Foucault Power

Foucault sees “power” everywhere. He does not mean actual strength, or even force over another person. He feels power is more in the form of control, knowledge, the discipline that is exert to other people. We see politics are a form of power and laws as a way to shape our society. However every day task, that becomes habits can be also a form of power. For example, Foucault sees the teachings on universities a way to guide their students into a certain way of thinking. It may be for or against an issue. Universities seem to be “neutral” to any political party; however by shaping their students into certain ways of thinking, it guides students into the candidate, issue, or side of the issue they have been taught from the “neutral” institution.

This is a critical part of Foucault’s theory because it demonstrates how knowledge and especially power occur as an everyday socialized phenomenon. It is embodying. This is a revolutionary way of thinking because it assumes that everyone is responsible for discovering “truths.” It is not the work of higher order institutions controlling social behavior, which is the conventional thread of thought. It is not until these “local centers” are established, that they become anchors for broader techniques of knowledge and strategies of power in a “higher order”

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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

In her article, “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power”, Bartkey begins by summarizing philosopher Michel Foucault’s literary analysis of the Panopticon and how the prison system works tying it to modern society. Foucault begins by using the example of a student who is forced to sit in assigned seating based of class ranking. The scrutiny the student faces forces him to sit upright; he must keep feet his feet on the floor; his head must stay erect; and he may not slouch or fidget. With

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“The Panopticon functions as a kind of laboratory of power,” Foucault declares; indeed, much knowledge can be ascertained by “penetra[ting] into men’s behavior” (379).

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

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In The Introduction to the History of Sexuality, Foucault explains how during the 19th century with the raise of new societies, the discourse or knowledge about sex was not confronted with repulsion but it “put into operation an entire machinery for producing true discourses concerning sex” (Foucault 69). In fact, this spreading of discourse on sexuality itself gives a clear account of how sexuality has been controlled and confined because it was determined in a certain kind of knowledge that carries power within it. Foucault reflects on the general working hypothesis or “repressive hypothesis,” and how this has exercised power to suppress people’s sexuality. It has power on deciding what is normal or abnormal and ethical or unethical

Michel Foucault’s work within philosophy has made important impacts when it comes to understanding how power affects a capitalist state. Believed that history of a country should how the past created a better future for society but in most cases through history, that was not the case. One of the examples that Foucault uses is how the mentally ill were treated in the Renaissance compared to the 18th century. During the Renaissance period, the mental ill people were allowed to seen within society and were seen as useful and gave wisdom into their society rather than in the 18th century. People with mental illness were put away and see as a burden to society and seen as needed to being cured by sinister people. Another example that Foucault discuss

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

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.

Foucault, addresses in the first part of his work, the power of the sovereign. He guides the readers through the historical period of the power of the monarch and Feudal system and transforms them into the 18th and 19th century. He put particular emphasis on the spectacle of the tortured individual. “Among so many changes, I shall consider one: the disappearance of torture as a public spectacle (p.7).” The spectacle functioned for

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.