-
5. Toward a Transgressional Account of Power
- University of Michigan Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
five Toward a Transgressional Account of Power To this point, this book has advanced the notion that an aesthetic insecurity operates in centralized bodies of power and that devices titled “counterpower” can engage this aesthetic insecurity. Going forward, however, one might ask whether counterpower can be situated within a larger body of power analysis. I argue here that it can—casting counterpower as a form of transgressional analysis. To do this, the present chapter contains several moves. First, rather than critique or even comprehensively review any and all literature on power, it takes a more modest route in demarcating two other categories where power contestation can be analyzed. Second, in terms of temporal and spatial frames, this chapter asserts how the transgressional analyzes the “instantaneous play” of power’s vulnerabilities as they appear within seconds, minutes, and days (Foucault 1977b: 37). In the transgression, a subject perceives itself to be autonomous, yet through this autonomy, it facilitates a limit that is breached. Unlike the spaces and periods in transcendental and transitional orders (where power has been contested or upended through identi‹able rivals), in the transgression, the Self (which is always ambiguous ) immediately is “lost in this space it marks with its sovereignty and becomes silent” (35). The transgressional perspective, because it analyzes at this “busier” level of contestation, needs to also be understood less as a theoretical school and more as a philosophy that emphasizes creation and emergence. Finally, this chapter demonstrates how the turn to aesthetics and power that has been the basis for this book is a logical one considering the ethos of creation embedded in the transgression, and it suggests that future analyses that focus on the creative forces that spring forth in 165 global politics might bene‹t from embracing transgressional analysis. To do so, such studies would need to jettison the notion of an unproblematized subject. For the transgressional level, if we take as a given that there is no grounding or origin for the Self, then it makes little sense to maintain a scienti‹c posture directed toward its analysis. To summarize, I argue in this chapter that because the bulk of IR analyses that have examined power to date have looked for its operation in certain locations and within periods of time, which has made possible the explication of such operation as patterned, there has been little need to use philosophy to develop their analyses. The transgression, by contrast, eludes probabilistic speci‹cation and thus represents more of a philosophical ethos than a predictive theory. Nevertheless, intersections between transcendental and transgressional analyses, on the one hand, and transgressional analysis , on the other, are important enough for us to view the latter less as a critique of the former two and more as a complementary mode of viewing the subject. This chapter begins with a brief generalization of transcendental and transitional analyses of power, with some examples, and explicates the temporal and spatial conditions, as well as the function of the intellectual , in each of these traditions. It then contrasts these with the temporality and spatiality found in a transgressional analysis and explicates the trangressional insights found in the work of Andrew Bacevich (2005) on “the new American militarism.” For ‹nal illustration of these three traditions of power analysis, the chapter concludes with the 2004 Fallujah bridge case, which was analyzed in the previous chapter. Transitional and Transcendental Analysis of Power The majority of accounts dealing with power in international relations have, to date, been transitional. Transitional accounts of power conceptualize it as relational in form. To derive in›uence from power presumes that there is a community that recognizes what is powerful and interacts according to this logic. Max Weber, for example, de‹ned power as the “opportunity to have one’s will prevail within a social relationship, also against resistance, no matter what this opportunity is based on” (Weber 1956, as translated in Berenskoetter 2007: 3).1 The role of the Other in 166 • defacing power 1. Uphoff (1989: 299) takes issue with this general tendency—exempli‹ed here by Berenskoetter but going back to Simon (1953) and Peter Blau (1964), among others—to “af‹rm that power is not a thing but rather a relationship.” [44.213.99.37] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 04:33 GMT) the transitional landscape is important, for it is where subjective notions of power intersect that we have the intersubjectivity in its meaning, which I discuss in more detail in the following section. We...