请将“A ‘relational’ approach also enables us to locate the problematic concept of ‘power’. I have already argued that power should not be seen as a pre-given quantum or property of particular agents that is allocated in a zero-sum fashion and noted that it should be seen instead as a complex social relation reflecting the changing balance of forces in a given situation. Power can be defined as the production of effects within the limits set by the ‘structural constraints’ confronting different agents. It results from the ‘contingently necessary’ interaction of their conduct in a given situation and must be related to the conduct of all relevant actors in that situation. This does not imply that agents are morally responsible for these effects by virtue of being free-willed, originating subjects but nor does it mean that agents cannot be seen simply as the Träger of self-reproducing structures. We can identify the exercise of power in terms of the impossibility of predicting these effects from a knowledge of the ‘structural constraints’ in isolation from knowledge about particular agents so that the actual effects can meaningfully be said to depend in part on their actions or inaction. This insistence that the exercise of power involves the production of effects that ‘would not otherwise occur’ is quite compatible with an account of the agents involved as non-unitary subjects constituted in and through discourse. For all that is required to sustain this conception of power is the notion of agents who can discursively interpret their situation and decide upon a course of (in)action. In this context the idea that individual and/or collective subjects can be non-unitary, ‘interdiscursive’ agents of interpretation, calculation, and intervention is an important element in sustaining an adequate account of power. Such an account would be simultaneously anti-structuralist (anti-Träger) and anti-voluntarist (opposed to the assumption of a unitary, rational, free-willed, autonomous subject). In this sense it would help to explain the indeterminacy of events at the level of structural constraints. (It should also be noted that ‘interdiscursivity’ is a crucial precondition of effective ideological intervention.) At the same time a ‘relational approach’ implies that the exercise of power is overdetermined at the level of social action in so far as it depends on the interaction of all relevant agents in the power relation. This makes it difficult to attribute the outcome of an interaction unequivocally to one agent among all those involved in a power relation except in the limiting case of a purely subject-object relation. More generally we must focus on the conjoint reproduction and/or transformation of social relations through the interaction of different agents and attempt to specify their various contributions to the overall outcome within the limits set through the structural constraints severally and/or collectively facing such agents.

This means that power as such is not an appropriate concept for the explanation of social relations. For, in so far as it does not simply denote the production of effects in general within the limits imposed by structural constraints, it identifies a field of determined effects which constitute an explanandum rather than explanans and so cannot have any independent status in causal analysis. In this sense, it follows that power is a formal concept empty of content and incapable of explaining how particular effects are produced or that it is rendered redundant through the subsequent elaboration of substantive chains of determination that are ‘contingently necessary’ to the production of the specific effects under investigation. Neglect of this point tends to produce purported explanations of social relations in terms of an exercise of power whose sole theoretical and evidential support involves reference to the self-same relationship or else leads to the introduction of power to ‘explain’ those aspects of a social relation that cannot be attributed to other types of determination. Such circular reasoning and residual categories would be quite bad enough if power could indeed be employed as an explanatory principle but, since it cannot be so used, it is doubly serious because it leads to fruitless attempts to specify how power as such can be invoked to explain particular events.

Thus power can have only a limited and descriptive role in social analysis. It is a concept that is conventionally used to identify a production of significant effects through the actions of specific agents in a given set of circumstances. It is limited to the extent that such an account abstracts from these circumstances to attribute the significant effects to the actions in question. It thereby encourages the assumption that such actions were freely chosen as well as the decisive causal factor in the relation. Yet the exercise of power is not the unconditional outcome of a mechanical clash of wills but has definite social and material conditions of existence and is circumscribed through its links with other determinations in a social formation. This is why politics can be justly described as ‘the art of the possible’. The analysis of these limits and constraints is therefore logically prior to the study of the actions of the agents involved in a power relation. Moreover, unless one regards such actions as random within the ‘structural constraints’ confronting these agents or else considers them as the result of an otherwise unconstrained free will, it is also necessary to investigate how the attributes, capacities, and modes of calculation of these agents further limit the possibilities of action and thereby help to determine the resulting power relation. An adequate analysis should therefore construct an historical account of the specific combination of social forces, actions, structural constraints, etc., that is necessary and/or sufficient to produce the effects in question.

This discussion implies that what is conventionally called ‘power’ is a complex, overdetermined phenomenon. At best the concept of ‘power’ can be retained to identify the production of significant effects (i.e., significant or pertinent at the level of abstraction and degree of complexity in terms of which the explanandum is defined) through the interaction of specific social forces within the limits implied in the prevailing set of structural constraints. The contingency of power in comparison with the determinacy of structure is theoretical rather than actual. All that it implies is that the conduct of the agents in question and, a fortiori, its effects in a given set of circumstances cannot be predicted from knowledge of the circumstances themselves. It does not mean that power is indeterminate in terms of factors peculiar to the agents themselves and/or indeterminate in terms of the pattern of their interaction. In this sense the analysis of power is closely connected with the analysis of the organisation, modes of calculation, resources, strategies, tactics, etc. of different agents (unions, parties, departments of state, pressure groups, police, etc.) and the relations among these agents (including the differential composition of the ‘structural constraints’ and ‘conjunctural opportunities’ that they confront) which determines the overall balance of forces. In discussing this balance of forces regard must be paid not only to the range (in terms of pertinent areas of influence as well as their various determinations) and determinacy (or certainty of the effects in question) of potential influence but also to the net costs and benefits of different courses of (inter)action. It is only through the latter calculation that we can assess the extent to which the exercise of power creates, maintains, or restores the conditions of capital accumulation or helps to secure the conditions of existence of some other point of reference.

It is in this context that we can locate the concept of ‘interest’. For the analysis of interests must be undertaken in a relational context concerned with comparative advantage rather than some notion of absolute interests posited in isolation from specific conjunctures. A situation, action, or event can be said to be in an agent’s interest if it secures a greater net increase (or smaller net decrease) in the realisation of that agent’s conditions of existence than do any feasible alternatives in a given conjuncture. This implies that an agent’s interests must be assessed in relation to the structural constraints and conjunctural opportunities obtaining in a given period. It implies that it could be to the advantage of an agent to sacrifice certain benefits in order to secure more important benefits in other areas (e.g., to sacrifice certain short-term ‘economic-corporate’ benefits within limits compatible with continued economic reproduction in order to secure support for an ‘hegemonic project’ necessary to long-term reproduction). It implies that agents can face conflicts of interest such that a given situation, action, or event undermines at least some conditions of existence in at least some respects at the same time as it advances these and/or other preconditions in other respects.

This has been recognised in several of the contributions to state theory considered above in terms of the contingent opposition or contradiction between the economic interests of capital in accumulation and its political interests in legitimation but it should be specified in greater detail to allow for the diversity of interests in relation to various conditions of existence and their conjunctural overdetermination. This means that we must always specify which aspects of an agent’s interests are being (dis) advantaged rather than engage in blanket assertions about such matters (cf. our earlier comments on the contingently capitalist character of state power). Moreover, in so far as an agent is involved in different relational systems and/or has been interpellated with different subjectivities or identities, there may be conflicts among the conditions of existence relevant to these systems and/or subjectivities with the result that the agent has no unitary and non-contradictory set of interests capable of realisation.

The ‘relational’ approach to interests thus implies that they can only be assessed in terms of the alternative outcomes in particular situations for specific subjects interpellated in a particular manner. The net balance of advantages for a given agent can change in parallel with variations in conjunctural opportunities and structural constraints and the same conjuncture can have different implications for interests if the manner in which the agent is interpellated is changed. Indeed a key area of ideological struggle consists in the redefinition and/or recombination of subjectivities and hence the interests that agents may have in various situations. Thus such struggle could focus on the interpellation of workers as wage-earners or as exploited proletarians, the weight to be attached to class as opposed to gender subjectivities in the case of male and female workers, or the recombination of class and popular-democratic subjectivities to form a new political alliance around a new ‘hegemonic project’. In turn this implies that class struggle is not only a struggle to form class forces but also a struggle to define the reference points for the calculation of class interests; and, once given such class forces and their interests, the so-called ‘class struggle’ is constituted through the interaction among these forces and their differential impact on class interests. This argument should help to clarify the manner in which a given ‘hegemonic project’ privileges certain particular interests compatible with its conception of the general interest and derogates other competing or contradictory particular interests.”翻译为中文