Title: Michel Foucaults theory of power
1Michel Foucaults theory of power
- Giovanni Navarria
- 13/03/2007
- The Human Sciences
- Perspectives and Methods
2Michel Foucault Philosopher and
Historian
- Birth Oct. 15, 1926 Death June 25, 1984
- From 1970 to his death Professor of the History
of Systems of Thought in Paris at the Collège de
France, giving it the title "The History of
Systems - Life-long aim Writing the history of the
present. 1) the identification of the historical
conditions of the rise of reason in the West 2)
the analysis of the present moment seeking to
check how we now stand, vis-à-vis the historical
foundation of rationality as the spirit of modern
culture. - Author of detailed histories of Madness,
Psychology, Medicine, the human sciences, the
penal system, and Greek and Roman ethics.
3Some of his many publications
- Mental Illness and Psychology
- Madness and Civilization A History of Insanity
in the Age of Reason - The Birth of the Clinic An Archaeology of
Medical Perception - Death and the Labyrinth the World of Raymond
Roussel - The Order of Things An Archaeology of the Human
Sciences - Archaeology of Knowledge (first three chapters
available on the blackboard) - Discipline and Punish The Birth of the Prison
- The History of Sexuality (Vol I The Will to
Knowledge (1976) - Vol II The Use of Pleasure
(1984) - Vol III The Care of the Self (1984))
4Key themes
- Strong opposition against the humanist concepts
of self and objectivity. He opposed - 1) The idea of an autonomous individual. The
subject for Foucault is not a rational agent
thinking and acting under its own self-imposed
and self-created commands. Rather the subject is
a product of social structures, epistemes,
discourses. - 2) An objectivist epistemology (theory of
knowledge). Our meaning, experiences, reason, and
truths are not simply given to us as stable and
fixed objects. Rather they are constructed for us
by the same social structures, the epistemes, and
discourse that give us our identity.
5Archaeology 1
- Archaeology that is not studying the history of
ideas per se but focusing on the condition in
which a subject (e.g the mad, the sick, or ill,
the delinquent ect.) is constituted as a possible
object of knowledge. - I was using this word to suggest that the kind
of analysis I was doing was out-of-phase, not in
terms of time but by virtue of the level at which
it was situated. Studying the history of ideas,
as they evolve, is not my problem so much as
trying to discern beneath them how one or another
object could take shape as a possible object of
knowledge. Why for instance did madness become,
at a given moment, an object of knoweldge
corresponding to a certain type of knowledge? By
using the word archaeology rather than
history, I tied to designate this
desynchronization between ideas about madness and
the constitution of madness as an object.
6Power Archaeology
- Power is no longer the conventional power of
institutions and leaders, but instead the
capillary modes of power that controls
individuals and their knowledge, the mechanism by
which power reaches into to the very grain of
individuals, touches their bodies and inserts
itself into their actions and attitudes, their
discourses, learning processes and everyday
lives. (Power/Knowledge, p. 30) It is in
discourse that power is both manifest and hardest
to identify. Discourse is where everything that
relates to power and knowledge, including his own
work, is buried.
7Archaeology Discontinuities 1
- Foucaults work is archaeological because sets
out to find out the discontinuities in the
history of thought. In fact beneath the great
continuities of thought one is now trying to
detect the incidence of interruptions these
show that the history of a concept is not wholly
and entirely that of is progressive refinement,
its continuously increasing rationality, its
abstraction gradient, but that of its various
fields of constitution and validity that of its
successive rules of use, that of the many
theoretical contexts in which it developed and
matured.
8Archaeology Discontinuity 2
- Such an analysis of discontinuous discourse does
not belong to the traditional history of ideas or
of science - ... it is rather an enquiry whose aim is to
rediscover on what basis knowledge and theory
became possible within what space of order
knowledge is constituted... Such an enterprise is
not so much a history, in the traditional meaning
of the word, as an "archaeology" (Order,
xxi-xxii).
9Madness and psychiatry
- Madness, for example, he examines the emergence
at the beginning of the nineteenth century of the
discourse called psychiatry. He discovers that
what made this discipline possible at the time it
appeared was a whole set of relations between
hospitalization, internment, the conditions and
procedures of social exclusion, the rules of
jurisprudence, the norms of industrial labour and
bourgeois morality, in short, a whole group of
exterior relations that characterized for this
discursive practice the formation of its
statements. The discursive formation whose
existence is mapped by the psychiatric discipline
went well beyond the bounds of psychiatry. The
subject of madness in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, what he calls the Classical
period, in no way constituted autonomous
disciplines.
10From Archaeology to Genealogy
- The problem with the archaeological method is
that if on one hand allows the comparison of
different discursive formations of different
periods, that is to say it helps suggesting the
contingency intrinsic in a given way of thinking
by simply showing that different ages had thought
differently, on the other hand this method cannot
satisfy the will of the historian to know more
about the causes that produce the transition from
one way of thinking to an other. Hence Foucault
opted to study not the archaeology of knowledge
but the Genealogy of it.
11Genealogy
- "Let us give the term 'genealogy' to the union of
erudite knowledge and local memories which allows
us to establish a historical knowledge of
struggles and to make use of this knowledge
tactically today (Genealogy and social Criticism,
p.42)."
12Archaeology and Genealogy
- Whereas archaeology Studies the practices of
language (in a strict sense), genealogy uncovers
the creation of objects through institutional
practices (Dreyfus Rabinow, p.104). Whereas the
archeological historian claims to write from a
neutral, disinterested perspective, the
Nietzschean or Foucaultian genealogist admits the
political and polemical interests motivating the
writing of the history (Hoy, 1986, p.6-7).
13Discipline Punish
- 1st Genealogical work
- History of disciplinary power it analyses
changes in the external control associated with
the negative aspect of power, whereas his later
history of sexuality analyses changes in the
internal controls associated with the positive
aspects of power. - DP traces changes in the nature of power as
repression. From the widespread of public torture
in the middle of 18th century to the allegedly
rational and gentler reforms of the enlightenment
of imprisoning criminals, thus creating a more
effective vehicle of social control. Ultimately a
model for the control on an entire society.
14Foucault Power (1)
- F. identifies the strategies of power with the
networks, the mechanism, and all those
techniques by which a decision could not but be
taken in the way it was. Within the context of
disciplinary power, disciplinary technologies are
meant to help disciplining individuals. In fact,
disciplinary power aims at producing an army of
docile people whose role is to strengthen the
social system and to help it running as smooth as
possible. (Foucault, 1980)
15Foucault Discipline
- Indicates a type of power, a modality for its
exercise, comprising a whole set of instruments,
techniques, procedures, targets it is a
'physics' or an 'anatomy' of power, a technology.
16Panopticon The prison is the instrument through
which modern discipline has replaced pre-modern
sovereignty (i.e. kings, judges) as the
fundamental power relation
17Example - Examination
- The practice of examination - for example of
students in school or of patients in hospitals
it combines hierarchical observation with
normative judgment. It is a prime example of what
Foucault refers to as Power/knowledge, since it
combines into a unified whole the deployment of
force and the establishment of truth. It both
elicits the truth of the subjects under
examination (in fact it tells what a students
know or what is the status of health of a
patient), and at the same time controls their
behavior (by forcing the student to study what is
prescribed, or the patient to follow a certain
treatment to be cured.)
18Episteme
- Foucault's archaeology seeks to uncover - the
episteme of the past - By episteme, we mean... the total set of
relations that unite, at a given period, the
discursive practices that give rise to
epistemological figures, sciences, and possibly
formalized systems the way in which, in each of
these discursive formations, the transitions to
epistemologization, scientificity, and
formalization are situated and operate the
distribution of these thresholds, which may
coincide, be subordinated to one another, or be
separated by shifts in time the lateral
relations that may exist between epistemological
figures or sciences in so far as they belong to
neighbouring, but distinct, discursive practices.
The episteme is not a form of knowledge
(connaissance) or type of rationality which,
crossing the boundaries of the most varied
sciences, manifests the sovereign unity of a
subject, a spirit, or a period it is the
totality of relations that can be discovered, for
a given period, between the sciences when one
analyses them at the level of discursive
regularities (Archaeology 191)
19Foucault - Governmentality
- Foucault uses the term governmentality to
indicate the complex tactics, procedures and
apparatuses that attempt to control and influence
the conduct of individuals by using truth,
knowledge, and political economy, rather than
violence in other words, the art of governing by
fostering willing compliance in subjects, rather
than achieving legitimacy through the help of
brute force.
20Mitchell Dean - Governmentality
- Government as the conduct of conduct
"Government is any more or less calculated and
rational activity, undertaken by a multiplicity
of authorities and agencies, employing a variety
of techniques and forms of knowledge, that seeks
to shape conduct by working through our desires,
aspirations, interests and beliefs, for definite
but shifting ends and with a diverse set of
relatively unpredictable consequences, effects
and outcomes." (Dean, 1999, p.11)
21 22Discontinuity
- the fact that within the space of a few years a
culture sometimes ceases to think as it had been
thinking up till then and begins to think other
things in a new way (Order of Things, p.50).
Establishing discontinuities is not an easy task
even for history in general. And it is certainly
even less so for the history of thought. We may
wish to draw a dividing-line but any limit we
set may perhaps be no more than an arbitrary
division made in a constantly mobile whole. We
may wish to mark off a period but have we the
right to establish symmetrical breaks at two
points in time in order to give an appearance of
continuity and unity to the system we place
between them? (Order of things, p.50)
23Dispositif
- The concept of an episteme is insuficient and
dispositif fills in the gap. An episteme is
researched through the analysis of discourse
(text), but there are practices (institutions,
architectural arrangments, regulations, laws,
administrative measures, scientific statements,
philosphic propositions, morality, philanthropy)
in addition to discourse which we may use to do a
genealogical analysis of some particular
situation (Dreyfus and Rabinow, p.121). These
practices form an intensified surveillance and
control mechanism (Darier, 589), creating policy
which polices and disciplines and which leads to
resistance among certain groups.