Review 1: Authority and community in classical and postfoundational theory
Leila Dawney
Abstract
This review surveys classical sociological literature on authority and the production of community
alongside more recent postfoundational approaches to set out the parameters for thinking about the
concept of “immanent authority”, and in doing so attempts to reinvigorate both the thought and
practice of community. This review also identifies and works through some of the important themes in
the way in which social theorists have thought about authority, such as foundational myths (Arendt,
Honig, Derrida,) augmentation (Arendt, Friedman), experience (Benjamin) and truth (Foucault).
Introduction
“With the loss of tradition we have lost the thread which safely guided us through the vast realms of
the past, but this thread was also the chain fettering each successive generation to a predetermined
aspect of the past. It could be that only now will the past open up to us with unexpected freshness and
tell us things no-one has yet had ears to hear” (Arendt 1977:91)
In this review, authority is considered as a specific type of power that is associated with the founding
and formation of community, that is generated through strong community, and that assures people that
community and connectivity are real. The philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt (1906-1975)
argues that the wish for a community without authority is the wish for a despot, seeing to impose a total
will on a community without opposition. Authority is considered here in terms of wider “practices”, and
the understanding that central to these practices are shared beliefs in the idea of a community
(Flathman 1980).
In order to show this, the review surveys classical sociological literature on authority and the
production of community alongside more recent postfoundational approaches to set out the
parameters for thinking about the concept of “immanent authority”, and in doing so attempts to
reinvigorate both the thought and practice of community. This review also identifies and works through
some of the important themes in the way in which social theorists have thought about authority, such as
foundational myths (Arendt, Honig, Derrida,) augmentation (Arendt, Friedman), experience (Benjamin)
and truth (Foucault).
Legitimacy
Authority in social and political thought is commonly used to refer to a specific type of power that is
identified through the concept of legitimacy: as a relation of obedience through an appeal to legitimacy
(Weber 1964:325). This definition places the concept in opposition to power wielded through coercion
1
or violence. Indeed, the use of coercion or violence may preclude a relationship from being defined as
authoritative and moreover may cause the subject of authority to lose that authority: in On Violence
Arendt writes that in an authoritative relationship,
“neither coercion nor persuasion is needed. (A father can lose his authority either by beating his child or
by starting to argue with him, that is, wither by behaving to him like a tyrant or by treating him as an
equal” (Arendt 1970:45).
Authority is not only produced through social practice: it is also productive of social practice. Authority
produces community by placing limits on contingency and thus produces a sort of becoming-together in
the practice of producing something solid, something that exists beyond the present (Sennett 1980). As
the experience of a power coming from an ‘outside’ (see below), a power beyond the capacities of
individuals, authority affirms the possibility of society and transcendence beyond the boundaries of the
individual, giving credulity to the promise of community and the escape from singularity. The
philosopher Alasdair Macintyre, in the Riddell Memorial Lectures, claimed that “the notion of authority
can only find application in a community, and in areas of life in which there is an agreed way of doing
things according to accepted rules” (Macintyre 1967:53), arguing for community as a prerequisite for
authority, in the sense that what produces community qua community is agreement or a sharing of that
which is common, whether that is considered in terms of investment in something that is to come or
belief in something that is held to exist.
Authority and modernity
Many writers have discussed the notion of the loss of authority through modernity – a theme identified
in Bertrand de Jouvanal, Schaar, Arendt and Benjamin, for example (Friedman 1990). This is perhaps
most famously argued by Hannah Arendt in “What is Authority?”, who claims that “ a constant, everwidening and deepening crisis of authority has accompanied the development of the modern world in
our century” (Arendt 1977:91). The authority that Arendt refers to here is a historically specific form – a
type of authority of Greco-Roman origin based on an external source understood as a transcendent
foundation. In Christian times the idea of hell and eternal damnation was appealed to as this
foundation; in Roman times the founding of the Empire. This form of authority gains its power through
elders, whose connection to the foundation is testified to and ‘augmented’ through that testimony.
Walter Benjamin’s essay “The work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility” focuses on the
decline of what he calls the “aura” and the corresponding emergence of a culture based on the
ephemeral (Benjamin 2002). Benjamin, a German Marxist and critical theorist writing in the early part of
the twentieth century, was concerned with the way in which shifts in modes of production entail shifts
of perceptive human apparatuses. Specifically, he explains how the technical reproducibility of the work
of art is related to the decline of ‘authenticity’ as a criterion for the appreciation of a work of art. This is
understood in terms of the decline of what he calls the “aura” in modernity, meaning that the meaning
of the work of art is no longer given by the here and now of its production, nor by the cult value and
correlated ideal of eternity that circumscribed the value attached to the work of art. Again, Benjamin
associates the destruction of the aura with the rise of totalitarianism in the figure of German Fascism,
but also with the possibility of new creative forms of the common.
A turn to recent social theory can provide us with a conceptual framework through which to respond to
these perceived changes in political formations and in the structure of experience. The changes
discussed above suggest that there is an increasing recognition of the constructedness of foundational
modes of social organisation, and that this in turn has led to what we might consider as a “politics of
contingency” based on immanence.
2
Immanent authority: immanence as a starting point
By immanence, we refer to a move in philosophy and social theory towards thinking about a totality
that relates to itself, that does not position a transcendent or rely on it as an ahistorical truth.
Philosophies of immanence include those by Spinoza, Nietzsche, Foucault, Deleuze and Derrida.
Immanence, then is being “without outside”. Instead of a transcendent foundation, a politics of
immanence positions a field of technical production that has only itself as a referent. A transcendent
‘outside’ is thus considered as a production of the immanent technologies of truth and knowledge.
Deleuze and Guattari in What is Philosophy discuss a “plane of immanence that refuses the
possibility of a transcendent. This ultimately has its roots in Spinoza’s notion of substance as an
immanent totality, causa sui . (Spinoza 1996). Deleuze and Guattari write:
“immanence is immanent only to itself and consequently captures everything, absorbs All-One, and
leaves nothing remaining to which it could be immanent. In any case, whenever immanence is
interpreted as immanent to Something, we can be sure that this Something reintroduces the
transcendent”(Deleuze and Guattari 1994:45). Agamben’s discussion of Deleuze in “pure immanence”
also reiterates the nature of immanence as that which does not refer to anything other than itself
(Agamben 1999).
An engagement with literature on biopolitics and vitalism can also inform thinking about ‘immanent
authority’. Foucault’s genealogical work, for example, demonstrates that the problem of immanence
preoccupied scholars in a wide variety of fields since as far back as the 1600s. In Discipline and Punish,
he charts the emergence of forms of power that, rather than being imposed from outside, are exercised
from within. In modernity, techniques for exercising power immanently rather than from a transcendent
outside (e.g. a sovereign) proliferate. Indeed, in The Order of Things he had already argued that in
modernity the very conditions of possibility of knowledge and experience in the human sciences were
transformed by the emergence of three ‘quasi-transcendentals’: language, production, and life. Organic
life came to be understood as self-forming, autonomous and, most importantly, effecting a continuous
circulation between the inside and outside (i.e. the organism and its milieu) through breathing, eating
and so on. Life, as something immanently self-producing, continually transcends its own state of being
(1970: 273) Thus in modernity, life – and hence, the human – can only be thought from the perspective
of immanence. This does not mean that the transcendent disappears (any more than the emergence of
disciplinary power means that sovereign power disappears), but that the transcendent can no longer be
opposed to the immanent. Life immanently produces its own outside. Thus, while this concept of life
emerged in an attempt to define the human, its self-transcending nature means that it contains within it
the possibility of transcending the human itself (1970: 387). The post-humanist turn associated with
post-structuralism, then, is not a radical break from the thought of modernity because it is the modern
concept of life of self-transcendence that makes post-humanism thinkable.
A related perspective on immanence is explored in Simmel’s essay “The transcendent character of life
(Simmel 1971). In Simmel, the concept of the transcendent emerges in the transcending of boundaries,
and it is these boundaries that give form to social life. The very fact that we become aware of our
bounded condition brings out our unbounded condition. Life, for Simmel, is a movement beyond itself.
Life exists in both past and future and, as such, constitutes the content of temporality (we experience
time precisely because there is life). Further, the nature of life is the perpetual production of and escape
from form as a process of self-transcendence. Life has to produce forms and yet it always has to escape
and break with forms. Life is as such both always more-life and more-than-life, transcendent in itself: a
process of immanent transcendence. Thus Simmel develops a theory of life that, rather than opposing
immanence to transcendence, argues that the outside is itself created immanently. ”To climb beyond
oneself in growth and reproduction, to sink below oneself in old age and death – these are not additions
3
to life, but such rising up and spilling over the boundaries of the individual condition constitutes life
itself. Perhaps the whole immortality of man simply signifies the accumulated feeling, heightened for
once into a huge symbol, for this self-transcendence of life” (Simmel 1971:369).
In figuring life as a stream proceeding through generations – flowing through, or as, individuals, the
subject is once again displaced as the origin and focus on movement of power, and instead the concept
of life becomes important. As for Foucault, and Bergson, too, the concept of life in Simmel is that which
exceeds the individual, and exceeds that which can be encountered through the phenomenological
subject. Life as object of power, then, transcends what can be captured and enables new regimes of
capture. life is an ongoing battle against form – against the closing, “between continuity and
individuality” (Simmel 1971:367).
Jean-Luc Nancy , similarly, argues that a key problem faced in modernity is the response to immanence.
He argues for a reading of totalitarianism, for example, as an ‘immanentism’ whose rationality forms
‘the general horizon of our time’ (Inoperative Community, p. 3). Immanentism is a mode of thought that
is oriented towards a fusion of community – a creation of a single communal body or population –
leading to a ‘goal of achieving a community of beings producing in essence their own essence as their
work, and furthermore producing precisely this essence as community’ (p. 2). In his joint work with
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe in The Literary Absolute, he traces aspects of the genealogy of immanentism
through a study of 18th and 19th century Romanticism, charting the emergence of an ideal of community
as an organic artwork, a community that is wholly immanent to itself: self-producing, continually
expanding, and reaching out towards the Absolute. In contrast to such logics of immanence, Nancy
formulates a concept of ‘trans-immanence’ where existence cannot be thought in terms of immanence
and transcendence (interiority and exteriority), but must be approached through more complex spatial
vocabularies (e.g. position, distance, spacing touch, tact, contact) that can better express a thinking of
‘being-with’ as an excess or exposure of singularities, rather than as fusion of identities (The Sense of the
World: page number?).
Deconstructive thinking and a politics of immanence can lead to the exposure of that outside as
something that has its origins in the politics of its own production, yet is projected as an idea of an
outside. Indeed, in thinking in these terms we can perhaps begin to conceive of authoritative relations
based on contingency rather than permanence, and which no longer rely on the position of God or an
outside in order to function. What this means, then, is that the loss of authority in modernity may only
simply be the loss of a chimera. Honig poses Arendt’s problem thus:
“How can we establish lasting foundations without appealing to gods, a fundamentalist ground, or
an absolute” (Honig 1991:88)?
We wish to consider the technologies through which authority can be produced such that one can
consider how authority can take place that does not rely on a foundation.
Recent poststructural writing on authority has demonstrated that all forms of authority, when
traced back, are based on an absence, or an aporia at the foundational moment. We have seen, through
the writing of poststructuralist thinkers such as Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze, how the foundational
basis for authority can be undone, and moreover, that a foundational basis for ethics and judgment
becomes problematic. It is now for us to consider, then, where this leaves us in terms of building
communities and providing technologies and practices of authority-production. An exploration in to
recent social theory can inform us that the foundations upon which authority was seen to lie are always
immanently produced as such: they are always products of various practices and technologies of
authority production. However, this is not to say that foundational authority is no longer with us; indeed
it is still one of the main ways in which authoritative relations take place. For example, where Arendt
4
considers the statements of the US constitution as purely performative, and as a result not based on a
foundational outside, Honig, through a consideration of Derrida’s deconstruction of the US Declaration
of Independence, points to fact that the Declaration still resorts to the logic of the foundation through
the recourse to the idea of “nature’s god”, and through the use of the constative rather than the
performative in order to appeal to the weightiness it seeks (Honig 1991).
During modernity, we have become more aware of the immanent production of authority and the
way in which foundations, outsides and the past are contingently produced in the present and in the
contest of immanence, out of a community of practice rather than a foundation. This is not to
uncritically celebrate a relativistic account of multiple narratives; rather, to recognize in the
contemporary world a confluence of positive and affirmative movements towards self-transcendence,
as well as tendencies towards fascistic, or saturated control.
Arendt and Benjamin offer not so much a lamentation on the loss of authority, but rather a hope, a
glimmer of possibility for new forms of authority to emerge from a transformation in structures of
experience and technological grounds that draw on a politics of contingency. Benjamin suggests that
this opens up a novel horizon for experience, based on the ephemeral instead of the eternal, and in
which the reception of the work of art is open and contingent. While not specifically a text on political
authority, what Benjamin charts the decline of is those very systems and modes of experience through
which authority gains its power: the decline of tradition and permanence in favour of the ephemeral.
However the possibilities that lie in the contingent politics of modernity also, for Arendt and Benjamin,
can lead to dangers. For example, while Arendt positions the performative foundation of the US
constitution as an idealisation of authority, she notes how authority can also be the context of
totalitarianism, both in terms of Fascism and State socialism. Similarly, Benjamin celebrates the
possibility of utopian communism that a politics of contingency could invite, while also citing it as the
context of the rise of Fascism.
For Benjamin, this promise and danger emerges from modernity’s increased sense of the ‘universal
equality of things’ (Benjamin 2002) that harbours both revolutionary energy but also a growing ability to
manipulate entire masses as calculable, statistical bodies. It is this emphasis on calculability that
Foucault draws out in much more detail in his work on biopolitics (e.g. Security, Territory & Population).
He observes how the advance of statistical techniques from the eighteenth century led to a growing
body of knowledge concerning the nature of the human population, the normal distribution of disease,
scarcity, crime, death etc, and how it could be governed as an organic totality without restricting the
individual freedoms of any of its constituent members. Populations could be governed by proliferating
contingency rather than eliminating it. Thus the immanence of a biological population could be
controlled by altering its milieu or environment. The arrangement of space – most importantly, towns
and cities – became one crucial means through which the immanence of a population could be
controlled (Security, Territory and Population, Lecture One). Immanent life became a key object of
power – but also an important site of resistance and practices of freedom. Biopolitical rationalities
enable a thinking of life in terms of beauty, for example (in the Kantian sense of beauty as a free
interplay of the faculties) that creates one resource from which to refuse the contemporary constitution
of the individual and communal self (Foucault, The Use of Pleasure).
This section has outlined what is meant by the terms “immanence” and a “politics of contingency” in
order to prepare the ground for thinking about authority in the light of these theoretical moves. It has
suggested that an ontology of immanence can help to expose the conditions of production of those
ideas and forces positioned as transcendental, and also that the perceived decline in authority is actually
related to a decline in belief in transcendentals. To begin with an ontology of contingency, then enables
a review of theories of authority production that can shed light on the techniques and technologies
through which authority is produced and what this means in terms of thinking about community
production.
5
Theories of how authority is produced.
Sennett, Friedman and the common
As Macintyre suggests above, the notion of authority can be understood as presupposing a relationship
with the idea of community or of the common (Macintyre 1967). Authority and community are seen to
emerge from relations between people that produce some idea of the common. The sociologist Richard
Sennett, a key writer on authority and author of Authority (1980) has a positive view of authority and its
role in social cohesion, arguing that authority is both useful and important and acts as an emotional
bond in modern society; as such it is necessary for society’s functioning (Sennett 1980). Sennett’s
argument is that the study of authority ties together psychology and politics, since it is primarily
concerned with an emotional and affective relation that is involved in the production of specific and
political forms. He also argues for authority as a “way of expressing care for others”, and suggests that a
need for authority is concerned with a need for someone to express care for us (Sennett 1980:15).
Authority answers a desire for stability and order, for defiance in the face of time, in the same way that
a monument can stand as a symbol that power will last “beyond the generation which now rules and the
generation which now obeys” (Sennett 1980:18). Sennett argues that authority can be figured as
something to strive towards – as a dream rather than something that exists objectively and as such is
open to analysis. It is the dream of authority that is important for cohesive social life, as well as its living
out:
“Authority, however, is itself inherently an act of imagination. It is not a thing; it is a search for solidity
and security in the strength of others which will seem to be like a thing. To believe the search can be
consummated is truly an illusion, and a dangerous one. Only tyrants fit the bill. But to believe the search
should not be conducted at all is also dangerous. Then, whatever is, is absolute” (Sennett 1980:197).
In his study of the idea of authority in political philosophy, Richard B. Friedman identifies two
approaches to the idea of the common in classical social theory that have an impact on how authority is
conceptualised. Firstly, he argues that political institutions have authority if people believe they reflect
their own beliefs or embody shared beliefs. In this view of the substance of the common, shared norms
and values are central to the production of authority, and this is of course associated with consensus
theories such as those of Durkheim and Parsons. The breakdown of consensus in society is then
intrinsically linked to the loss of authority, and as such those who write on authority’s loss, such as
Arendt, can be placed in this school (Friedman 1990).
The second way of conceptualising the common does not assume shared beliefs, but instead focuses on
the state regulation of conduct which becomes a social contract with members of society (e.g. Hobbes,
Spinoza and Mill). Where someone is considered “an authority”, Friedman argues, there is a
presupposed world of common beliefs and the recognition of inequality in the capacity of men to
understand those beliefs” (Friedman 1990:84). Where there is a relation of “in authority” there is a
presupposition of a “world of conflicting opinions and the recognition that all opinions are equally
‘private’, no one having a claim in its own right to organise society” (Friedman 1990:84-5). Here, a
distinction is made between a personalised bestowal of authority onto another, and a form of authority
based on the social contract and on a belief in the system through which the subject of authority
acquires its authoritative status. Authority is thus understood as a means of exploring the substance of
cohesion/unity in societies, and Friedman argues that the substance of the authoritative relation is
inextricably tied to the way in which a sense of the common is formed, and hence its implicit relation to
ideas of community. In the first definition, an a priori community of values is assumed, while in the
second a community of interests emerges.
6
Judgment, legitimacy and community: structural accounts of authoritative relations.
Weber, Friedman and Lukes offer to us a formal, structuralist account of the way in which authority
works in social systems, of the emergence of specific relations through these claims to legitimacy.
Weber also suggests that those subject to authority need to have an interest in the “continuation and
the continual reactivation of the community” - in other words, there needs to be personal motives for
the re-creation of community and authority which is part of the recognition of and listening to authority
(Weber 1964:370).
Max Weber’s (1864-1920) famous account of authority in Economy and Society focuses on what
produces the authoritative figure and as such involves a descriptive breakdown of the authoritative
relation into three ideal types: rational/legal, traditional and charismatic. The ideal types are
distinguished in terms of the basis for their legitimation: the substance of claim made to legitimacy. In
Weber, then, obedience to or acceptance of authority is a result of the belief in the legitimacy of an
authoritative relation. Authority is not based on whether the contractual nature of the authoritative
relation is voluntary or involuntary (here he makes reference to the relationship between the soldier
and commanding officer), or to do with power wielded through economic might. Instead, legitimacy is
measured by the probability that attitudes match conduct, and ensure conduct relates to command.
“What is important is the fact that in a given case the particular claim to legitimacy is to a significant
degree and according to its type treated as ‘valid’” (Weber 1964:327).
In the case of rational/legal authority, the claims for legitimacy are made on rational grounds. Claims for
legitimacy are based on an abstract set of rules or norms, and roles are placed in order to perform/enact
this. These roles are considered as necessary for the functioning of the system. Figures of authority in
this case occupy an “office” based on their position in the bureaucratic order rather than on their
qualities or lineage. In rational/legal authority there is a separation of the personal and the official, and
obedience to authority takes place by the subject as a member of a status group. Here, hierarchical
systems of authority are in operation. Weber gives the example of a military structure or priesthood.
Weber’s definition of legal-rational authority captures well the imagination of the law. Obedience is not
to the figure of the leader, but to the impersonal order – the set of rules and a generalised agreement
on the rationality of those rules. The authority of the law in this sense is legitimate (it is obeyed not
enforced) authority in that it is grounded upon a belief in rationality and actualised in an administrative
order.
Traditional authority is grounded on belief in the sanctity of immemorial traditions, and as such involves
a temporality that is quite distinct from the other forms. The sanctity of the order is handed down –
central to this is the notion that these practices and relations “have always existed” (Weber 1964:341).
Obedience here can be based on a more personal relation than in rational/legal authority – for example
through bonds of loyalty. Rather than members of a group, subjects of authority are considered subjects
or comrades, their allegiance based on “not the impersonal obligation of office, but personal loyalty to
the chief” (Weber 1964:341). Legitimacy is maintained through a) traditions that determine the content
of the command and b) the chief’s decisions – through personal loyalty. Authority can be granted to
others by chiefs in a top down system of authority bestowal. For example, a knight may be granted
authority over a particular fiefdom.
The third ground for legitimacy is manifest in the concept of charismatic authority: based on a “sanctity,
heroism or exemplary character” of a charismatic leader (Weber 1968:215). The leader is driven by a
“call” rather than being appointed. There are no administrative organs in the pure form of this type of
authority. The domain of the charismatic necessarily stands outside of the profane or everyday. It is not
based on rational systems – indeed is foreign to all rules, lying in the relationship between leaders and
7
followers. Similarly, it eschews economic power and is described by Weber as an “anti-economic force”
(Weber 1964:362). In modernity, according to Weber, democratisation and bureaucratisation go
together through the separation of the person from the office held by that person characterised by the
move from charismatic or traditional models of authority to rational-legal models. With the move to
permanence from charismatic authority, Weber argues, the two other types of authority need to move
in and fill the role, since charismatic authority is by definition new and always self-recreating. It “may be
said to exist only in the process of originating” (Weber 1964:364).
In Weber, then, belief in the grounds upon which the authoritative relation is built is central to an
understanding and analysis of authority. In Weber’s account of authority, belief in the legitimacy of the
authoritative structure is essential for authority and this is what makes it different from coercion. “Every
system attempts to establish and to cultivate the belief in its own legitimacy” (Weber 1964:325). As a
supplement to this broadly descriptive account, Friedman maintains that the distinction between belief
and conduct is central to an analysis of authority, where the combination of belief and conduct rather
than conduct alone is what distinguishes an authoritative relationship. (Friedman 1990:57). In this way,
as in Weber, belief and conduct are necessary in the authoritative relation: conduct alone is not
sufficient.
Authority can thus be understood as taking place through the act of bestowing – through a listening
which is not coerced, but rather emerges as a result of the subject positions produced in the
authoritative relation. Authority is not imposed upon, rather it is given as those subject to authority
accept the position of those in authority and listen to what they have to say. As such it has a direct
relationship with knowledge and the production of truth, which is explored later in this review,
particularly through the work of Foucault. Authority can be seen to inhabit the space between
knowledge and truth, and as such is dependent on the assumption of unequal access to knowledge and
truth. The emphasis on knowledge and inequality on writing on authority is also clear in Arendt, who
understands authority as based on a relation of inequality of legitimate access to knowledge (Arendt
1970).
In a similar fashion, the listening that is central to the authoritative relationship is discussed by Friedman
in terms of a “special and distinctive kind of dependence on the will or judgment of another so well
conveyed by the notion of ‘surrender of private judgment;” (Friedman 1990:68). This concept of the
surrender of private judgment comes initially from Mill’s essay on Tocqueville. In this way, Friedman
asserts that “to cite authority as a reason for doing an act (or believing an opinion) is to put a stop to
the demand for reasons at the level of the act itself, and to transfer reason to an other person’s will or
judgment” (Friedman 1990:67). In this way, then, the authoritative relationship is conceived from the
point of view of those who give authority and accede to it: authority is produced through listening,
surrender and the recognition of unequal access to knowledge and wisdom. Counter to this, however,
Richard Flathman argues in The Practice of Political Authority that the notion of surrender of judgment is
misleading (Flathman 1980:124) and suggests that bestowing authority involves evidence and reason
and therefore judgment. In other words, the bestowal of authority involves not so much a surrender of
judgment as a judgment of who to listen to and trust based on evidence and reason.
Arendt and augmentation
Arendt notes how the word authority, from the Latin auctoritas, shares its root with augere, to
augment. Augmentation, through various techniques and figures, is what produces and maintains the
authoritative relation. These techniques and practices might include discursive articulation and
rearticulations, repetition through ritual practices, or sedimentation in the habits and common sense
practices of everyday life. Such practices of authority establish future referents for collective life by
reinterpreting the past. Authority carries something into the present – to “add to what existed before,
8
as a witness adds to the thing his testimony about the thing”. (Gladstone 1829 in Friedman 1990:75).
Authority then becomes an intermediary between those subject to its power and a foundation upon
which that power rests. This has focused our attention onto the practices and techniques of the
authoritative relation as performative of itself, through this concept of augmentation. The etymological
roots of authority are helpful in understanding Arendt’s account of the decline of the specific form of
authority she follows through the Roman reinterpretation of Greek political authority with the forming
of the city state as foundation of authority and her association of the political crisis of her contemporary
world with a rise in totalitarianism. She argues that, in modernity, as the foundational reference points
augmented through traditions become unstable, the social is divested of the capacity to give form to a
being beyond individual being, or what we might consider to be community. Foundational authority,
which as we have seen is intrinsically tied to the idea of community, becomes impossible under the
conditions of modernity. For Arendt, the foundational moment is positioned in terms of a need to cope
with finitude – as a way of dealing with mortality and as a way of addressing the problem of memory as
a means of holding on to the past. The production of continuity through the idea of permanence and
durability in her account of authority enables the continuity of life. As such, authority resides in the
technologies of preserving time – such as the technologies of testimony, both written and oral, which
link past and present through providing partial access to the excess of the foundational moment, as well
as through tradition as preserved in institutions such as education systems. Testimony enables collective
memory – a collective witness to the foundation and therefore a link to that foundation, in a similar way
to Sennett’s figuring of the comfort of the monument in its ability to outlive present life (Sennett
1980:18-19).
The authority of the foundation is augmented through the handing down of the testimony of the
founders from generation to generation. Authority is thus conceived as a specific relation, reliant on an
outside, on something transcendent that establishes that authority and upon which the authoritative
relation ultimately depends:
“The source of authority in authoritarian government is always a force external and superior to
its own power; it is always this source, this external force which transcends the political realm,
from which the authorities derive their “authority”, that is, their legitimacy, and against which
their power can be checked” (Arendt 1977:97).
This transcendent outside might take the form of a religious foundation, or laws of nature, or Platonic
ideas. Authority is governed by and appeals to an outside. The authoritative relation, however, does not
reside in the outside; nevertheless it relies on the outside for its legitimacy. Authoritative relations
testify to the power of the outside - to the foundation - through the positioning of certain subjects and
institutions as having a privileged access to the foundation, and it is this practice of testifying to that
foundation through which authority is bestowed and also through which it is augmented. The authority
of the foundation is thus positioned as an outside, as an exteriority which wields no power itself, yet
enables power through reference to this outside. The externality is in excess of itself, it can never be
reached in entirety, and is accessed only through the testimony of those who in some way witnessed the
foundational moment.
“Tradition preserved the past by handing down from one generation to the next the testimony
of the ancestors, who first had witnessed and created the sacred founding and then augmented
it by their authority throughout the centuries. As long as this tradition was uninterrupted,
authority was inviolate; and to act without authority and tradition, without accepted, timehonoured standards and models, without the help of the wisdom of the founding fathers, was
inconceivable” (Arendt 1977:124).
To understand authority in terms of its augmentation is central to understanding it in terms of practice.
To figure authority as techniques and technologies through which it emerges in an ongoing self9
production enables an analysis of the conditions and practices through which authority emerges and
positions it as something that happens, rather than something that simply exists.
Foucault, the subject and authority
The writing of Foucault on the subject and power is also central to thinking about the way in which the
authoritative relation has been theorised. The concepts of subjectivation and subject production, in
particular, can help elucidate the conditions through which the authoritative relation is produced. In
Foucault’s work, the mechanisms of historically specific regimes of truth become inseparable from the
cultivation of particular disciplines and technologies of the self, which are mutually constitutive of the
specificity and reach of power. Foucault enables thinking about the ‘conditions of possibility’ (Foucault
2001:xxiv, 183, 265) of a particular relation, and of the regimes, rationalities and truth games through
which the possibility for the authoritative relation emerges.
Foucault understands power not as violence, nor consent. Rather, it is a ‘total structure of actions
brought to bear upon possible actions; it incites, induces, and seduces … and in the extreme constrains
or forbids absolutely (Foucault 1982:790). In this definition, power is nevertheless always a way of
“acting upon an acting subject or acting subjects by virtue of their acting or being capable of action”
(Foucault 1982:790). Foucault employs the term ‘conduct’ to understand the specificity of power
relations, which refers at one and the same time to the capacity to lead others (e.g. according to
mechanisms of coercion), and way of behaving within a more or less open field of possibilities. Hence
the exercise of power consists in guiding the possibility of conduct and putting in order the possible
outcome:
“this form of power applies itself to immediate everyday life which categorises the individual, marks him
by his own individuality, attaches him to his own identity, imposes a law of truth on him which he must
recognise and which others have to recognise in him. It is a form of power which makes individuals
subjects” (Foucault 1982:781).
In the particular form of political rationality which Foucault traces genealogically to an ensemble of
procedures, tactics and instruments which emerged during the eighteenth century, “population” is
constituted both as an object of government and as the collective bearer of certain rights, belonging to
particular notions of collective well-being, or “life” (Foucault 1978). In this new form of power,
“biopolitics”, subjects are simultaneously subjected to a law of truth which imposes certain relations
and responsibilities in relation to social problems, and, by means of the same individualised selfrelations, invested with the capacity to “refuse what we are” and thereby produce new forms of
subjectivity (Foucault 1982:782). From this point onwards, the structuring of the possible field of action
is understood to be inseparable from the establishment of transversal links between institutions,
political-economic rationalities, and modes of reflection directed towards the preservation of freedom
and prosperity.
Foucault’s concepts of subjectivation are useful for thinking about the production of subjects of and to
authority, and the concept of biopower and population life for a thinking about a transpersonal and
posthuman account of authority production. Through these analyses, Foucault displaces the
authoritative relation by considering it as the effect of particular processes. For example, in positioning
power as what produces bodies, Foucault critiques the idea of the subject and in doing so attempts to
free the “history of thought from its subjection to transcendence” (Merquior 1985:17). The subject is
destabilised and repositioned as an effect of processes of subjectification. In this way, subjectivation
becomes the process through which productive power works:
“it is not power but the subject which is the general theme of my research” (Foucault 1982:778).
10
To think with Foucault enables us to analyse relations between knowledge, values and social
change in a manner sensitive to both the historical specificity sought by Weber and Arendt, and
also the capacities of bodies for desire and the will to act. Foucault’s critique of the foundational
subject and of a pure interior to the subject focuses on bodies not as originators of ways of
being and acting but as nodes, or points of contact in networks of power relations: bodies as
part of technologies of control that can be analysed accordingly, and whose pleasures too are
produced in the service of power (Foucault 1978, 1988, 1992). As such, the subject is displaced
from being origin of experience of authority and community to that which is produced through
the regimes of truth and power that are the substance of authoritative relations. Foucault does
away with depth in favour of an account of the social that is a constant production of surface
effects, a play of surfaces over the movement of bodies, matter and knowledge. It is Deleuze
who perhaps most clearly discusses this surfacing in Foucault’s work, when he writes that
the outside is not a fixed limit but a moving matter animated by peristaltic movements, folds and foldings
that together make up an inside: they are not something other than the outside, but precisely the inside
of the outside (Deleuze 1988:80).
This is perhaps clearest in his often cited discussion of the soul as subjectification in Discipline
and Punish: the soul as effect of an apparatus that surveys, supervises, coerces and regulates,
an effect of a “certain technology of power over the body” that is produced
out of methods of punishment, supervision and restraint… [and that] inhabits [the subject] and brings him
(sic) to existence, which is itself a factor in the mastery that power exercises over the body. The soul is the
effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body (Foucault 1979:29).
Here, the ‘soul’ emerges as a surface effect that effaces the idea of the inside. Foucault moves towards a
consideration of the body as materialising power in a way that disrupts the foundational subject of
Western thought through analyses of the processes through which subjects are produced - the
techniques and technologies of subjectivation (assujetissement) - and at the same time that does away
with the possibility of positing an outside to the power/knowledge relations that are produced through
and produce materialities. He finds a way to escape any attempt to “grasp the ineffable moment of
origin, the primitive intention of authors” (Foucault 1972:138-40), instead positioning the subject as
always already embedded in relations of power (Foucault 1982). In his discussion of Foucault and
governmentality, Mitchell Dean writes of the ways in which subjectivation and objectivation are
involved in the production of authority and how government occurs through the production of subjects
who are able to produce and reproduce, through their conduct, the authoritative relationship. He notes
how “the establishment of an interior domain is thus dependent on the enfolding of external authority”
(Dean 1996:222). In particular, he refers to the governing substance as the material that is worked on in
this enfolding, and the governing work, which relates to the “means, techniques, rationalities, forms of
knowledge and expertise that are used to accomplish the enfolding of authority” (Dean 1996:222-3). In
doing so, we can see that subjectivation is only part of the story. It is also necessary to consider “the
relation between the forms of truth by which we have come to know ourselves and the forms of
practice by which we seek to shape the conduct of ourselves and others” (Dean 1996:220).
These observations open up the possibility to consider authority as no longer a relation between people
alone, but instead as to do with knowledge production and those regimes of truth through which bodies
and subjects are produced. Instead of beginning with people, or subject positions, we are able to begin
with the conditions of possibility through which those people/subjects come to be produced as such,
11
and with the processes through which the authoritative relation becomes recognised. Authority can thus
be considered in terms of the recognition of a gap between knowledge and truth: and an interrogation
of how that gap is realised through differential access to knowledges which are considered nearer or
further to truth. The analysis of authority, then, is reformulated and displaced through a focus not on
the figures of authority themselves, but on the regimes through which some bodies come to be
considered as figures of authority and through which some come to be produced as those who listen,
recognise and respect that authority. Foucault also writes about looking at where power does not
encompass all – where resistance to power emerges as being a way of shedding light on how it works in
other situations. In looking at authoritative relations which have “broken down,”, then, we can consider
more about the processes through which authority is figured. “rather than analysing power from the
point of view of its internal rationality, it consists of analysing power relations through the antagonism
of strategies” (Foucault 1982:780).
Deleuze and Derrida: ethics, combat and deconstruction
Finally, we move to the writing of Deleuze and Derrida in order to offer new ways of thinking authority
after the negation of the foundation. In “Force of Law: the mystical foundation of authority”, Derrida
writes on the problem of justice and deconstruction, asking whether it is indeed possible to think
deconstructively about justice (Derrida 1990), and what is positioned as a foundation and a truth if we
do away with thinking about truth. Derrida suggests in this text that deconstruction always implies the
question of justice, even when it is approached obliquely:
“Deconstruction, while seeming not to “address” the problem of justice, has done nothing but address
it, if only obliquely, unable to do so directly” (Derrida 1990:935).
This post-Nietzschean approach to ethics is also considered in Deleuze’s “To have done with judgment”
as containing a way of considering the production of knowledge through what he refers to as “combat”.
As we have seen above, Friedman conceptualises authority in terms of a surrender of judgment to
another. Here Deleuze argues for the specificity of the consideration of justice and judgment together,
arguing that justice does not necessitate judgment, and that in this recognition lies the possibility of
opening up a space for justice through what he calls “combat”. Deleuze argues that there can be a
justice that is opposed to all judgment – the justice of combat. This is a justice that is opposed to
judgment: “a system of blood and life that is opposed to the writing of the book” (Deleuze 1997:128).
Deleuze argues that judgment is a historical product of Christianity. Against judgement, combat is about
the body, about experience, about the affective intensities that build in certain situations. The logic of
combat involves a move towards the body without organs, “an affective, intensive, anarchist body that
consists solely of poles, zones, thresholds, and gradients” (Deleuze 1997:131). Combat replaces
judgment, the will to power, the “powerful, nonorganic vitality that supplements force with force, and
enriches whatever it takes hold of” (Deleuze 1997:133).
These two texts call into question the ethical foundations for authority and open up the possibility for
discussion about what values, what ethical tenets can be set that provide a way in which to produce
communities. Derrida writes that the authority of the law contains within it the spectre of force – there
is no law without its possibility of enforcement – and, as a result, the concept of justice, upon which the
law is based, contains within it always the possibility of force. This is particularly true of the English
phrase, to enforce the law, which, as Derrida points out, loses its power in the French idiom “appliquer
la loi”. This linguistic slippage, as Derrida points out in his discussion of Benjamin’s “Zur Kritik der
12
Gewalt”, also emerges in the German. The text is translated as “Critique of violence”, yet, as Derrida
points out, gewalt also refers to legitimate power, public force and authority.
In “Force of Law: the mystical foundation of authority”, Derrida also considers the aporia at the
foundation of the law and of its authority through the recognition that at the moment of foundation
there is nothing to appeal to. Referring to a term used by Montaigne’s and adopted by Pascal, Derrida
discusses how the fondement mystique de l’autorite refers to this aporia: “custom is the sole basis for
equity,for the simple reason that it is received; it is the mystical foundation for authority. Whoever
traces it to its source annihilates it” (Derrida 1990:939). As he points out:
“Justice, in the sense of droit (right or law) would not simply be put in the service of a social force or
power, for example an economic, political, ideological power that would exist outside or before it and
which it would have to accommodate or bend to when useful. Its very moment of foundation or
institution (which in any case is never a moment inscribed in the homogeneous tissue of a history, since
it is ripped apart with one decision), the operation that consists of founding, inaugurating, justifying law
(droit), making law, would consist of a coup de force, of a performative and therefore interpretative
violence that in itself is neither just nor unjust and that no justice and no previous law with its founding
anterior moment could guarantee or contradict or invalidate” (Derrida 1990:941-3).
Authority, then, becomes a “violence without a ground” (Derrida 1990:943). Deconstructing the grounds
of authority thus reveals its nonfoundational nature and calls for attention to be paid not to the means
through which it not only appears as foundational, but how those foundations are produced as such
through technology and practice. It also draws attention to the power of the performative in the
production of authority. Arendt argues that the performative nature of the formation of the US
constitution is a positive example of authority production that does not rely on an outside. Derrida’s
‘Signature, Event, Context’ discusses the force of the performative, arguing that the performative has
force precisely in its break from structure as a force de rupture (Derrida 1988) . Using the example of
Rosa Parks, Butler writes how the sheer lack of iteration in her act of sitting in the front of the bus,
without prior right provided a break that opened up new forms of authority: “in laying claim to the right
for which she had no prior authorisation, she endowed a certain authority on the act, and began the
insurrectionary process of overthrowing those established codes of legitimacy” (Butler 1997:147) . This
is an interesting case in point, however, as we could also argue that her authority relied on the
legitimacy bestowed upon the act by the political community of those who felt she should have a
legitimate right to do what she did. In other words, the performative authority attached to the act was
not in isolation, and did not come from nowhere.
Nancy: spacing, community and technics
Another thinker that administers to the issue of immanent authority is the French philosopher Jean-Luc
Nancy. Nancy, like Deleuze in his effort to be done with judgment, sees the search for nonfoundational
authority as an ethical project. His philosophy incorporates the aporias and indeterminacies of
poststructuralism into a phenomenology that critiques the very ground of phenomenological thought.
Nancy’s philosophy argues for an ontology of ‘singular–plural’ existence – an ontology that is based on
being among others but implying no relation of gathering. Being cannot be thought of without beingwith, as the primary ontological condition: “Being cannot be anything but being-with-one-another,
circulating in the with and as the with of this singular-plural existence” (Nancy 2000:3).
Being-with, and the idea of being as singular-plural, raises the question of the possibility of thinking the
body or the subject in isolation. Being can only be thought through being-with. Being-with for Nancy
implies no sense of similarity between bodies, any recourse to identity politics or ethics: rather it is an
ontological state of opening out onto the world, of the production of time and space through this
13
movement - what Nancy sees as the spacing of the world. Moreover it is only through being-with that
we are capable of thinking about individuals and groups.
Being-with occurs prior to the determination of space and time, prior to the individual. It operates as
divisions and entanglements – intertwinings and dispersions. It is what makes space and time possible,
and also the possibility of thinking about individuals and societies, which are understood as
hypostatisations of the primary being-with. Being-with, the “co-”, the “mit-”, is a spacing, an opening
out of the world. Being-with, however, can apply to one who is alone. Indeed, to be alone, for Nancy, is
to be alone-with (Nancy 2005). Being-with is a condition for being-alone.
The ontological separation implied by Nancy’s concept of spacing as opening out can bring about a
move away from foundational identity politics and towards a new politics of singularity, since the
gathering implied by identity politics and the logic of the nation and the political group can be displaced
through this move. Nancy’s writing on community intends to refigure the concept of community such
that it enables a posthuman, post-identity politics reading of the idea of the common. Taking the
ontological being-with as a starting point, Nancy repositions community as that which occurs through a
shared sense of finitude – a shared relation to death, rather than an identarian grounding in similar
nationality or ethnic group. Nancy attempts to formulate an experience of community which does not
retreat to the level of the individual, and which bypasses and challenges a metaphysics of the subject. In
doing so, he critiques the idea of community as that which is lost – a prior mode of being that nostalgia
is felt for – and instead positions community as that which stands in the realm of the to-come.
“community is possible, in the first instance, and on a primordial level, only as a kind of rupturing or
dispersion, which is itself constitutive of the sharing or communication proper to the being-in-common
of the communal. The experience of rupture or dispersal, that is, the separation of those entities which
are “in common” in community, would be, according to this account, precisely that which allows them
to be exposed to each other, to communicate and to share an existence” (James 2006:176).
Nancy’s critique of the idea of community is directed in particular towards the notion that
community is something which has become lost in modernity and needs to be regained. Nostalgia for
community is thus deconstructed as being based on an idea of community which itself is contingent, this
deconstruction itself enables a rethinking of the concept of community and of the common. Nancy
argues that one cannot subsume the singular in-common into a communal project or collective identity.
Rather, community lies in the shared experience of finitude: “community reveals, or rather is, our
exposure to the unmasterable limit of death, and thus our being together outside of all identity, or work
of subjectivity” (James 2006:185). Community is the “fundamental “being-with” of those singularities,
and not as a collection of individual subjects who bind themselves together on the basis of a shared
identity” (James 2006:177).
This has significant implications for the study of authority and community, insofar that a politics of the
common, of the with, the co-, the mit- that is not based on identity but on shared spacing, can emerge
from such thinking. Nancy’s work invites a consideration of foundationless ethics that are based on the
refusal of the sovereign, or of identity politics in favour of a solidarity-based ethics: a being-together
that dissolves the I or the you and replaces it with the we.
However, Nancy's chapter “War, sovereignty, right, technē”, describes a world where the foundation
has been replaced by technē, or ecotechnics, which can broadly be considered in terms of a political
economy without a sovereign. The sovereign, as foundational authority, although it is displaced by
technē, still reappears as a spectre filling the space where the sovereign lay. So for Nancy the problem
lies in thinking without foundation, allowing for a new ethics, an ethics based on the ontology of spacing
14
and opening out of meaning. This ethics, then, as a utopian project, is perhaps more consonant with the
world emerging through ecotechnics than the world working on the logic of the displaced sovereign. A
move towards an ethics of spacing, a world where the empty space of the sovereign is allowed to
remain empty, then, may lead to a less dissonant experience of the world and the possibility of a new
ethics without foundation. The argument made by Nancy around the decline of Sovereign law is that
sovereign authority is being undermined by ecotechnics. He argues that there is a gap in the efficacy of
sovereign law in its grounding of claims for authority lying on foundational grounds (blood and soil, for
example) which opens up the possibility of what he calls the spacing of the world. For Nancy, the field of
experience provided by the link of techne and finitude – which implies a radical affirmation of our
technicity – may provide the grounds for the spacing of the world as something that can fill the empty
space of law and of justice.
Conclusion
This review has explored the work of various thinkers on the subject of authority through the lens of
what might be considered an ontology of immanence. In doing so, it has attempted to show how the
authoritative relation is produced through legitimacy, surrender of judgement, performative acts and
the projection of foundations. In combining structural and poststructural accounts, the review intends to
demarcate a specific field for thinking about authority and immanence that takes into account the work
of social theorists such as Sennett, Weber and Arendt, yet supplements it through the thought of writers
such as Derrida, Nancy and Deleuze. As such, the review prepares the ground for further thinking about
the ethics and aesthetics of the authoritative relation, and also for thinking specifically about the
experience of authority in the light of postfoundational thought. For example, one can investigate the
substance and conditions of emergence of those beliefs and motives referred to by Weber in his account
of types of authority. This would involve a consideration of the production of subjects and particular
forms of life and how this can help to theorise the way in which authoritative relations and subject
positions are produced. This involves a consideration of the conditions for their appearance, and specific
rationalities through which these forms of authority are generated such that they appear as powerful
motivations for action.
Agamben, G. (1999). Absolute Immanence. Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy. D. HellerRoazen. Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press: 220-235.
Arendt, H. (1970). On Violence. New York, Harcourt Publishers.
Arendt, H. (1977). What Is Authority? Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought. H.
Arendt. Harmondsworth, Penguin: 91-142.
Benjamin, W. (2002). The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducability. Walter Benjamin:
Selected Writings Vol 3, 1935-1938. H. Eiland and M. Jennings. Cambridge: Massachusetts,
Harvard University Press: 101-133.
Butler, J. (1997). Excitable Speech: Politics of the Performative. London, Routledge.
Dean, M. (1996). Foucault, Government and the Enfolding of Authority. Foucault and Political Reason. A.
Barry, T. Osborne and N. Rose. London, UCL Press.
Deleuze, G. (1988). Foucault. Minneapolis and London, University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, G. (1997). To Have Done with Judgment. Essays Critical and Clinical. Minneapolis, University of
Minnesota Press: 125-135.
Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1994). What Is Philosophy? London, Verso.
Derrida, J. (1988). Limited Inc. Evanston, IL, Northwestern University Press.
15
Derrida, J. (1990). "Force of Law: The "Mystical Foundation of Authority"." Cardozo Law Review 11: 9201045.
Flathman, R. E. (1980). The Practice of Political Authority. Chicago, University of Chicago press.
Foucault, M. (1972). The Archæology of Knowledge. London, Routledge.
Foucault, M. (1978). The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. New York, Pantheon Books.
Foucault, M. (1979). Discipline and Punish. New York, Vintage.
Foucault, M. (1982). "The Subject and Power." Critical Inquiry 8(4): 777-789.
Foucault, M. (1988). The History of Sexuality Vol.3, the Care of the Self Harmondsworth, The Penguin
Press.
Foucault, M. (1992). The History of Sexuality Vol.2, the Use of Pleasure London, Penguin.
Foucault, M. (2001). The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London, Routledge.
Friedman, R. B. (1990). On the Concept of Authority in Political Philosophy. Authority. J. Raz. New York,
New York University Press: 56-91.
Honig, B. (1991). "Declarations of Independence: Arendt and Derrida on the Problem of Foundation a
Republic." The American Political Science Review 85(1): 97-113.
James, I. (2006). The Fragmentary Demand :An Introduction to the Philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy.
Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press.
Macintyre, A. (1967). Secularization and Moral Change : The Riddell Memorial Lectures,N36th
Series,Delivered at the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne on 11,2 and 1 November,1964.
Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Merquior, J. G. (1985). Foucault. London, Fontana.
Nancy, J.-L. (2000). Being Singular Plural Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press.
Nancy, J.-L. (2005). "The Insufficiency of 'Values' and the Necessity of 'Sense'." Journal for Cultural
Research 9(4): 437-441.
Sennett, R. (1980). Authority. New York, Alfred A. Knopf.
Simmel, G. (1971). The Transcendent Character of Life. On Individuality and Social Forms. D. N. Levine.
London and Chicago, University of Chicago Press: 353-374.
Spinoza, B. d. (1996). Ethics London, Penguin.
Weber, M. (1964). The Theory of Social and Economic Organization / Edited with an Introduction by
Talcott Parsons. London, Collier-Macmillan.
Weber, M. (1968). Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. New York, Bedminster
Press.
16