

Later he turned to a series of works more concerned with power and the constitution of human subjectivity. First he emphasized that power is not a matter of formal or institutional authority. Power for Foucault is not something that could be a possession; it exists only in its exercise. Next he criticized the reduction of power to its overtly repressive aspects, recommending instead a “microphysics” that focuses on what in popular discourse is sometimes called “power to” as opposed to “power over” — a positive rather than a negative notion of power. Finally he began to say that there is really no such thing as power, and what matters is the way subjects are constituted through “technologies of the self”. The primary way that social control is effected, particularly in modern Western societies, has less to do with symbolic spectacles of extreme violence than with the very formation of our personal identities. (See also Ethos, Hexis.)

One way these developments might be summarized is to say that power for Foucault is something emergent and not something originary: “power”, whatever it is, is a result, and not a cause. Power is not a magical power emanating from a source that somehow directly affects things, but a way of describing aspects of concrete relational situations.

Aristotle too tells us that power is not a cause in a primary or ultimate sense. It may provide a relative “reason why” in particular cases, but ultimately it is something to be explained, rather than being an ultimate explainer.