Complex Powers: Beyond the Panopticon?

Abstract

Throughout the modern era the nation state was central to the analysis of the origins and form of social and political power. The dominant paradigms of modern political sociology tended to analyse power within the framework of the sovereignty and legitimacy of the nation state and shared a conceptualization of power as an objective category. ‘Episodic’ power was connected to agency and the capacity to act and could be combined, concentrated and applied or rejected and challenged through the concentration and application of counter-power. The reality of the ways in which power was lived and experienced was always more complex and this was reflected in the ‘subterranean’ tradition of analysing power associated with Nietzsche and Foucault (Clegg, 1989, 2000) which challenged the universalism and essentialism of Enlightenment thought. This tradition focused on forms of ‘dispositional’ power whereby power is constituted as a system of social meaning, and ‘being-in-the-world’ is connected to the modes of subjectification associated with particular and specific ontologies. The metaphor of the panopticon was central to the model of power developed by Michel Foucault and provided an apt model for the configuration of power in modern society. The object of social power was the control or coordination of populations or bodies of people under the gaze of bureaucratically organized governments, corporations and institutions.