Force+(Wilcox)

Force is a mysterious concept used by philosophers, theorists, and critics of various stripes that seems to have been originally imported from physics and natural philosophy. With its various connotations of strength, compulsion, the exercise of the will, action, violence, and power, //force// brings with it a martial inflection that those enlisting it must work with or work against. //Force// also carries with it impersonal or natural connotations, though the term is normally pluralized (i.e. forces of nature) in these cases. Force can be brought to bear on anything by anything, can act in any way, can hold things together or break them apart. In French poststructuralist thought, force is associated not only with domination but also with liberation, conditions of possibility, and immanence, as figured in the work of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze. Force is complementary to, yet distinct from “power,” in the way that “tactics” are distinct from “strategies.” Power (or power/knowledge) is totalizing and—as free floating as it can be (Foucault: “Power…comes from everywhere” [i] )—it operates within a regime of structures, constraints, and disciplines, that is, indeed, held together by forces. As Foucault observes:

// Relations of power are not in a position of exteriority with respect to other types of relationships (economic processes, knowledge relationships, sexual relations), but are immanent in the latter; they are the immediate effects of the divisions, inequalities, and disequilibriums which occur in the latter, and conversely they are the internal conditions of these differentiations (HS, 94) [ii] //

Important to this conception of force is the idea of a “field of immanence, [iii] ” in which a multiplicity of “relations of forces [iv] ” have the potential to manifest. It is in this territory that Foucauldian and Deluezean thought on their closely related conceptions of power (power/knowledge) for Foucault and Force for Deleuze resonate with each other.

What produces and exerts force? Assemblages as wholes, or parts within assemblages operating on other parts within a differential field of force. As implied by Foucault’s concept of power-knowledge, discursive practices and objects always carry some type of force. Yet, heterogeneous assemblages are the infrastructures and circuits of forces; materiality always plays a role and things exert forces of their own. What are the qualities of force? Force can preserve a state of affairs or destroy it; it can be innate or projected from an external source. It is always a relational property—force is irrelevant in relation to a single entity in a vacuum.

Political theorist Jane Bennett has explored the “force of things,” as has philosopher Graham Harman in his explication of Bruno Latour’s metaphysics. For these theorists of the nonhuman, things or //actants// are forces in themselves. As Bennett writes in the first chapter of her book //Vibrant Matter,// “the force of things”:

// Glove, pollen, rat, cap, stick. As I encountered these items, they shimmied back and forth between debris and thing—between, on the one hand, stuff to ignore, except insofar as it betokened human activity (the workman’s efforts, the litterer’s toss, the rat-poisoner’s success), and, on the other hand, stuff that commanded attention in its own right, as existents in excess of their association with human meanings, habits, or projects. In the second moment, stuff exhibited its thing-power: it issued a call, even if I did not quite understand what it was saying. At the very least, it provoked affects in me: I was repelled by the dead (or was it merely sleeping?) rat and dismayed by the litter, but I also felt something else: a nameless awareness of the impossible singularity of that rat, that configuration of pollen, that otherwise utterly banal, mass-produced plastic water-bottle cap. // // I was struck by what Stephen Jay Gould called the “excruciating complexity and intractability” of nonhuman bodies, but in being struck, I realized that the capacity of these bodies was not restricted to a passive “intractability” but also included the ability to make things happen, to produce effects. [v] //

Notes

[i] Quoted in Rouse, “Power/Knowledge,” p. 11. [ii] Quoted in //ibid//. p. 14. [iii] Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). //A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia//. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. [iv] Foucault, M. (2008). The history of sexuality: The will to knowledge: vol. 1. Camberwell, Vic: Penguin. p. 121-122. [v] Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Durham: Duke University Press.