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Michel oucaults theory ofpowerGiovanni Navarria

13/03/2007

The Human Sciences

Perspectives and Methods

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Michel Foucault: Philosopher and

Historian

Birth: Oct. 15, 1926Death: June 25, 1984

From 1970 to his death: Professor of theHistory of Systems of Thought in Paris atthe Collge de France, giving it the title "TheHistory of Systems

Life-long aim: Writing the history of thepresent. 1) the identification of the historicalconditions of the rise of reason in the West;2) the analysis of the present momentseeking to check how we nowstand, vis--vis the historical foundation of rationality asthe spirit of modern culture.

Author ofdetailed histories of: Madness,Psychology, Medicine, the human sciences,the penal system, and Greek and Romanethics.

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Some of his many publications: Mental Illness and Psychology

Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in theAge 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 HumanSciences

Archaeology of Knowledge (first three chapters availableon 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: TheCare of the Self (1984))

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Key themes:

Strong opposition against the humanist concepts of selfand objectivity. He opposed:

1) The idea of an autonomous individual. The subject forFoucault is not a rational agent thinking and acting under its

own self-imposed and self-created commands. Rather thesubject is a product of social structures, epistemes,discourses.

2) An objectivist epistemology (theory of knowledge). Ourmeaning, experiences, reason, and truths are not simplygiven to us as stable and fixed objects. Rather they areconstructed for us by the same social structures, theepistemes, and discourse that give us our identity.

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Power Archaeology

Power is no longer the conventional power of institutionsand leaders, but instead the capillary modes of power thatcontrols individuals and their knowledge, the mechanismby which power reaches into to the very grain ofindividuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself intotheir actions and attitudes, their discourses, learningprocesses and everyday lives. (Power/Knowledge, p. 30)It is in discourse that power is both manifest and hardestto identify. Discourse is where everything that relates to

power and knowledge, including his own work, is buried.

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Archaeology & Discontinuities 1

Foucaults work is archaeological because sets out to findout the discontinuities in the history of thought. In factbeneath the great continuities of thought one is nowtrying to detect the incidence of interruptions [these]show that the history of a concept is not wholly andentirely that of is progressive refinement, its continuouslyincreasing rationality, its abstraction gradient, but that ofits various fields of constitution and validity that of itssuccessive rules of use, that of the many theoretical

contexts in which it developed and matured.

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Archaeology & Discontinuity 2

Such an analysis of discontinuous discoursedoes not belong to the traditional history ofideas or of science:

... it is rather an enquiry whose aim is torediscover on what basis knowledge andtheory became possible; within what space oforder knowledge is constituted... Such an

enterprise is not so much a history, in thetraditional meaning of the word, as an"archaeology" (Order, xxi-xxii).

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Madness and psychiatry

Madness, for example, he examines the emergence at thebeginning of the nineteenth century of the discourse calledpsychiatry. He discovers that what made this discipline possibleat the time it appeared was a whole set of relations betweenhospitalization, internment, the conditions and procedures ofsocial exclusion, the rules of jurisprudence, the norms ofindustrial labour and bourgeois morality, in short, a whole groupof exterior relations that characterized for this discursivepractice the formation of its statements. The discursiveformation whose existence is mapped by the psychiatricdiscipline went well beyond the bounds of psychiatry. The

subject of madness in the seventeenth and eighteenthcenturies, what he calls the Classical period, in no wayconstituted autonomous disciplines.

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From Archaeology to Genealogy

The problem with the archaeological method is that if onone hand allows the comparison of different discursiveformations of different periods, that is to say it helpssuggesting the contingency intrinsic in a given way of

thinking by simply showing that different ages hadthought differently, on the other hand this method cannotsatisfy the will of the historian to know more about thecauses that produce the transition from one way ofthinking to an other. Hence Foucault opted to study not

the archaeology of knowledge but the Genealogy of it.

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Genealogy

"Let us give the term 'genealogy' to the

union of erudite knowledge and local

memories which allows us to establish ahistorical knowledge of struggles and to

make use of this knowledge tactically

today (Genealogy and social Criticism,

p.42)."

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Archaeology and Genealogy

Whereas archaeology Studies the practicesof language (in a strict sense), genealogyuncovers the creation of objects through

institutional practices(Dreyfus & Rabinow,p.104). Whereas the archeological historianclaims to write from a neutral, disinterestedperspective, the Nietzschean or Foucaultian

genealogist admits the political and polemicalinterests motivating the writing of the history(Hoy, 1986, p.6-7).

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Discipline & Punish

1stGenealogical work

History of disciplinary power: it analyses changes inthe external control associated with the negativeaspect of power, whereas his later history ofsexuality analyses changes in the internal controlsassociated with the positive aspects of power.

D&P traces changes in the nature of power asrepression. From the widespread of public torture inthe middle of 18thcentury to the allegedly rational

and gentler reforms of the enlightenment ofimprisoning criminals, thus creating a more effectivevehicle of social control. Ultimately a model for thecontrol on an entire society.

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Foucault Power (1)

F. identifies the strategies of power with thenetworks, the mechanism, [and] all thosetechniques by which [a] decision could not but

be taken in the way it was. Within the contextof disciplinary power, disciplinary technologiesare meant to help disciplining individuals. Infact, disciplinary power aims at producing anarmy of docile peoplewhose role is to

strengthen the social system and to help itrunning as smooth as possible. (Foucault,1980)

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Foucault 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.

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Panopticon: The prison is the instrument through which modern discipline has

replaced pre-modern sovereignty (i.e. kings, judges) as the fundamental power

relation

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Example - Examination

The practice of examination - for example of students inschool or of patients in hospitalsit combineshierarchical observation with normative judgment. It is aprime example of what Foucault refers to as

Power/knowledge, since it combines into a unified wholethe 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 statusof health of a patient), and at the same time controls their

behavior (by forcing the student to study what isprescribed, or the patient to follow a certain treatment tobe cured.)

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Episteme

Foucault's archaeology seeks to uncover - the epistemeof the past:

By episteme, we mean... the total set of relations that unite, at a givenperiod, the discursive practices that give rise to epistemologicalfigures, sciences, and possibly formalized systems; the way in which,in each of these discursive formations, the transitions to

epistemologization, scientificity, and formalization are situated andoperate; the distribution of these thresholds, which may coincide, besubordinated to one another, or be separated by shifts in time; thelateral relations that may exist between epistemological figures orsciences 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 atthe level of discursive regularities (Archaeology191)

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Foucault - Governmentality

Foucault uses the term governmental i ty 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.

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Mitchell Dean - Governmentality

Government as the conduct ofconduct: "Government is any more or lesscalculated and rational activity, undertaken by

a multiplicity of authorities and agencies,employing a variety of techniques and forms ofknowledge, that seeks to shape conduct byworking through our desires, aspirations,interests and beliefs, for definite but shifting

ends and with a diverse set of relativelyunpredictable consequences, effects andoutcomes." (Dean, 1999, p.11)

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The End

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Discontinuity

the fact that within the space of a few years a culturesometimes ceases to think as it had been thinking up tillthen and begins to think other things in a new way (Orderof Things, p.50). Establishing discontinuities is not an

easy task even for history in general. And it is certainlyeven less so for the history of thought. We may wish todraw a dividing-line; but any limit we set may perhaps beno more than an arbitrary division made in a constantlymobile whole. We may wish to mark off a period; but have

we the right to establish symmetrical breaks at two pointsin time in order to give an appearance of continuity andunity to the system we place between them? (Order ofthings, p.50)

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ispositif The concept of an episteme is insuficient and dispositif

fills in the gap. An episteme is researched through theanalysis of discourse (text), but there are practices(institutions, architectural arrangments, regulations,

laws, administrative measures, scientific statements,philosphic propositions, morality, philanthropy) inaddition to discourse which we may use to do agenealogical 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 anddisciplines and which leads to resistance amongcertain groups.

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