Alt fails, they sweep + totalize

Counter-power is power in two directions: it is power in that it implies the regulation of people towards its strategies, occasioning its own sub-resistance, and it is power in that it is acting upon the actions of agents outside its own strategy, in attempting to retard or change the behaviour of people perpetrating the strategies of power it opposes. Clearly, counter-power can-not hope to abolish power per se, or even to be implacably opposed to it, since it is itself power! Might it not be possible however to constitute resistance in such a way as to utterly refuse and exclude power, and thus eventually abolish it? Hardly, since to utterly annihilate power would mean nothing less than the destruction of all actions upon actions. It cannot be done by appealing to a higher action upon actions that will keep power in check, since that would of course itself still be power, hence the abnegation of total freedom. The complete disappearance of Foucaultian power relations would seem to require nothing less than the total abolition of sociality: Power relations are rooted deep in the social nexus, not a supplementary structure over and above “society” whose radical effacement one could perhaps dream of. To live in society is, in any event, to live in such a way that some can act on the actions of others. (EW3 343) Hence Foucault’s injunction that “we must stop imagining that we can escape power relations at a stroke, globally, massively, by a kind of radical rupture” (DE2 542), since “there is not then with power relations any one site of the great refusal, no soul of revolt, base of all rebellions, or pure law Resistance 113 of the revolutionary” (VS 126; cf. WK 95–96). Hence, anarchism, qua the project of abolishing government, is a kind of fantasy that belies the real reasons for its existence, which is always in fact the opposition to a real, proximal repression: in the discussion after a 1978 lecture in Paris, Foucault declares, I do not think that the will not to be governed at all is something that could be considered an originary aspiration. I think that, in fact, the will not to be governed is always the will not to be governed like this, in this way, by these people, at this price. As for resolving not to be governed at all, it would seem to me to be some kind of philosophical and theoretical paroxysm of something that would be this will not to be governed relatively speaking. (Foucault 1990, 59; cf. PT 72–73) However, he in fact goes on to make clear that, while he does not endorse a “fundamental anarchism,” that is opposed to government, he does not “absolutely exclude it” either. Such anarchism, though “fundamental,” is merely opposition to “all governmentalisation” (Foucault 1990, 59), not opposition to power per se. Foucault clearly had certain anarchist tendencies; like Nietzsche (Z:1 “The New Idol”), Foucault (2005, 128) has a keen mistrust of “this monstrosity we call the state,” and at times he does indeed seem to endorse a fight against power itself, as in this excerpt from a 1980 interview: We have to rise up against all forms of power—but not just power in the narrow sense of the word, referring to the power of a government or of one social group over another: these are only a few particular in-stances of power. (Foucault 1988, 1) 2 Yet, here Foucault does not mean that we must rise up against power itself, but rather that every form which does occur must be fought against. Anarchists, on the other hand, as Todd May (1994, 65) has put it, assume as an a priori that power itself must be fought against. 3 The difference is that the Foucaultian aim of fighting against specific forms of power isnot to get rid of power forever, but only to modify the network of power relations in such a way as to change the power with which we are at that moment concerned. As May puts it, the problem with the anarchist attitude, and the reason it is an a priori, is that their opposition to power is not based on an assessment of the tactical situation. Total opposition to power does not allow us to pick our battles, but rather condemns all power by way of a norm of the abolition of power relations which is thoroughly unachievable.