I' Culture and Power

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I. Culture and Power A. Michel Foucault
(1926-1984) 1.Discourse as Power 2. The
Panopticon B. Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) 1.
Culture and Class Domination 2. Symbolic
Violence, -Cultural Capital, and Double
Reproduction
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Two Influential Ways of Thinking About Culture
and Power Foucault Bourdieu
a Marxism of the superstructure
Materialism
Idealism
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Michel Foucault (1926-1984)The Concept of
Discourse

• we construct the world through the way we talk
  about it and act towards it
• discourse draws the line between reason and
  madness
• discourse includes and excludes
• discourse is a form of power

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• a quite gloomy view of modern society
• power as increasingly hidden, unrecognized
• we are increasingly dominated by power we dont
  recognize, exercised by professional specialists
• that power is largely imposed through
  discoursethrough the way we are trained to think
  and talk

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A Pessimistic View of the Progress of Western
Civilization Drawing on Nietzsches diagnosis,
Foucault argued that humanity has not progressed
from war, combat, and force to a more humane
system of law, but from one form of domination to
another. It will become apparent that an
antipathy to the idea of the progress of reason
constitutes a consistent and general feature of
Foucaults work. Quotes from Barry Smart, Michel
Foucault, pp. 57, 33)
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The Panopticon as the Paradigm of Modern
Civilization
Textual Analysis Michel Foucault, Pantopticism
Eastern State Penitentiary,Philadelphia
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Two Views of Eastern State Penitentiary Thrown
into solitude, (the prisoner) reflects....Can
there be a combination more powerful for
reformation that that of a prison which hands
over the prisoner to all the trials of solitude,
leads him through reflection to remorse, through
religion to hope makes him industrious by the
burden of idleness...? (DeTocqueville, 1831) I
hold this slow and daily tampering with the
mysteries of the brain to be immeasurably worse
than any torture of the body and because its
ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to
the eye..and it extorts few cries that human ears
can hear therefore I the more denounce it, as a
secret punishment in which slumbering humanity is
not roused up to stay. (Charles Dickens, 1842)
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The Panopticon presents a cruel, ingenious
cage...it is the diagram of a mechanism of power
reduced to its ideal form...it makes it possible
to perfect the exercise of power. (p. 413) What
are the broader implications of this statement?
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• Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002)
• Culture, class domination, and the social
  reproduction of inequality (p. 242)
• The concept of symbolic violence (p. 244-5)
• The concepts of cultural capital and double
  reproduction (p. 246)
• Distinction and the example of taste (pp. 248-9)

(1930-2002)