Pottage 1998

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Power as an art of contingency: Luhmann, Deleuze,

Foucault
Alain Pottage
Published online: 08 May 2009.
To cite this article: Alain Pottage (1998) Power as an art of contingency: Luhmann, Deleuze, Foucault, Economy and
Society, 27:1, 1-27, DOI: 10.1080/03085149800000001
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Power as an art of
contingency: Luhmann,
Deleuze, Foucault
Alain Pottage
Abstract
Downloaded by [University of California, San Francisco] at 13:04 20 December 2014
This article recovers the conceptual content of Michel Foucault's model of power as
'action upon actions'. The principal argument is that the innovations of this model
are intelligible only against the background of a broader social-theoretical distinction
between 'substance' and 'emergence'. The suggestion is that the idea of bio-power, as
distinct from sovereignty, becomes clearer, and more productive, if it is seen as a figure
of emergence. More specifically, it is suggested that the logic of acting upon actions,
which encapsulates so many of the vital innovations of Foucault's account of power,
may be defined as a relation of 'non-indifferent difference'. In explaining these con-
cepts, the article makes connections between Foucault's project and the work of Niklas
Luhmann and Gilles Deleuze. The object of this method is to open Foucault's analy-
ses of power to some particularly illuminating and incisive theoretical complements.
Keywords: emergence; sovereignty; risk; difference.
Introduction
Niklas Luhmann's account of autopoietic social systems, which is perhaps the

most sophisticated position in contemporary social theory, seems to ask some
difficult questions of Michel Foucault's analyses of power. Systems theory so
effectively disposes of the traditional template of subjects and actions that it
seems to leave nothing for Foucault's critique to bite on. Things which for
Foucault were problems - for example, 'how does the subject enter into a par-
ticular game of truth?' (Foucault 1994g: 717) - are undramatically admitted as
presuppositions.
Contemporary society is one from which 'man' has already, and quite irre-
trievably, disappeared. Instead, there are only systems and their environments,
Economy and Society Volume 27 Number 1 February 1998: 1-27

O Routledge 1998 0308-5 147
2 Alain Pottage
communicative events rather than actions, psychic systems rather than human
subjects, and so on. For Luhmann, the point is not to register this as an occasion
for disappointment or critique, but to address the rigorously epistemological
question of how to do theory in these circumstances. Nevertheless, the argument
in this article suggests that, although Luhmann's specification of modernity
might seem opposed, or simply indifferent, to whatever Foucault was doing, it
is more interesting and productive to treat the theory of social systems as a sort
of critical complement to Foucault's project. As such, it offers an important
clarification of one particularly innovative element in Foucault's writings, an
element that is most directly represented in the idea of power as action upon
actions. In order to make this argument, the rare innovation of Luhmann's
approach is characterized in terms of a theoretical shift from 'substance' to
'emergence'. This distinction is then used to draw out the sense of Foucault's
notion of bio-power, specifically the model of action upon actions.
I begin with a brief account of the distinction made by Luhmann between
system and environment. The object is to differentiate substance and emergence,

to sketch out the implications of this difference for social theory, and to identify
its role in shaping Foucault's theoretical trajectory. Against that background, the
argument unfolds the distinction between sovereignty and bio-power. T h e
hypothesis is that the innovations of bio-power can be more clearly specified if
one begins with the abstract distinction between substance and emergence
rather than with a movement of theoretical inference from particular historical
codes or configurations. My suggestion is that the specifications of 'post-repres-
sive' power should be elaborated by treating sovereignty and bio-power as two
forms of expectational structure. I then go on to consider how this approach is
gathered into the concept of action upon actions. T h e suggestion is that power
as an emergent relation is one figure of a concept of 'non-indifferent difference'
that was fashioned by a sort of ongoing conceptual complicity between Foucault
and Deleuze. The theoretical form of this relation transforms the notions of rep-
resentation and intervention, or autonomy and heteronomy, that are associated
with the familiar form of the question of power. Inevitably, the direction of my
argument cuts against the grain of some familiar interpretations of Foucault, and
is implicitly critical of many aspects of what it takes to be Foucault's own posi-
tion in relation to power. However, the object is not to interpret Foucault, but to
find the most productive way of reading him in the context of the recent evol-
ution of social theory.
Substance and emergence
The theme of emergence contra substance is no more than implicit in Foucault's

work; or, at least, it is developed only in a somewhat fragile and allusive theor-
etical language. Nevertheless, that language yields the idea that 'modernity' is
characterized by a peculiar form of contingency, which has some quite far-reach-
ing implications for social theory. My argument is that Foucault's account of
Power as an art of contingency 3
power as action upon actions is most productively read against the background
of this form. What then is this peculiar form of contingency, and what are its
implications for theory?
Although many positions in social theory have declared the demise of ontol-
ogy and its companion notions of subjectivity and action, nowhere is the task of
specifying the theoretical architecture of a 'de-ontologized' society undertaken
as rigorously or as convincingly as it is in Luhmann's work. Although it is
described as a theory of social systems, that label may be somewhat misleading.
If it is taken to mean a theory of entities or functions that replace human actors,
but which can nevertheless be conceived by analogy to human agency, and which
still fit into the representation of society as a totality divisible into a set of com-
ponent parts, the vital innovation of the theory is lost. In short, Luhmann's
systems theory is not that of Parsons. It should be distinguished, and it distin-
guishes itself, from any theory of society that relies upon notions of substance,
structure or subjectivity (or their analogues). Instead, it prompts the elaboration
of accounts of social elements and operations (and social theories) that construct
themselves 'upon a foundation that is entirely not "there"' (Luhmann 1995: 48).
In place of ontological substances and structures, 'emergence' deals instead with
structures, processes and theories that produce themselves out of their own con-
tingency. This concept is most sharply defined in Luhmann's account of the dis-
tinction between 'system' and 'environment'. The environment of a system is
not an enveloping world of substances and structures from which a system
begins to make selections and to pattern relations. It is not a unzversitas rerum,
or a totality of facts or elements which might serve as the substance or substrate
of systems' operations; instead, it refers to an 'ungraspable unity' (Luhmann
1995: 208). Phenomenologically, this 'ungraspable unity' becomes 'real' or
observable only when the system's operations differentiate it in such a way as to
precipitate some sort of regularity from it. Therefore, the environment does not
pre-exist the system that observes it. More precisely, the environment is the
'negative correlate' of a system in the sense that each system differentiates or
'individuates' itself as system by distinguishing itself from its environment. T h e
environment is always more complex than the system; 'no system can maintain
itself by means of a point-for-point correlation with its environment, i.e. can
summon enough "requisite variety" to match its environment' (Luhmann
1990d: 11-12). T h e initial system/environment distinction having been made,
a system is forced to embark on the ongoing process of distinguishing itself from
its correlative environment. If it is not to be smothered by complexity, it must
continually distinguish itself from its environment so as to 'admit' only those
events that are compatible with its own reproduction.
The environment therefore presents a constant pressure to develop and refine
strategies for the reduction of complexity. In that sense, complexity is a constant
problem for the system: 'complexity, in this sense, means being forced to select;
being forced to select means contingency; and contingency means risk'
(Luhmann 1995: 25). By the same token, complexity is also a basic presupposi-
tion. It is a problem of the system's own making and it has to be resolved by its
4 Alain Pottage
own 'making'. That is so because complexity is not a matter of degree in the

familiar sense of an ontological difference between a set of elementary, indivis-
ible, units, and various elaborations or combinations of those units. Given that
there 'is' nothing without or before a system's observations, the operations that
reduce complexity have to be generated by self-reference and self-limitation
rather than by reducing external, ontological, elements to a more manageable
degree of complexity. In the process of reducing complexity, the system (further)
differentiates itself from its environment, using its dependence to make itself
autonomous.
This is achieved by a process of recursivity, using previous operations and
observations as the basis for further operations and observations:
What remains is the recursivity of observation and cognition. A process is
called recursive when it uses the results of its own operations as the basis for
further operations - that is, what is undertaken is determined in part by what
has occurred in earlier operations. [Rlecursive operations produce and repro-

duce a network of such operations as the condition for the very possibility of
this reproduction.
(Luhmann 1990c: 72,75)
The 'being' of systems is therefore processual in the sense that they exist only
in and through the operations that articulate their elements. These operations
are continually renewed; they articulate events, elements that become fully satu-
rated, and die away with each operation, remaining only as a prompting memory
for future operations. With each operation, the system exposes itself to its
environment in order to be stimulated into a further operation. In this way the
system reproduces itself from operation to operation, dependent upon the very
environment from which it has to distinguish and 'defend' itself This distinc-
tion between system and environment unfolds into the most rigorous account of
emergence and the most acute specification of the theoretical challenge posed by
the question of modernity. Specifically, it is the most accomplished definition of
social and theoretical operations which do not depend on any ontological
warrant, and which are characterized by contingency and processuality. In this
sense, emergent forms 'exist notwithstanding their logical impossibility: as a
paradox' (Luhmann 1990b: 15).
It would be impossible to offer an extensive account of this theory here. My
suggestion is simply that this particular specification of emergence discloses
what is perhaps the most insistent and important theme in Foucault's work, and,
more specifically, that it is essential to begin with this figure of contingency if
one is to identify the innovation of power as 'action upon actions'. Although one
might say that 'substance' is the historical or evolutionary precursor of 'emer-
gence', it is nevertheless the case that the latter is theoretically prior to the
former. Substance can be conceptualized only granted a lucid specification of
emergence. If Foucault's accounts of contingency seem fragile and allusive, it is
that they presuppose a notion of emergence that is never recovered within those
accounts. That is not to say that there is no explicit reference to emergence in
Foucault's writings. Indeed, 'emergence' is proposed as the translation of

Nietzsche's usage of Entstehung (Foucault 1971b). As such, emergence is one
figure of Foucault's almost etymological explication of contingency as the idea
of a social fabric composed of collisions rather than causes: 'bodies, in colliding
with each other, in mingling, or suffering, cause at their surface events which
have no depth, which form no mixture, and have no passion, and which there-
fore can no longer be causes' (Foucault 1970: 891). This version of contingency
has some obvious affinities with Luhmann's account of recursive communicative
processes, or of events and elements that have no origin or provenance other than
that which they make for themselves. More specifically, this notion of emergence
anticipates the problem of 'action upon actions'. It sketches out the model of an
'agonistic' relation which, because the space of an emergent encounter is a 'non-
lieu', in the sense that adversaries simply do not belong to the same 'space'
(Foucault 1971b: $4), cannot be described in terms of the conventional socio-
logical notion of an interaction between subjects set against a common horizon
of social space. The point of exposing Foucault's analyses to Luhmann's systems

theory as a sort of theoretical 'disclosing agent' is to give Foucault's various
accounts of contingency and emergence a finer theoretical specification. For
example, if Luhmann's move from substance to emergence is characterized by
the dissolution of social and theoretical forms that cling to ontological elements
or relations, or to their analogues, then the object of Foucault's analyses of
authorship and discursive regularity becomes somewhat clearer. Thus, the object
of his account of authorship was not merely to make the figure of the author his-
torically contingent, but, granted that, to make it functionally contingent.
Instances of authorship are themselves authored; not by some determinate social
master-principle, but by contingent discursive processes not dissimilar to those
described by Luhmann, which continually re-make their elements. In short, the
object was to dispose of the idea that the function of the author should be con-
ceived by reference to structures or subjectivity, even analogically.
A preliminary and suggestive formulation of the theme of emergence contra
substance, and one which is particularly relevant to the question of bio-power,
is implicit in the context of the theme of 'life'; more specifically, in Foucault's
account of Cuvier's comparative anatomy (Foucault 1966b: 275-92). Cuvier dis-
solved natural-historical topologies of classification by treating each species as
the particular, differentiated, form of 'an abstract being'. So, for example, the
structure and disposition of an animal's organs no longer served as the basis for
comparison and classification. Rather, visible, and hence classifiable, elements
were explained by hidden functions; organs were variables which derived their
specific character from the functions that differentiated each organism into a set
of interlinked processes. For Cuvier, organisms could be distinguished only by
plotting functional perfection along two distinct axes: first, a 'macroseries'
which measured the functional evolution of the whole organism; secondly, a
'microseries' which measured the evolution of each organ in each species
(Foucault 1966b: 283-4). These series were so partial, fragmented and dis-
jointed that they made of life a sort of discontinuous network of functions, or a
6 Alain Pottage
variable geometry which dispersed each species, or cluster of species, into a

'space' whose co-ordinates could not be matched to an idea of linear space.
Moreover, each of these dispersed 'locales' was temporalized. As each active
group of a species interacted with its environment, 'internal' functions entered
into a mutually transformative relation with 'external' variables. At this point,
Foucault implicitly rejoins Canguilhem's earlier analyses of evolution, which
describe how evolutionary thought makes the 'identity' of each exemplar of a
species processual, contingent and unstable (see especially Canguilhem et al.
1962). The species-identity of each individual is a 'statistical' concept. It is a
provisional, constantly corrected, measure of the adaptation of populations to
their dynamic environments; and, to the extent that evolution replaced embryo-
genesis as an explanation of species-identity, the 'identity' of each developing
embryo is hostage to the mutations of that measure. 'Identities' become emer-
gent properties. In Canguilhem and in Foucault, this model gives rise to an
account of recursivity which is surprisingly close to some elements of
Luhmann's version (see infra).

Historians of science complained that this account misrepresented Cuvier
(Foucault 1994a); and, in their reprise of the story, Deleuze and Guattari accord
the role of epistemologist of emergence to Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, at the expense
of Cuvier (1980: 60-3). None of this matters greatly here. The important point
is that this reflection on the 'spatiality' of life offers an alternative thematization
of the contingency associated with emergence. The relation between spatiality
and contingency is brought out by the affinities between Foucault's account of
Cuvier and Michel Serres' description of the evolution of social complexity.
Serres describes a similar transformation from analytical, tabular, space to a
space that is represented as a fluid, processual, fabric, or as a 'variable geometry'
in which there are no constant co-ordinates, and hence no ground or structure
that explains or guarantees the existence of beings or individuals (1980: passim;
1994: 29-85). Rather, things that 'exist' must do so as 'forms bound into them-
selves [desformes qui se nouent sur elles-mimes]' (Foucault 1966b: 292). In both
cases, the manoeuvre which makes space processual dissolves an imaginary
structure in which both space and time are rendered as linear or 'spatial' hor-
izons. Serres describes this 'imaginary' as a way of relating local and global, in
which global space is constructed as 'a dilation of local space, whether by exten-
sion or by a continuous homothetic operation' (Serres 1980: 71), thus preserv-
ing order in complexity. Processuality disrupts this sort of model by folding
space into a series of evolving, discontinuous, dimensions; space becomes a
'polychronic tissue' made up of discontinuous or 'sporadic' vectors rather than
continuous changes of scale or proportion between local and global instances
(Serres 1980: 82). This leaves no point from which elements or entities can
begin, or to which they can refer as the warrant of their being, and no position
from which the whole can be encompassed and observed. The result is a state
that Deleuze describes as a 'fini-illimite"; an arrangement in which 'a finite
number of elements yields a practically unlimited range of combinations'
(Deleuze 1986: 140)' and hence a form of 'rhizomatic' multiplicity (Deleuze and
Guattari 1980). Whereas the infinite could still serve as a ground or end for finite
entities (Foucault 1966b), the advent of 'finitude' brings with it a 'ground' that
is discontinuous and sporadic in the sense described by Foucault's account of
Cuvier's space of life. T h e concept of afini-illimite' is therefore a formula for a
multiplicity of elements that are not ordered as the parts of a whole, but rather
a form of unitas multiplex (see infra).
Inevitably, any account of Foucault's power should begin with the distinction
between sovereignty and bio-power. This distinction is diffracted into a number
of overlapping terms and pairings: repressive, juridical or dominating power on
the one hand, discipline, governmentality, bio-power and technological power on
the other. However, the hypothesis of this article is that these distinctions are
informed by an apprehension of contingency and emergence. This suggestion is
developed by way of a commentary on Foucault's distinction between a power
to dispense death and a power to foster life.
The politics of life and death
Sovereignty is formulated as a right to kill or to let live [defaire mourir ou de laisser

vivre],and governmental bio-power as the programme of causing to live or allow-
ing to die lfaire vivre ou rejeter duns la mort] (Foucault 1976: 177-211). This
austere distinction articulates the difference between modern and pre-modern
social structure in terms of a transformation in the conditions in which power is
exercised and theorized. How should the distinction be unfolded? T h e argument
here is that the imprecision of Foucault's definitions of sovereignty makes it
more productive to begin with its theoretical structure rather than with an
attempt to categorize particular historical phenomena.
The difficulty of making theoretical inferences from historical configurations
becomes apparent as soon as one attempts to elaborate the idea that sovereign
power was a derivative or 'reactivated' form of Roman law patria potestas
(Foucault 1976: 177; 1994b: 185). In fact, patriapotestas was not the formula or
warrant for a power to take or to kill. Yan Thomas points out that to the extent
that the Roman paterfamilias did exercise a right to punish, and perhaps kill, his
dependants he did so not in accordance with an absolute, proprietary, power of
this sort but in the exercise of a fragmentary domestic jurisdiction which applied
different rules and procedures to women, slaves and sons (Thomas 1990).
Rather, patria potestas described the quite specific relation of legal or institutional
kinship which bound sons to their fathers. This distinction amounts to some-
thing more than a mere disagreement as to terminology. It reminds us that what
Foucault calls 'sovereignty' or 'juridico-discursive' power encompasses a
number of different rationalities or modes of binding persons and things. Patria
potestas was indeed associated with a form of sovereignty. However, as the details
of the Roman law of succession suggest, sons succeeded fathers within a tem-
poral order which was legal and institutional rather than natural and ontologi-
cal (Thomas 1996). The sovereignty-effect of Roman law ars iuris lay in its
8 Alain Pottage
capacity to institute this temporal order as the foundation of subjectivity, and to

address not 'natural' subjects but instituted fictions. Specifically, the 'institu-
tionality' of Roman law consisted in its power to deal with a 'natural' order of
its own making: it fictionalized the most basic facts of life by imposing its own
specification of the properties of natural relationships, the temporal order of life
and death, or the facts of sexual difference. 'Nature' was an institutional product
which was presupposed by legal operations: 'nature was an artefact which was
used to produce an artefact' (Thomas 1995: 39). The paternal power of patria
potestas was a representation of this sovereign or institutional power, or of the
law which granted each subject their subjectivity and which bound them accord-
ing to an institutional schema of persons, things and actions.
The peculiarity of this mode of institutionality emerges if one compares it
with the mediaeval code of sovereignty. T h e sovereignty of princes and popes
also implied a right to use legal fictions, but this was a mastery of the facts which
only allowed nature to be circumvented. Although pontifical sovereignty was
attributed a power to bring into existence that which did not exist, to abolish that
which did exist, or to 'change the nature of things' (Kantorowicz 1965), this
power was gained against nature; it was a structure of fiction which conceded
the claims of nature by contradicting them. This mode of jurisdictional or
judicial sovereignty, which accorded to popes or princes the reactive position of
an ultimate arbiter, in turn gave way to another, namely the 'legislative' sover-
eignty formulated by Corasius and Bodin in the latter part of the sixteenth
century. Jurisdictional sovereignty was based upon a process of judgement
through interpretation. T h e process of 'governing' was nothing other than the
process of interpreting and declaring the law: ius dicere. In the exercise of this
right, a sovereign could modify or derogate from divine or natural law, but did
not exercise a power to make legislation founded in a causative will. So, for
example, in the writings of Marsilius of Padua the 'universal legislator' has 'a
jurisdictional prerogative to legislate, discovers and declares law, effects law, and
causes it to be observed; but the legislator does not wilfully make law' (Fell 1984:
215). What is distinctive about legislative sovereignty is not the notion that
government begins with legislation, but rather the idea that the art of legislation
is thematized as an autarchic activity. Only in Corasius's later writings does there
emerge this idea of sovereignty as a form of autarchy oriented to an idea of the
state or the public good. The art of sovereignty was to steer the ship of state, not
by declaring divine or natural law, but by legislating for 'the protection of justice
or the preservation of legal equality in the affairs and cases of citizens' (Cora-
sius, cited in Fell 1983: 179). Only much later than that, however, does one reach
Bentham's and Austin's more familar representation of sovereignty as a power
to command through (positive) law.
Each of these different figures of sovereignty represents a distinctive mode of
binding persons and things, and hence a different species of 'sovereign' power.
These differences are essential to the question of what sovereignty was, what
operations it authorized or how it was transformed. Foucault's account handles
these historical figures and associations somewhat imprecisely, as a result of
which some of his historical propositions may be questionable. However,

historical 'accuracy' is not the most interesting or important issue. My sugges-
tion is that Foucault's historical references describe two attitudes to contingency,
one which avoids or absorbs contingency (substance), and another which pre-
supposes, and thrives on, contingency (emergence). T h e essential point is that
this apparently simple and austere distinction between a right to dispense death
and a power to foster life expresses a vital transformation in the fabric of society
and in the operation of social processes.
The transition from sovereignty to bio-power is made when life is folded into
history: 'life is not only placed outside history, as its biological environment [son
entour biologique], but also within human historicity, as a domain penetrated by
techniques of power and knowledge' (Foucault 1976: 189). This formula is more
complex than it seems. Ostensibly, it describes an operation in which social life
incorporates its own foundation, turning what ought 'logically' to be its substrate
into the domain in which its operations are applied. In itself, this description
would be no innovation. After all, the schema of this inversion is richly elabor-
ated in Heidegger's account of technology as 'Enframing' (Heidegger 1977).
Technology replicates itself by 'adapting itself to its own results', and, in so
doing, makes itself prior to 'nature'. More specifically, technology 'challenges'
or 'provokes' nature in such a way as to make of it a 'standing reserve [Bestand]'
which answers to technology according to the questions that the latter asks of it
(Heidegger 1977: 23). The innovation of Foucault's model lies in its represen-
tation of 'life', which should here be understood in the sense of Deleuze's notion
of afini-illzmite', or life as it is figured in Foucault's reconstruction of Cuvier. So,
to fold life into history is not merely to invert a 'logical' hierarchy; rather, it is
to presuppose a horizon that affords no substances or structures to which the
elements of social life can be attached. Social or historical operations have to take
responsibility for themselves. They do so by virtue of a structure of reflexivity
that is best explained as a peculiarly radical explanation of operations which
'adapt themselves to their own results', namely, Luhmann's account of recur-
sivity.
Foucault's formulation of the shift from sovereignty to bio-power has some
illuminating affinities with Luhmann's account of risk as the hallmark of mod-
ernity. What distinguishes this account from others (notably those of Ulrich
Beck and Fran~oisEwald) is that it unfolds an understanding of emergence. For
Luhmann, risk is associated with a particular structure of decision making,
which is introduced when social structures shift from 'cosmology' to 'tech-
nology'. Cosmology describes a social structure in which the uncertainties and
failures encountered by human decisions are attributed to the interventions of
God or Nature. Life remains 'outside' history in the sense that its processes
remain opaque and intractable, and the fortunes of human actions and decisions
are subject to the humour of those processes. The shift to technology occurs
when the unexpected and undesired consequences of decisions are attributed to
the fact that those decisions were made rather than to the workings of Fate.
According to this understanding, the future is not something that imposes itself
12 Alain Pottage
ontology of vitalism. The concept of man as a folding of forces renders both man
and those forces as figures of emergence (see infra). For example, 'finitude' is a
ground that is somehow always 'between' past and future; it exists only in the
grammatical mode which, in psychoanalytical theory, is characterized as the
mode of the future anterior, or the mode of the 'what will-always-already-have-
been' (Weber 1991: 9). It is a foundation that is constantly remade as the 'pre-
cursor' of a future that is itself always in the making. This process of ongoing
reformulation is Foucault's version of what Nietzsche called the formation of a
'second nature', born of the attempt 'to give oneself, as it were a posteriori, a past
in which one would like to originate in opposition to that in which one did orig-
inate' (Nietzsche 1983: 76). It is a process in which both the self and its environ-
ment are emergent.
How should these conceptions of contingency be developed into an account
of the actualized operations of bio-power? What sorts of questions do these
notions of 'life' pose for the idea of bio-power as the activity of 'steering' the
forces of life? In contrast with his accounts of discursive processes, Foucault's

analyses of power are somewhat imprecise in their specification of methods and
concepts. T h e most familar attempt to provide theoretical specification is based
upon the idea that law, as an articulation of anatomo-political and bio-political
power, was transformed in such a way that it came increasingly to operate as a
norm (see especially Ewald 1986). According to this interpretation, the struc-
ture of norms is reflexive and paradoxical, and is associated with a somewhat
different question of risk and insurance. First, as is suggested in Canguilhem's
analysis of norms (which is the most likely inspiration for Foucault's reference
to norms), a normal state can exist only in relation to a prior state of abnormal-
ity: 'although the abnormal is logically secondary, it is existentially prior' (1993:
178). In practice, therefore, the 'normal' functions as a criterion by which to nor-
malize the abnormal. Second, a norm is a prescription based not upon 'natural'
necessity but upon a particular governmental preference, which programmes the
distinction between normal and abnormal by defining an appropriate criterion
of normality. The essential implication is that a 'normal' state is an outcome
achieved by the (ongoing) implementation of a particular normative project.
Given the 'existential priority' of the abnormal, the logical priority of the normal
can be sustained only in the performance of the norm. Franqois Ewald elabor-
ates the cognitive implications of this model. T h e process of normalization
generates a 'spiral of observation' in which information as to the performance of
a norm continually modifies the knowledge that is presupposed by the norma-
tive component of the norm (Ewald 1986: 151). In this way the operation of dis-
cursive practices is woven into the fabric of a social 'order' characterized by
contingency.
Luhmann's analysis of risk exposes two important limitations to this concept
of normalization. The model of a norm works only with a weak specification of
contingency. In depicting an instance that retains an identity throughout pro-
cesses of normalization, and, in retaining the concept of action as the actualiz-
ation of intention, it remains dependent upon an analogy to subjective action.
Power as a n art ofcontzngency 13
More importantly, it does not address one of the most significant implications
of the shift from sovereignty to bio-power. The defining component of sover-
eignty as a political code was a claim to occupy a privileged position of obser-
vation and intervention (see infra). The sovereign stood at the apex of a social
hierarchy, as the ultimate master of events within its territory. In beginning with
the idea that there is no such commanding instance in society, but only a multi-
plicity of concurrent knowledges and practices, Foucault's account of bio-power
introduces the concept of a social fabric characterized by contingent inter-
actions. This concept of multiplicity is already present in the archaeology of
knowledge; specifically, in the idea of a discontinuous discursive field: a 'spatial-
ity of dispersion' characterized by 'spaces of dissension' (Foucault 1969b: 19,
203). In the case of bio-power, the implication is that each governmental instance
or actor is just one of many participants in a social 'order', and that none has any
privileged claim to a position of observation or intervention. How then does
power work where there is concurrence without hierarchy? T h e problem is to
explain the continuing operation of processes which 'reciprocally overlap in

time' (Luhmann 1995: 305). More provocatively, is concurrence without hier-
archy compatible with the very notion of power? In any event, whereas the struc-
ture of norms offers no account of reciprocity, Luhmann's concept of risk
unfolds into an explanation of how the operations of social participants can
overlap without according a privilege to any participant in a pairing or multi-
plicity. In so doing, it radicalizes the concept of 'norm-reflexivity', turning the
reflexive structure of norms into an emergent process of recursivity.
As a decision-making structure, risk is just one form of expectational struc-
ture. Luhmann identifies 'cognitive' and 'normative' expectations, which corre-
spond, respectively, to the terms of Wittgenstein's distinction between
'experimental' and 'calculative' attitudes (Wittgenstein 1979: 160). The experi-
mental attitude is one in which expectations are continually held open to revision
in the light of information as to their performance. In contrast, a calculative
expectation is 'antecedent to truth': an expectation (in this case a rule of calcu-
lation) is fixed in such a way that, if the calculation produces an inexplicable
result, one blames the workings of the world rather than the form of the calcu-
lation:
When on counting two rows of apples we do not get the result calculated by
adding their numbers we can either say our addition rule must change or that
the counting is incorrect. We would most likely say the latter. Or we might say
one apple had vanished if the count was less than the calculated result. What
is the criterion of an apple's vanishing? One criterion is seeing it vanish. But
if we had two boxes of 25 and 16 apples, respectively, and after careful count-
ing found only 40 apples even though we did not see one vanish, we might
nevertheless say one must have vanished.
(Wittgenstein 1979: 160)
Thus, in cases of transgression or disappointment, the world rather than the rule
is at fault. Luhmann transforms this sort of account by introducing the concept
14 Alain Pottage
of reflexive expectations; 'we may build expectatioris of expectations; we may

normatively expect normative expectations or may normatively be expected to
apply cognitive expectations, and vice versa' (Luhmann 1985: 116). To have
expectations about one's expectations is to anticipate how one will react to their
disappointment. It implies taking up a stance or disposition towards an expecta-
tion which supposes that it will be disappointed, and decides in advance on a
response to disappointment. The effect of presupposing disappointment is that,
however events actually turn out, the expectation, rather than the event which
'fixes' it, serves as the reference point for the next operation of the system. Thus,
a reflexive expectational structure implies a mode of self-observation which uses
contingent events only as an occasion or stimulus to move from one operation to
the next, according to the model of recursivity described at the beginning of this
article. As in the case of risk, the attribution of events transforms contingency.
Given that reflexivity in this sense actualizes recursivity, it describes the way
in which a system differentiates itself from its environment, or constitutes its
environment as environment. T h e emergent1 relaying of one operation to the

next shows how a reflexive expectational structure allows for the self-reproduc-
tion of a process. How does self-reproduction facilitate the reciprocal overlap-
ping of expectations? The answer is that a system's recursivity is also its mode
of relating to others. More specifically, the expectation of expectations is the
structure which allows for the interaction of a multiplicity of social participants:
[It describes] how expectation can order a social field that includes more than
one participant. Ego must be able to anticipate what alter expects of him to
make his own anticipations and behaviour agree with alter's anticipation.
(Luhmann 1995: 303)
This can be described as a process of 'taking account of taking account'
(Luhmann 1995: 304), which presupposes the absence of any symmetry or com-
mensurability of participants' horizons. An anticipation is not met or fulfilled by
alter's response; rather, each response is a disappointment which prompts a new
attitude on the part of Ego which in turn prompts a new anticipation in alter,
and so on (though even this presentation makes the process too linear). The
result is an 'emergent order' based upon mutual self-restraint. Self-restraint
describes the process in which each participant observes itself, adjusting its oper-
ations to its anticipations of others' anticipations, thus developing a mode of
interaction that depends on the processual and ongoing observation of one's own
expectations. From the perspective of Foucault's model of bio-power, the upshot
is that the articulation of overlapping processes is managed in such a way that
each reproduces itself autonomously, within the horizon of a jnz-illimite'.
Luhmann's model of risk and reciprocal self-restraint describes a problem that
is implicit in Foucault's notion of life and bio-power, and which is anticipated in
Foucault's own interpretation of 'emergence' in Nietzsche's writings. If the
social fabric is woven by a multiplicity of recursive processes, what sort of
relations or influences can there be 'between' processes? Although Foucault's
theoretical trajectory describes a different curve, Luhmann's logic of 'taking
Power as an art of contingenqy 15
account of taking account' reveals the theoretical stakes and ambitions of

Foucault's formulation of action upon actions.
Sovereignty as substance
Before turning to that formulation, it is appropriate to say something about the

way in which Foucault's historical references to sovereignty articulate the idea
of power as substance. Again, this is too large a task to be completed here, but it
is possible to suggest how a reconstruction might proceed. First, it should be
emphasized that, just as substance is secondary to emergence, so sovereignty is
secondary to bio-power. The most important implication is that at least from this
perspective, sovereignty is not treated as an actualized social configuration.
Inevitably, sovereignty is (re-)constructed only as a theme within a theory of
emergence, or, in Foucault's terms, it is a theme in a history of the present.
Indeed, substance was never more than an idea, or a hypothesis, of those politi-
cal and theoretical codes which presupposed the existence of some instance of
authorship, where authorship is simply a way of describing all forms of onto-
logical warranty or substratum. Undoubtedly, there was a time when these codes
and their hypotheses 'worked'. Social operations and individual roles were not
so complex or differentiated that they could not be thematized by reference to a
central or paramount instance. Sovereignty, status and legitimacy were possible
on this basis. However, these thematizations did not survive social evolution.
Personal roles were no longer defined by status or quality, but by individual
achievement. Political legitimacy was fractioned into particular interests and
estates. T h e result was that the semantics of social operations - at the level of
what Foucault calls inonczatzons rather than inoncis - could no longer function
as parts of a centralized or hierarchical order.
Foucault's sketch of the 'repressive hypothesis' is one way of depicting theor-
etical perspectives which persist with an archaic distinction between centre and
periphery, or with a code of hierarchy. The kinship between sovereignty as a
political code and the 'repressive hypothesis' as a theoretical code is most appar-
ent if one considers sovereignty as a mode of observation. One of the features of
sovereignty in each of its historical figures was a claim to occupy a privileged
position of observation and representation. T h e position of the sovereign as the
centre of power, present in all parts of society and possessed of legitimate auth-
ority, gave it the right to speak for society. In these terms, the question of sov-
ereignty was, to adapt an eighteenth-century formula, a question of
representation: 'who is specifically authorised to speak on behalf of society?
Who, really, as part of the whole, can represent the whole?' (Luhmann 1990b:
13). Here, sovereignty acquires a different and perhaps more immediate rele-
vance for social and political theory. T h e sovereign's claim to represent society,
or to hold a privileged position of observation, was assigned to sociology in its
traditional role of describing, diagnosing or planning the structure of society, or,
more recently, of warning society of the dangers of technology (cf. Luhmann
16 Alain Pottage
1993). However, just as the traditional figures of political sovereignty were

unable to cope with the differentiation and complexification of society, so too is
sociology unable to address the implications of the fact that its observations are
contingent: 'sociology is not the nation within the nation. It participates, at most,
in the claim to be such, and for that reason its relations with society remain
confused' (Luhmann 1990b; 17-18). The repressive hypothesis identifies this
chiasmus between politics and theory, and suggests how theoretical denuncia-
tions of sovereignty merely betray their own subjection to an outdated theoreti-
cal paradigm. In these terms, the repressive hypothesis is a particular form of
what might be termed a paradigm of 'mastery', within which society is described
only in terms of some form of 'pre- or extra-societally given substratum' (Schiitz
1994: 155).
However, from the perspective of 'emergence theory', how does the political
code of sovereignty appear? First, it figures as a resolutely normative expecta-
tion structure. Its laws were warranted by its name or right, or by arbitrary dis-
tinctions between friend and foe, in such a way that it was constitutionally unable
to learn, or to thematize its own operations. Sovereignty was a code of sumptu-
ary power, sustained by a self-assured, non-calculative, investment in the 'sump-
tuary expression of strength [expression somptuaire de puissance]' (Foucault 1975:
189). So, for example, sovereign largesse was informed by an ethos of ostenta-
tious excess which prescribed that a ruler should look only to the expenditure
side, and not to the revenue side, of the balance sheet (Guery 1984: 1241). In
other words, sovereign power was proved only in its performance: there was no
question of that performance being assessed or evaluated 'economically' or
reflexively, by the ongoing adjustment of expenditure to resources. By taking its
name as its warrant or substance, it foreclosed the process by which expectations
become reflexive. As a political form that presupposed itself as a prior ground or
warrant, sovereignty is the most stark instance of an operation that presupposes
substance. Specifically, it was a tautology, a static paradox as opposed to the
dynamic paradoxical figure of recursivity. As the performativity of the code of
jurisdictional kingship suggests, it was precisely sovereignty's tautological form
that characterized it as reactive rather than 'productive'. Although the aim of
sovereign power was generally supposed to be the preservation of the common
good, that objective was ultimately defined as obedience to the law made or
administered by the sovereign. In other words, the ultimate objective of sover-
eignty was not the implementation of a political programme, but simply the
recognition of its name, or its right to enunciate and enforce the law. This struc-
ture made a virtue of what might be described as a paradox of enunciation
(Foucault 1966a: 523): obedience to the propositional content of laws implicitly
and retroactively validated the illocutionary position of the sovereign who enun-
ciated those laws. T h e fact of generalized obedience was a retroactive proof of a
sovereign's jurisdictional right. In theoretical terms, this tautological form of
self-reference explains why 'sumptuary power' was necessarily technically
impoverished and tactically monotonous, and thus condemned 'endlessly to
repeat itself' (Foucault 1976: 112).
Configurations o f non-indifferent difference
Why is this discussion of questions of risk, complexity and multiplicity an essen-

tial preliminary to an understanding of Foucault's notions of power? The sug-
gestion here is that, for Foucault, the question of power was the question of how
to explain interdependence or interpenetration in conditions where the familiar
sociological models of interaction, or causal or strategic influence, are unavail-
able. The resonances between Luhmann and Foucault are significant here
because Luhmann offers the clearest specification of why causation, interaction
and strategy are unsuitable categories for an analysis that begins with contin-
gency. Because contingency excludes any model of hierarchy, or centre and
periphery, and because it disqualifies structures and subjects (or any form of
master-principle), as appropriate units of theoretical analysis, the anchoring
points of causal analysis are dissolved. Foucault's writings on sovereignty and
authorship are remarkable for the fact that they suggest that, whether one begins
with structures or subjects, with 'objective' regularities or 'subjective' initiative,

one imposes what is in effect the same totalizing constraint on contingency.
Again, because emergence is theoretically prior to substance, a particular specifi-
cation of contingency is essential to an appreciation of this point. However, the
difficulty then is to explain how 'power' as a formula for other-affecting opera-
tions can be retained as a description when none of power's traditional con-
ditions of success have survived: 'how can a non-relation be a relation?' (Deleuze
1986: 72).
Luhmann's notion of 'taking account of taking account', or of mutual self-
restraint, offers one successful response to this question. In the case of Foucault,
the answer lies in the schema of power as action upon actions, which elaborates
the problem of relationality in the context of Foucault's hallmark distinction,
namely, the distinction between forces and discursive events. The formula of
action upon actions is not tied to this particular distinction. Rather, it is a basic
'combinatory' principle: it binds force to force, forces to communicative events,
and so on. One could begin with these or other distinctions. The important point
is that none of these distinctions is substantial or ontological; they are, one might
say formal distinctions, referable to the fact that description or analysis has to
begin somewhere. Foucault begins with an articulation of 'words' and 'things',
or, more precisely, an articulation of discourse (knowledge) and force (power).
H e presents 'technological' power as the elaboration of a question which, he says,
remained implicit in The Order of Dzscourse; namely, the question of 'the articu-
lation of discursive facts and mechanisms of power' (1994b: 228). This articu-
lation is based upon a relation which presupposes their difference: 'technologies
of knowledge and strategies of power are not external to each other, even though
they each have their specific role and they articulate with each other on the basis
of their difference [U partir de leur difirence]' (Foucault 1976: 130; cf. Deleuze
1986: 82). This form of relation is paradoxical in that it manufactures continu-
ity out of discontinuity. In so doing, however, it obviates any notion of power as
the abolition of difference or autonomy. Instead, it presupposes the quality of
multiplicity that is specified by the concept of a&ni-zllimite'. T h e binary distinc-
tion between 'words' and 'things' (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 86-7) is referable
to a mode of differentiation which is compatible with a non-totalizable multipli-
city. The following paragraphs draw out this notion of differentiation by identi-
fying a form of conceptual complicity between Deleuze and Foucault. Inevitably,
the discussion is somewhat abstract, not it least because it reconstructs precisely
those architectural elements that Foucault was happier to leave as the unformu-
lated presuppositions of a more delicate theoretical style.
The question of contingency and multiplicity was essential to the idea of a
mode of discourse analysis which would operate without reference to the unify-
ing substances of time (or structure) and subjectivity:
We are concerned with a set of splits [cisures] which shatter instants and dis-
perse subjects into a plurality of possible positions and functions. This sort of
discontinuity afflicts and disables the smallest of the units which are recog-
nised by tradition and which it is most difficult to contest; the instant and the
subject. Beneath these, and independently of them, one must conceive of a set
of relations between these discontinuous series which are neither of the order
of succession and simultaneity nor of one or more conscious minds; the task
is to elaborate - outside any philosophy of the subject or of time - a theory of
discontinuous systematics [systimaticztis dzscontinues].
(Foucault 1971a: 60)
T h e instances of the 'subject' and the 'instant' are the cardinal elements of two
ostensibly different ways of unifying linguistic processes, by referring them,
respectively, to the strategic actions of subjects, or to the 'objective' replication
of structures. One hybrid model of structuration is found in Benveniste's
concept of personal pronouns as 'shifters' (embrayeurs); this concept constructs
a subject-function which defines the set of performable speech acts which can
be accommodated in language (Benveniste 1966). In doing so, it individuates
statements and speech acts semantically or syntactically, according to a struc-
ture of (inter-)subjectivity which is internal to language, rather than (in
Foucault's terms) discursively, by reference to the open-ended set of practical
or strategic processes which machine semantic elements and illocutionary roles
(Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 98-9). Thus, although the performativity of lan-
guage is explained by opening out the illocutionary dimension of language, illo-
cutionary roles are still articulated by a structured system, bound into a
coherent multiplicity by stable relations of (inter-)subjectivity. So, although a
'shifter' represents a subject-function rather than the familiar humanist
subject, it none the less imports a moment of 'substance' into discourse (cf
Foucault 1969b). T h e effect of 'shattering' this category of the subject is to undo
the substantialized structure that it articulates by making the subject of a speech
act an element that is thoroughly re-made in each successive discursive event
(Foucault 1969b: 68-74). Discourse, or each discontinuous discursive process,
is articulated by 'subject-functions' which do not exist as replicas of some
abstract 'master-function', but which subsist only in the particular enunciative
performance which 'machines' them. In other words, discursive roles and func-
tions are processual. They come into being in a unique articulation of forces
and discursive events, and, even if each observer patterns these articulations
into a temporal schema, each articulation is a novel event. In Foucault's
account, this 'quality' of processuality also undoes the category of the instant.
In scholastic thought, the instant was as much a spatial as a temporal point. It
was the germ of linear, systematic, space, or its indivisible moment (cf. Borst
1993: 71-2). As such, it unfolded into an encompassing horizon which made
events localizable and commensurable. In short, it is one figuration of the most
vital moment of structural logic. In contrast to this, Foucault's model of dis-
continuous systematics depicts a multiplicity within which there are as many
temporal horizons as there are discursive processes, and thus no indivisible
instant which could unify those processes. Again, somewhat reductively, one
might say that Foucault's deconstruction of the subject and the instant undoes
the opposition of structure and subjectivity by invoking the concept of contin-
gency as their common ~ o r r e l a t e . ~

The result is a form of 'rhizomatic' multiplicity (Deleuze and Guattari 1980:
32). Within such a multiplicity, there are no structures or substances that articu-
late or sustain power. Power, as with any other form of articulation or process,
cannot begin before it is actualized. Indeed, it does not begin with discursive
operations as techniques for moulding forces and things, but with reciprocal
interactions between autonomous discursive events and autonomous forces.
This phenomenon can be explained by developing the concept of machines and
ugencements which Deleuze and Guattari introduced in L'Anti-oedipe and Mille
plateaux. Machines describe not a form of technological or mechanical appar-
atus so much as the mode of individuation and replication of social elements and
processes. Their character might be explained by returning to the concept of
emergence and developing it into a concept of co-variation.
As with Luhmann, emergence is not an account of origin. Rather, it presup-
poses the absence of anything that might count as an origin or ground. It is a
way of coping with the difficulty of always having to begin in the 'middle',
without a root or telos, or any pre-given substances or structures (Deleuze and
Guattari 1980: 34). In short, emergence is a correlate of complexity. It describes
a process in which operations (re-)produce themselves from their own contin-
gency. Deleuze's and Guattari's concept of a machine or an a~encement
machiniyue offers an account of this process. A machine is composed of variables
or elements which do not pre-exist the process that 'machines' or articulates
them. Machines select, characterize and 'invent' their own components: 'an
element remains abstract and absolutely indeterminate until it is referred to the
agencement that it presupposes' (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 495). However, this
principle of articulation and individuation is not a creative or developmental
principle of 'authorship': it is itself a product of the articulation and association
of elements. A machined process is replicated not by the continuous unfolding
or development of an originating principle, but in a succession of singular, self-
sufficient, operations, each of which casts the variables of machine in a unique
20 Alain Pottage
form and configuration. One operation replaces another, but it does so quite
independently, its only relay or reference to its predecessor(s) being by way of a
faculty of 'memory'. The idea is of a series of 'successive draws, each of which
is made entirely at random, but in extrinsic conditions determined by the pre-
ceding draw' (Deleuze 1986: 92). The emergent vector of a machined process is
traced by this succession of continuously varying operations. What then differ-
entiates that process and gives a machine its emergent momentum?
T h e principle of continuous variation that characterizes each machine is itself
sustained by an agencement machinigue that binds two machines together in a
process of CO-variation.This notion of CO-variation can be understood as an
engagement with the distinctive theoretical questions addressed by Luhmann's
account of the differentiation of system from environment. It proposes a com-
panion form of what might be termed 'distinction theory', which adapts the
familiar 'substantialist' concepts of difference and identity to a theory of emer-
gence. Each of the processes articulated by a machine is 'a unity which is a unity
only as a multiplicity, a unitas multiplex' (Luhmann 1990c: 68), or ajini-illimite'.

As such, it cannot be ordered into a set of segments, functions or relations which
each represent or 'iterate' the concept of a 'whole', and which collectively form
the constituent 'parts' of that whole. So, for example, discursive processes are
not organized by an analytical 'tree' which unfolds continuously, from a set of
basic ordering principles into the particular form of each permissible linguistic
performance. Language does not have the unity presupposed by this sort of
structural, or 'substance-based', explanation. Rather, it is composed of a set of
semantic elements which are machined by the particular discursive operation
which actualizes them: again, 'an element remains abstract and absolutely inde-
terminate until it is referred to the agencement that it presupposes'. As with the
differentiation of system from environment, the discursive operations which
reproduce a given machine work to differentiate that machine from a domain
which might, to borrow Luhmann's term, be called its 'negative correlate'.
However, with the concept of an agencement machinigue, the focus sharpens,
resolving the question of differentiation into the question of CO-variation, or
coupling. The proposition is that the trajectory of each machine precipitates
from its CO-variationwith another machine. For example, given that discourse
cannot find its unifying identity within itself (there being no way of identifying
its parts by reference to a 'whole' that preceded them, and no way of composing
a 'whole' out of ontologically warranted parts), it has instead to find identity in
difference; specifically by distinguishing itself from an associated layer of non-
discursive forces. For that reason, performance implies differentiation. Indeed,
the process of differentiation or individuation is double-sided. First, it secures
the 'external' articulation of discursive operations by distinguishing them from
non-discursive events, and, second, it ensures the 'internal' articulation of dis-
course by statements, subject functions, their function or value in a sequence of
discursive events. The non-linear complexity of this process of CO-variation
reveals how an ostensibly 'structural' distinction between two strata is dissolved
into ajni-illimite'.
T h e differentiation and replication of each machine is therefore dependent

upon its association with a contiguous machine. T h e articulation of an agence-
ment machinique presupposes the irreducible and active autonomy of the
machines it puts in relation. So, for example, discursive processes are auton-
omous in that they reproduce themselves according to a 'machined' process of
internal variation, rather than as the shadows of nature or economy. However,
discourse does not have the sort of 'commanding' autonomy that is implied by
the model of the signifier as a master-function, or by a model of reference or rep-
resentation. Non-discursive events vary and reproduce themselves according to
their own machined processes. Here, autonomy should be understood according
to the quite peculiar sense of identity in difference that is fashioned by the dif-
ferentiation of system from environment, or expressed in the concept of
relations which 'articulate with each other on the basis of their difference [d
partir de leur dflirence]'. Where Deleuze and Guattari multiply and diffract these
distinctions across the surfaces of the social, making fluid differences between
crystalline, organic, social, and psychic, Foucault focuses on the distinction

between discursive and non-discursive events. This choice does not 'substan-
tialize' either term of the distinction, if only because each term itself presup-
poses a number of other agencements. And, as the idea that elements are
characterized or 'invented' by machines suggests, the same events or elements
can be either discursive and non-discursive, or perhaps both at once, depending
on the designation of the machine that 'machines' them. In any case, although
each process is autonomous, each 'intervenes' in the other, not causally, through
a relation in which one determines or represents the other, but by virtue of a
principle of co-variation. So, for example, each discursive operation 'intervenes'
in non-discursive forces by attributing itself to them (Deleuze and Guattari
1980: 110); it binds them into the structure of a discursive event by distributing
them around a particular configuration of statements and subject-functions (see
also Foucault 1969b: chapter 4). Yet non-discursive events retain their own
autonomous principle of variation: 'things themselves' are never seized in dis-
course (Foucault 1969b: chapter 3). Indeed, they exploit the interventions of dis-
course to sustain their own process of replication through variation (on the
question of action and passion in this relation, see Deleuze 1986: 88-99;
Foucault 1970). Reciprocal interventions or attributions 'between' contiguous
machines hold each machine in a sort of double-bind in which each, by making
itself dependent upon the continuous variation of its partner, is able to continue
replicating itself as a differentiated process. CO-variation is a dynamic or 'tem-
poralized' process. Each successive 'intervention' by one machine prompts a re-
configuration within its 'neighbour', thereby modifying the horizon
presupposed by the first machine and prompting it into a new configuration or
performance, which in turn prompts a new configuration of the neighbouring
machine, and so on. CO-variation having already and irretrievably 'begun', the
momentum of each machine and of the agencement that binds them together is
sustained by this ongoing process of reciprocal stimulation. An agencement
machinique is emergent in the sense that it does not precede or govern this mutual
22 Alain Pottage
interaction; rather it precipitates from the interaction of the processes it binds

together. This expresses an idea that is essential to the concept of power as action
upon actions. Each machine is affected by another only by virtue of its own
autonomous principle of replication, and their CO-variationis 'productive' in the
quite radical sense that the force it generates is referable only to this continu-
ously varying articulation.
Power in actu: actions upon actions
These concepts of emergence and CO-variation are vital presuppositions in

Foucault's account of action upon actions. First, the idea of emergence is tersely
expressed in the proposition that 'lepouvoir n'exzste qu 'en acte' (power exists only
in actu) (Foucault 1994f: 238). Here, the English translation blunts the thesis by
holding that: 'power exists only when it is put into action' (1982: 219). A concept
of emergence becomes an idea of latency and potentiality, and hence lapses back
into an understanding of power as substance. Making power a latent or proba-
bilistic property of events does not do away with the reference to some (quasi)-
ontological warranty. By contrast, to say that power exists only en acte, or in actu,
is to say - in language that is closer to Spinoza, or, perhaps, Duns Scotus (see
Veyne 1978) - that it 'is' only in the process of its exercise. It is emergent in the
sense that it originates neither in its protagonists nor in an abstract social-
structural function. So, although a power relation presupposes a particular his-
torical configuration of forces and discourses, it does not actualize or stabilize
latent possibles or probables. Rather, it is produced in the relation sculpted by
its exercise: it emerges from the articulation of discourse and force. The speci-
ficity of this relation is expressed by the idea of power as agon, or 'agonism'
(Foucault 1994f: 238). Agon describes a gymnastic relation characterized by a
play of interpretations and anticipations. The art of the game is not to dominate
an opposing actor, but to anticipate and exploit its interventions, and thus to
make one's own interventions dependent upon an opponent's restless invention
of (counter-)strategies. There is no intersubjective, mediating, horizon between
opponents which would make strategies commensurable or communicable.
There is only a 'continuous incorporation of contraries' (for an avowedly 'juridi-
cal' reading of these themes, see Rose 1992). An agonistic relation is a relation
that sculpts, and is sculpted by, its terms.
Agon therefore describes a relation in which each of the actors is dependent
upon the autonomy of the other; it can exist only where forces or actors are rad-
ically and dynamically differentiated. The alternative is a relation of violence in
which the active, immanent, autonomy of 'actors' is suspended by binding one
to the intentions of the other, or by binding both to a consensually constructed
tertium quid (Foucault 1994f: 236). This is one of the most vital and most noticed
features of power as actions upon actions. For that reason, it is important to be
clear what 'freedom' means here. If the exercise of power is to be explained as
Power as an art of contingencjl 23
an operation that presupposes the autonomy of actors, and does not simply
abolish, suspend or displace it, what does it mean to presuppose autonomy?
Freedom does not mean the capacity to oppose or abscond. Nor does it mean
inhabiting a relation by an abdication of autonomy or by forbearance from
action. In short, it does not correspond to any of the characteristics of autonomy
as a property of subjects. It implies restlessness in relation; each participant is
continuously at stake in the relation in the sense that their being as an actor is
sustained (through continuous transformation) only by the reciprocal movement
of provocation and anticipation. Each is constantly active; or, to borrow a phrase
from elsewhere, each is 'constantly active with action [toujours actzfd'action]'
(Foucault 1989: 158). Power presupposes freedom in the sense that the relation
itself is sculpted by a constant movement of reciprocal anticipations and inter-
ventions such that each actor is dependent upon the autonomy of the other.
More important, and as the concept of CO-variationsuggests, this is a peculiar
mode of autonomy. In making autonomy an emergent attribute, the concept of
agon entirely disposes of the familiar constellation of connotations surrounding

the notions of autonomy and freedom: subjectivity, identity, individuality, con-
tinuity and so on. There are, quite simply, no identity-based selves of which
autonomy might be a predicate. Only granted such a transformation of the
notion of autonomy is it possible to make an effective distinction between 'power'
as a dynamic, reversible relation and 'violence' as an asymmetrical relation of
capture and constraint.
This simple agonistic relation between forces characterizes power in the larger
sense of an articulation of discursive and non-discursive events, or forces, com-
munications and technologies. The idea that power exists only in actu implies
that it is not latent in institutional configurations. Nevertheless, each emergent
power relation does presuppose a particular historical 'diagram' of forces.
Deleuze makes a distinction between historical 'diagrams' of forces: sovereignty,
discipline and inspection [contr6le] (Deleuze 1990: 240-7). Each diagram is an
abstract machine which exists only as the 'immanent cause' of the techniques or
dispositzfs that effectuate it: 'relations of force or power are no more than virtual,
potential, unstable, evanescent, molecular, defining only possibilities, or proba-
bilities of interaction, until or unless they accede to a macroscopic structure
which can give shape to their fluid matter and diffuse function' (Deleuze 1986:
45). T h e idea is that a diagram does not affect power relations either determin-
istically or probabilistically; rather, it is a presupposition of those emergent
agencements machiniques that 'produce' power (Deleuze 1986: 91-2). Of course,
Foucault refers to disfiositifs rather than machines or agencements. Foucault
himself was somewhat unclear as to the precise specifications of dispositifs - con-
sider, for example, his responses to some sharp questions in an interview with
Ornicar? (1994d) - but his concept of an association of heterogeneous elements,
discursive and non-discursive, that are continuously saturated with different
strategies (Foucault describes a 'processus de perpituel remplissement stratigique')
strongly echoes the concept of an agencement machinique (Foucault 1994d:
299-300: Deleuze 1990: 123). T h e principle of power consists not in actors'
24 Alain Pottage
intentions or in embedded social structures, but in the ongoing 'stitching

together' of these 'saturable' variables. Again, it should be emphasized that the
distinction between 'discursive' and 'non-discursive' is only a formal distinc-
tion; the process of saturation is such that the same events can be invented within
different machines. The question of power rejoins the concept of contingency
and multiplicity figured in Luhmann's account of reflexive expectational struc-
tures. Action upon actions is a principle which allows for the articulation of
autonomous and radically discontinuous processes, none of which is capable of
mastering or constraining the others. They may 'steer' conduct [conduire la con-
duzte], but this implies less a relation in which one instance binds another than
an 'agonistic' process of reciprocal anticipation and adaptation.
To associate the model of agon with the concept of CO-varyingmachines is to
introduce some important elucidations. First, the figure of the 'actor' in a power
relationship is re-specified. The 'individuality' of all the elements or individuals
in a machine is 'infinitely machined' (Deleuze 1988: 12); each is itself the pre-
cipitate or articulation of a number of compounded agencements. This applies to

actors as much as to other elements. Each actor can be decomposed into a
number of smaller and smaller machines and agencements: linguistic, techno-
logical, bio-chemical, organic and so on. The configuration of each actor is pro-
duced by the overlapping of this multiplicity of machines, and its operations
presuppose their emergent operations. For that reason, the dynamic of any par-
ticular articulation is attributable not to the reflexivity, strategy or habitus of an
actor, but to the CO-variationof the multiplicity of machined processes that it
presupposes. This reconstruction of action upon actions offers the most articu-
late and productive interpretation of power as a relation 'that materially traverses
the dimensions of bodies [l'e'paisseur mtme des corps] without having to be relayed
by subjects' representations' (Foucault 1994c: 231). Similarly, it offers the most
illuminating version of 'strategies without strategists'; strategies that have no
author or origin because they are the contingent outcomes of microphysical
agencements. These strategies de-substantialize not only actors, but also actions
as operations upon a material or quasi-material substrate. In an 'agonistic'
relation, the operations of each partner generate events which stimulate and
engage the other(s), not because they are materialized in 'things' that are real for
all actors, but only to the extent that they are events to which each partner has
exposed itself by virtue of its own operations, and which have the value or func-
tion granted by those operations. So, for example, in contrast with Bruno
Latour's model of networks of znte'ressement, in which each actor in a network
seeks to 'perform' its representations - 'to inscribe in the nature of things their
own interpretation of the nature of things' (Latour 1993: 161)' or, quite literally,
to 'concretize' their interpretations (ibid.: 159-60) - there are no 'quasi-
material' facts which precipitate from the interaction of actors' observations.
Rather, events remain the attributions of each particular 'actor'. Even architec-
ture, the most 'concrete' sculpting of space, turns out to be the differentiated
correlate of autonomous processes rather than a unifying spatio-temporal
ground or phenomenon (Habermas 1985; Pottage 1996).
Power as a n art o f contingency 25
Conclusion
T h e theoretical innovation represented by the figure of agon becomes apparent

only if one refers it to the evolution of a theory of emergent elements and pro-
cesses. Only o n that basis can the idea of power as action upon actions be speci-
fied in terms that allow it to be clearly and unequivocally distinguished from
'sovereign' or 'repressive' power. Indeed, this approach is such that it abolishes
almost all of the elements of power as it was traditionally conceived. I n so doing,
it goes somewhat further than Foucault himself might have been prepared to
go. Despite his frequent disavowals of the word 'power' itself, and of the
'imaginary' that it sustains, it might be said that Foucault, in common with
many of his interpreters, was not unwilling to draw o n the rhetorical capital
implicit in any reference to power. Nevertheless, the conceptual formulation of
power as action upon actions describes not a privileged instance of action, but
a formula for social operations in general. T h i s article offers only the bare
outline of that formula. A more substantial reconstruction would enable one to

develop an account of how it is compounded into the discursive or 'insti-
tutional' processes that are traditionally identified with the exercise of power.
I t would also offer some clarification of the theoretical distinction between
'agon' and violence, or between agonistic relations and the historical diagrams
which they presuppose. Similarly, it would allow one to associate the autonomy
presupposed by agonistic relations with the figure of autonomy that is devel-
oped in later accounts of ascesis and self-government (Foucault 1984a, 1984b).
For now, however, the objective is simply to recover the concept of agon as a
model of non-indifferent difference. Even this bare formulation offers a way of
rethinking the place of the question of power in Foucault's work, and in social
theory generally.
London School o f Economics
Notes
1 The distinction between normative and cognitive expectations is a non-essential

distinction, which organizes an emergent processual operation rather than an ontologi-
cal ordering. An expectational structure is a 'structure' only in the quite special sense of
those structures 'whose genesis and reproduction are due to a dzfference. Structural
formation is not preformed in a principle, an arche" (Luhmann 1995: 324).
2 For reasons which will become obvious, I have focused on Deleuze and Guattari's
critique of Benveniste. However, this example has the disadvantage that it addresses a
theory of language in which subjectivity is already structural, so that the distinction
between the subject and the instant is somewhat blurred.
26 Alain Pottage
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Economy and Society

Power as an art of contingency: Luhmann, Deleuze,

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Keywords: emergence; sovereignty; risk; difference.

Niklas Luhmann's account of autopoietic social systems, which is perhaps the

Economy and Society Volume 27 Number 1 February 1998: 1-27

system and environment. The object is to differentiate substance and emergence,

Substance and emergence

The theme of emergence contra substance is no more than implicit in Foucault's

own 'making'. That is so because complexity is not a matter of degree in the

has occurred in earlier operations. [Rlecursive operations produce and repro-

Foucault's writings. Indeed, 'emergence' is proposed as the translation of

of social space. The point of exposing Foucault's analyses to Luhmann's systems

variable geometry which dispersed each species, or cluster of species, into a

Luhmann's version (see infra).

The politics of life and death

Sovereignty is formulated as a right to kill or to let live [defaire mourir ou de laisser

capacity to institute this temporal order as the foundation of subjectivity, and to

which some of his historical propositions may be questionable. However,

forces of life? In contrast with his accounts of discursive processes, Foucault's

explain the continuing operation of processes which 'reciprocally overlap in

of reflexive expectations; 'we may build expectatioris of expectations; we may

environment as environment. T h e emergent1 relaying of one operation to the

account of taking account' reveals the theoretical stakes and ambitions of

Before turning to that formulation, it is appropriate to say something about the

1993). However, just as the traditional figures of political sovereignty were

Configurations o f non-indifferent difference

Why is this discussion of questions of risk, complexity and multiplicity an essen-

with structures or subjects, with 'objective' regularities or 'subjective' initiative,

gency as their common ~ o r r e l a t e . ~

only as a multiplicity, a unitas multiplex' (Luhmann 1990c: 68), or ajini-illimite'.

T h e differentiation and replication of each machine is therefore dependent

crystalline, organic, social, and psychic, Foucault focuses on the distinction

interaction; rather it precipitates from the interaction of the processes it binds

Power in actu: actions upon actions

These concepts of emergence and CO-variation are vital presuppositions in

agon entirely disposes of the familiar constellation of connotations surrounding

intentions or in embedded social structures, but in the ongoing 'stitching

cipitate or articulation of a number of compounded agencements. This applies to

T h e theoretical innovation represented by the figure of agon becomes apparent

outline of that formula. A more substantial reconstruction would enable one to

London School o f Economics

1 The distinction between normative and cognitive expectations is a non-essential

-(1990). Pourparlers, Paris: Minuit. icrits, Vol. 3, 1976-9, Paris: Gallimard,

-(1990~)'The cognitive program of Rome.

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