Foucault - Part 2_transcript

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Foucault – Part 2 (Governmentality and the power/knowledge nexus) So Foucault's panopticism is just one element of his broader reconceptualization of power in modern society. And just one aspect of his broader discussions of governmentality in modern society. Now Foucault is huge in academic discourse because he basically re-conceptualized how power functions in modern society. So Foucault said that power operates completely different in a modern nation state. That with the advent of capitalism - and we're talking Western societies here - with the advent of capitalism and Western societies and the development of the modern nation state, Foucault said, power dramatically transformed. So Foucault in his writing, he distinguishes very broadly between the Western modern nation state in advanced industrial capitalist societies and he opposes that to forms of power like we would see in the monarchy and in feudal states. So Foucault says that with the development of the modern nation state, with the development of Western capitalism. Foucault's talking basically about the 18th century here, that the government became concerned with how do we control these larger portions of the population. Very broadly speaking, we're talking about the development of industrialized capitalism. We're talking about demographic shifts. We're talking about more concentrated populations in urban centers. And it became a problem for governments. The very kind of top down rule that we saw, very centralized top-down rule that we saw in feudal governments no longer made sense when you had vast amounts of people concentrated in an urban center. And so Foucault said that the government became concerned with how do we control these larger portions of the population? What are some other methods of rule that we can use in order to bring the population in line with what we would consider to be normalized forms of behavior? And this is where Foucault's concept of governmentality comes into play. And with his concept of governmentality, Foucault encourages us to think of power very differently and very differently than we thought of power in maybe the feudal state. So in the feudal state, we had, as I've kind of alluded to, a very centralized, hierarchical form of power. You have the king or the monarch at the top, and they reign over their subjects or their citizens. But in the modern nation state, power becomes decentralized. It becomes diffused, and no longer resides just in the government, but now is decentralized in a capillary like fashion to all social institutions within society. And so social institution throughout society become disciplinary institutions. So things like schools, medical institutions like hospitals or psychiatric facilities, criminal justice systems like prisons. All of those become disciplinary institutions. Power is now decentralized into all of those social institutions. And they become a form of governing power that produces a self-regulating citizenry. And it works in this way - In each of those social institutions power operates through the use of knowledge, through the use of certain discourses. And that is where Foucault talks about his very famous power/ knowledge nexus. So power is produced in these social institutions through the knowledge that is produced in these social institutions. And how that works is that individuals are interacting with those social institutions. If we think back to our very basics from unit one, individuals interact with social institutions. Individuals are socialized by social

institutions. So it only makes sense that the knowledge or the discourses produced in these social institutions, individuals will be interacting with those discourses and internalizing them. Well for Foucault, those discourses are imbued with power. Power in the sense of we have to ask the question of who is developing the discourse in those social institutions. And then the discourse in those social institution speaks to who is in power and their messages of subjugation. So power is produced in these social institutions through the knowledge or the discourses that guide the social institutions. And so therefore, when individuals interact with the social institutions, they are also interacting with systems of power. Now, when they interact with the social institutions, they're also going to be internalizing those systems of power. And those messages, those knowledge produced in those discourses are going to be internalizing that knowledge, but then also bringing their behavior in line with that knowledge. So if normative discourses are produced in the social institutions, individuals are going to interact with those social institutions. They are going to learn these normative or prescriptive guidelines for behavior and they will then try their best to bring their behavior in line with those messages of what is considered normal for our society. And what that means is that you are producing a self regulating or self disciplining citizenry. You are producing individuals who will bring it upon themselves to bring their behavior in line with these normative prescriptions, without the threat, unnecessarily external force or some kind of top-down hierarchical power. So in short, if you're going to understand Foucault's reconceptualization of power, his discussion of governmentality, and a self-regulating citizenry, you're going to understand three things. You're going to understand that he says power is dramatically transformed in modern society. And that power is decentralized. Power becomes capillary like. Power no longer resides just in the government, but power now emanates to all different social institutions within society. Hospitals, schools, psychiatric facilities, prisons are just a few. We also want to know about the power knowledge nexus. Knowledge is produced in these institutions, discourses are produced in these institutions, but that knowledge is imbued with power as those that are in power in society are shaping the discourses within those institutions. This all produces a self- regulating citizenry. Individuals interact with the institutions. And in that interaction with the institutions, they internalize that knowledge and that power. And they do whatever they can most of the time to bring their behavior in line with those discourses. Now, this is just a general kind of overview of Foucault and his ideas of power and social control and how that produces normative behavior in modern society. And I bring up Foucault here because these ideas are very powerful. And I bring them up here because they provide for you another lens, another context for understanding and examining how crime and deviance functions in contemporary or modern society. Now I want to end our discussion today talking a little bit more about how Rios sees Foucault's panopticsim and how he sees it functioning in the lives of Black and Latino boys that are part of his ethnographic study. So Rios actually kind of breaks with Foucault a little bit. Rios argues that the boys actually turn the panopticon on its head. The boys don't have a centralized form of surveillance in their everyday life. Rather, surveillance has been emanating throughout all different social institutions in the boys day to day life, they experience

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