discuss Michael Foucault's analysis of power
Answers
Answered by
2
Foucault is a philosopher whose politics everybody seems to have a differing opinion on. He has been called a disguised Marxist, both a secret and explicit anti-Marxist, a nihilist, a new conservative, a new liberal, a neutral interpretivist, a crypto-normativist, a principled anarchist as well as a dangerous left-wing one, and even a Gaullist technocrat. An American professor complained that an obvious KGB agent like Foucault was being invited to talk at his country’s universities and the Eastern European press of the Soviet era denounced him as being an accomplice of the dissidents.
A socialist even wrote that the thinker he resembles most closely was Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf, and others on the left have claimed he is a danger to Western democracy. What could the man have done to receive such a variety of labels? A simple answer to that question is that he analysed power.
Foucault starts one of his seminal works, Discipline and Punish, with a graphic description of a torture scene from 18th century France. A regicide called Damiens is publicly drawn and quartered, after having the skin peeled from his body and a combination of sulphur, oil and lead poured into his wounds. The book then jumps ahead 80 years to a description of the new way of dealing with criminals, the prison. Instead of public execution we now have a time-table. The prisoners’ day involves time for prayers, reading, workshops, meals and recreation; a reflection of a more enlightened, humanist form of governance one would assume.
Not so, argues Foucault. The problem with the old public torture and executions, what he calls ‘the spectacle of the scaffold’, was not their cruelty, but that they didn’t have the intended effect. The victims became the heroes of folk tales and pamphlets. Breeding more resentment than discipline, the scaffold, the great displays of power and brutality, were replaced by disciplining and normalising institutions of less visible, more discreet, and most importantly, more ‘efficient’, power.
The technology of power
The prison, and its panoptic architecture, was for Foucault a perfect example of these new technologies of power. In the panopticon, the prisoner can be observed at any time. However, because the observation tower in the middle of the prison is also a source of light, he doesn’t know when he is actually being watched, therefore acts with the assumption of an omnipresent observer.
Along with other methods such as the examination of a parole board hearing, the prisoner is slowly normalised back into society. The same panoptic principles of normalising judgements, examination and omnipresent, hierarchical observation – that have their ideal model in military camps where soldiers were made from the ‘formless clay’ of a peasant – were also incorporated into the schools, factories, asylums, working class housing estates and hospitals of the era.
Resistance?
Such a conception of power in the modern world seems to leave little space for agency or resistance from those subject to it; this is one of the most common critiques of Foucault coming from the left. People, according to Jurgen Habermas’ interpretation of Foucault, are merely “individual copies that are mechanically punched out”. However Foucault is not so pessimistic and does not have an exclusively negative definition of power. Power for him is simply the ability to create change in society or in the behaviour of individuals, be it positive or negative.
Power is then everywhere, in every relationship; we are constantly subjecting it and being objects of it. Take for example a male worker. He is obviously an object of his boss’s power; but if he joins a union and goes on strike, he subjects his boss to the collective power he and his co-workers possess. If the union bureaucracy then calls off the strike against his wishes, he is now an object of their power. Now let’s say he is the sole breadwinner of a traditional family but he drinks a good portion of his wages; he has then subjected his family to his power as patriarch in a patriarchal world.
That power comes from multiple sources means there must be multiple sources of resistance – in contrast to the Marxist-Leninist conception of power as emanating from one source, capital, with all other struggles secondary to, or a product of, that primary battle. If one fails to tackle the multiple sources of power, “one risks allowing them to continue to exist; and to see this class power reconstitute itself even after an apparent revolutionary process”.
This forms the basis of Foucault’s objection to vanguardism; instead he argues for many struggles by “women, prisoners, conscripted soldiers, hospital patients, and homosexuals against the particularised power, the constraints and controls, that are exerted over them...these movements are linked to the revolutionary movement of the proletariat to the extent that they fight against the controls and constraints which serve the same system of power.”
A socialist even wrote that the thinker he resembles most closely was Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf, and others on the left have claimed he is a danger to Western democracy. What could the man have done to receive such a variety of labels? A simple answer to that question is that he analysed power.
Foucault starts one of his seminal works, Discipline and Punish, with a graphic description of a torture scene from 18th century France. A regicide called Damiens is publicly drawn and quartered, after having the skin peeled from his body and a combination of sulphur, oil and lead poured into his wounds. The book then jumps ahead 80 years to a description of the new way of dealing with criminals, the prison. Instead of public execution we now have a time-table. The prisoners’ day involves time for prayers, reading, workshops, meals and recreation; a reflection of a more enlightened, humanist form of governance one would assume.
Not so, argues Foucault. The problem with the old public torture and executions, what he calls ‘the spectacle of the scaffold’, was not their cruelty, but that they didn’t have the intended effect. The victims became the heroes of folk tales and pamphlets. Breeding more resentment than discipline, the scaffold, the great displays of power and brutality, were replaced by disciplining and normalising institutions of less visible, more discreet, and most importantly, more ‘efficient’, power.
The technology of power
The prison, and its panoptic architecture, was for Foucault a perfect example of these new technologies of power. In the panopticon, the prisoner can be observed at any time. However, because the observation tower in the middle of the prison is also a source of light, he doesn’t know when he is actually being watched, therefore acts with the assumption of an omnipresent observer.
Along with other methods such as the examination of a parole board hearing, the prisoner is slowly normalised back into society. The same panoptic principles of normalising judgements, examination and omnipresent, hierarchical observation – that have their ideal model in military camps where soldiers were made from the ‘formless clay’ of a peasant – were also incorporated into the schools, factories, asylums, working class housing estates and hospitals of the era.
Resistance?
Such a conception of power in the modern world seems to leave little space for agency or resistance from those subject to it; this is one of the most common critiques of Foucault coming from the left. People, according to Jurgen Habermas’ interpretation of Foucault, are merely “individual copies that are mechanically punched out”. However Foucault is not so pessimistic and does not have an exclusively negative definition of power. Power for him is simply the ability to create change in society or in the behaviour of individuals, be it positive or negative.
Power is then everywhere, in every relationship; we are constantly subjecting it and being objects of it. Take for example a male worker. He is obviously an object of his boss’s power; but if he joins a union and goes on strike, he subjects his boss to the collective power he and his co-workers possess. If the union bureaucracy then calls off the strike against his wishes, he is now an object of their power. Now let’s say he is the sole breadwinner of a traditional family but he drinks a good portion of his wages; he has then subjected his family to his power as patriarch in a patriarchal world.
That power comes from multiple sources means there must be multiple sources of resistance – in contrast to the Marxist-Leninist conception of power as emanating from one source, capital, with all other struggles secondary to, or a product of, that primary battle. If one fails to tackle the multiple sources of power, “one risks allowing them to continue to exist; and to see this class power reconstitute itself even after an apparent revolutionary process”.
This forms the basis of Foucault’s objection to vanguardism; instead he argues for many struggles by “women, prisoners, conscripted soldiers, hospital patients, and homosexuals against the particularised power, the constraints and controls, that are exerted over them...these movements are linked to the revolutionary movement of the proletariat to the extent that they fight against the controls and constraints which serve the same system of power.”
Similar questions