What remains of the individual after power has had its way? Is the discursive body an automaton, emptied of will by the permeating discourse of pleasure and sexuality? Or does something remain that can push back and do some penetrating of its own?
Foucault suggests that although power is indeed omnipresent in the sense that it comes from everywhere, it is not all consuming: “Where there is power, there is resistance.” On one hand, in order to exist and reproduce, power depends on “a multiplicity of points of resistance: these play the role of adversary, target, support, or handle in power relations.” But Foucault also sees resistance as the “irreducible opposite” of power.
Just as the network of power relations ends by forming a dense web that passes through apparatuses and institutions, without being exactly localized in them, so too the swarm of points of resistance traverses social stratifications and individual unities.
So power and resistance function in the same way: both are permeating, distributed, and rhizomatic. The “strategic codification” of resistance—the organized embodiment of the discourse of resistance in technology and technique—can make revolution possible.
This seems to be but a small glimmer of hope in an otherwise terrifying vision of the reaches of power. But if power is neither domination nor subjugation nor rule, don’t power and resistance refer to the very same set of relationships? Perhaps the living, breathing, desiring individual body in turn caresses and electrifies the body of discourse, revealing it in all its contingency, humanity, and vulnerability.
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