Disciplinary Modality Of Power By Foucault

Although there are somewhat of similarities between Weber’s and Foucault’s relations of power and dominance, how they evaluate the concepts separately and the ways these concepts are practiced in society, can be distinguished differently. Webber appears to occupy the polar opposite with the respect to his claims of how power becomes existent with bureaucratic instruments and bureaucracy itself, Foucault argues that the power relations are everywhere in society and with expansive elements; society has no option but to internalize (Shaw 2011). His explanation of power is much broader than Weber’s. Focault rejects the hierarchical models of power, and believed that relations of dominance are formations of unequal power (McClaren 2002), and over time domination may seem fixed in society’s social structure (Shaw 2011). Additionally, Foucault looks at the concept of power from a functional strategy, with the functional practices administered by authority, and emphasises that authority commonly uses discursive power and the operation of discourse to maintain the dominance (Smart 2010; Shaw 2011). What is compelling about Foucault’s concept of power are his discursive claims. Unlike Webber, he suggests that power relations are not necessarily derived from state practices, but are all under state control, and highlights that “state and hegemony is in the every area of life” (Shaw 2011). Further, to understand some of Foucault’s functional examples, he focuses on the everyday lives of

For example in the setting of a workplace the power does not pass from the top down; instead it circulates through their organizational practices. Such practices act like a grid, provoking and inciting certain courses of action and denying others. Foucault considers this as no straightforward matter and believes that it rests on how far individuals interpret what is being laid down as "obvious" or "self evident", institutional power works best when all parties accept it willingly. Foucault's notion of power is a difficult notion to grasp principally because it is never entirely clear on who has the power in the first place, once the idea is removed that power must be vested in someone at the top of the ladder, it becomes much more difficult to identify what power is or where and whom it lies with. Foucault believes that we are used to thinking about power as an identifiable and overt force and that this view is simply not the case, because it is taken for granted that the above statement is true then it is much more complicated to comprehend power as a guiding force that does not show itself in an obvious manner.

Foucault goes through the way governments have attempted to control populations throughout history, and how power has exercised

“Foucault’s work gave the terms discursive practices and discursive formation to the analysis of particular institutions and their ways of establishing orders of truth, or what is accepted as ‘reality’ in a given society” (Goldberg). Discursive formations display hierarchical arrangement and are understood as reinforcing certain already established identities or subjectivities- in matters of sexuality, status, or class for example. These dominant discourses are understood as in turn reinforced by existing systems of law, education and the media”. Foucault’s work is to show that members of society such as intellectuals, “are implicated in discourse and in the discursive regimes or systems of power and regulation which give them their livelihoods

In order to understand the power structures present in her description of life as a low-wage worker in Nickel and Dimed, we need to first understand Michael Foucault’s philosophy regarding discipline and surveillance. Rather than perceive power and discipline as strictly political and authoritative, Foucault believes that society is structured in a way in which constant observation disciplines us to abide by social norms and expectations. This constant surveillance is omnipresent in the sense that observation occurs in all realms of society, from education to sexuality. To further explain this idea of disciplining through constant inspection, Foucault describes Jeremy Bentham’s panoptican, a type of prison in which

Foucault’s primary example of a disciplinary institution was the Panopticon planned by J. Bentham. It was what seemed to be precise in the aspects of control, power, discipline, and isolation. It was for all types of people such as a schoolboy, worker, sickly patient or a madman. It was created to stop all foolishness. Inmates needed to be watched constantly to make sure that everything and everyone were in order; therefore there was special architecture produced in order to accomplish that task.

In his essay “Panopticism,” Michel Foucault introduces the Panopticon structure as proof of modern society tending toward efficient disciplinary mechanisms. Starting with his example of the strict, intensely organized measures that are taken in a typical 17th-century plague-stricken town, Foucault describes how the town employed constant surveillance techniques, centralized a hierarchy of authorities to survey households, partitioned individual structures to impose certain behavior, and record current information about each individual.

There are a few ways that Foucault’s conceptualization of bio-power and of disciplinary knowledge and practices may be evident in college settings. One example of bio-power in a college setting might be birth control and sex education at my university. Another example of bio-power in our colleges is a requirement of a health credit, such as basic health or physical education, in order to graduate. Like bio-power, disciplinary knowledge and practices are used in our university and other community colleges and universities as well. For example, when admissions offices obtain shot records is one instance. Although this isn’t used in my college, another instance is when a university requires students to attend religious services held by the school or receive a religion credit in order to graduate.

Foucault's "Panopticism" (1979) is a careful piece that talks about how a panoptic framework would impact culture, society, the political, and individuals. Foucault describes panopticon is to “induce the inmate a state of conscious and visibility that assures the automatic function of power.” Foucault mentions, surveillance has a lasting effects, regardless of the fact that it is discontinuous in its activity; that the perfection of power ought to render its real unneeded practice. The Inmates are in a dominating circumstance that they are them-selves the bearers. Foucault (201, 202–3) also mentions that "He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and knows it, expect responsibility regardless of the constrains of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon

Michel Foucault wrote a book called History of Sexuality. In Part five of the book Right of Death and Power over Life, he discusses about the historical “Sovereign Power” where one is allowed to decide who has the right to live and who has the right to die. The sovereign uses his power over life through the deaths that he can command and uses his authority to announce death by the lives he can spare. Foucault then moves on to Disciplinary Power where he came up with the “Panopticon” where one is to believe they were under surveillance at all times. Such surveillance is still used in our everyday life such as schools, prisons, offices, hospitals, and mental institutes. Later in his life, Foucault discovered Bio-power. This bio-power

dealing simply with subjects, or even with a “people,” but with a “population,” with its specific phenomena and its peculiar variables." (298/25) This is where we begin to see Foucault's concept of Biopower come into play. One of the central themes of Foucault's writing, he defines biopower as "[T]he forms of power, the channels it takes, and the discourses it permeates in order to reach the most tenuous and individual modes of behavior, the paths that give it access to the rare or scarcely perceivable forms of desire, how it penetrates and controls everyday pleasure—all this entailing effects that may be those of refusal, blockage, and invalidation, but also incitement and intensification: in short, the 'polymorphous techniques of power.'” (292/11 For Foucault, Biopower relates to the government's concern with fostering the life of the population, but is also a form of complete control of that population through surveillance or perceived surveillance. Foucault believed that Biopower permeates through the

Subsequently, the modernist approach of Buchanan (Silva et al., 2009) illustrate Foucault’s theory that ‘’the development of standardised uniform spaces commanding uniform behaviour, leaving no room for individual interpretation, explaining everything with signs and texts. The government and public authorities look after the citizens’’ (Silva et al., 2009 p. 339). In modernist approach rules, orders and prohibitions enforces behaviour demanding individuals to adapt to the system on the street. The individual conforms to rules and a state solves problems and looks after the people by setting up laws and prohibitions. In contrast, the flexible approach or shared space movement has the opposite outcome, making human behaviour central and negotiating ‘shared space’ as emphasised by Goffman. (Silva et al., 2009)

Foucault in theorizing the relationship between power and knowledge basically focused on how power operated in the institutions and in its techniques. The point is how power was supported by knowledge in the functioning of institutions of punishment. “He places the body at the centre of the struggles between different formations of power/knowledge. The techniques of regulation are applied to the body” (Wheterell et al., 2001: 78)

Sandra Bartky begins her piece by explaining Michel Foucault’s ideas about modern power dynamics. Unlike in the past, power in modern society focuses not only on controlling the products of the body but, rather, on governing all its activities. In order for this power to continue, people are disciplined into becoming “docile bodies” which are subjected and practiced (Bartky, 63). This discipline is imposed through constant surveillance in a manner similar to the Panopticon. Inmates in said prison are always visible to a guard in the central tower, so they mentally coerced into monitoring their own behavior. In the same way, individuals become their own jailers and subject themselves to the society’s whim due to being in a “state of conscious and permanent visibility” to its all-seeing eye (65). Bartky, however, breaks from Foucault’s theory by claiming that there is a clear difference in the disciplines imposed on men and women that are ignored in the latter’s writings.

With reference to at least three of the four thinkers whose work we discussed in class, and in response to one of the following quotations, write an account of the Societies of Control: