Michel Foucault: Power and Identity Essay

3. As such, Foucault sets aside sociohistorical analysis within this paper and decides to focus on the individual author and his or her relationship to the text. 2. When carefully considering the relationship between the author and the text, it is important to note two major themes. a.

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

To appreciate Foucault’s contrasting (good use of language to emphasise what you are doing) angle that social order is a product of authoritative knowledge, discourses and power, we can examine his viewpoint that social institutions are what influence our conduct through the powers of intervention. He feels that the values and rules for conduct, which are proposed to individuals by diverse institutions such as the family, education systems or churches are what govern social order. These institutions bring forth and integrate discipline. Discipline is a mechanism of power which regulates the behaviour of individuals. He suggests that 'the good' is something that is practised, not discovered ‘social control becomes internalised and becomes self control’(Silva,2009,pg.320). Foucault feels that power work through discourse, ‘discourses provide the frameworks that shape what can be thought about and talked about’ (Silva,2009,pg.320)

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.

In Discipline and Punishment, Foucault does an interpretation and expose of the implicit power relationship that has been pervasive throughout society. Foucault undertakes this task through a genealogy that attempts to track the metamorphosis of power using the penal system as a conduit. For Foucault, it seems that the relationship between the disciplinary form of punishment and the carceral archipelago is not only fundamental to understanding contemporary power, but they integrally related. By the end of the paper not only will the link between the carceral archipelago and punishment become evident, but how it has also infested the internet and its culture.

Here, it is mainly discipline. Foucault sees many similarities to how the prison system, the hospital system is run and how education is taught. Power is an invisible but intrinsic force that takes the form of discipline in these systems as well as the education system. Foucault uses the example of a parish school to exemplify how discipline is intrinsically a part of education. In the parish school, students were not only scholars learning side by side but also officers (intendants, observers, monitors, etc…) who supervised each other and marked down bad practice so that “a relation of surveillance, defined and regulated, is inscribed at the heart of the practice of teaching, not as an additional or adjacent part, but as a mechanism that is inherent to it and which increases its efficiency” (Foucault 1977:176). In Foucault’s college classroom, students and teachers are the watchful eye, surveilling each other and enacting power to keep the class productive. The professor could tell students to keep phones off, students would tell other students to stop distracting them with miscellaneous content seen through laptops, and my friend would nudge me awake when I fell asleep in

In the History of Sexuality Vol. 1, Michel Foucault writes the body as a constructed and manipulated agent, the locus of sociopolitical discourse and power. To Foucault, the body cannot exist before the law (that which holds and ascribes its meaning). Similarly, sexuality cannot free itself from relations of power (Butler 1989:603). Indeed, the body is culturally contested; it is incapable of independence from any particular structuralized narrative. The ubiquitous yet uncertain subject of sex, as Foucault describes, is an “imaginary point, the consequence of materiality fully invested with ideas” (Butler 1989:603). He writes; “Nothing in man— not even his body – is sufficiently stable to serve as the basis for self-recognition or for understanding other men” (Foucault 1980:153). The culturally constructed body then, asserts a multitude of identities. The body is molded by distinct regimes of life, broken down by “rhythms of work, rest, and holiday” uprooted by cultural significant values, habits and moral laws (Foucault 1980:153).

Foucault’s notion of micro-power can be distinguished from the concept of hegemony as outlined by Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci argued that powerful groups don’t necessarily have to impose their values on the less powerful by the use of direct force. Often, less powerful groups come to accept that the differences in levels of power and economic wealth within a society are natural and just, and so will consent to the rule of their betters. When working- class people vote for conservative parties (as happened in the United Kingdom at the time of

Foucault: I guess I will start. I think when talking about these topics in relation to the modern society it is important to understand the history of punishment and discipline. Throughout history there has been a shift on the focus from the body to the soul. In the past society focused on punishment through the methods of torture and pain. The fear

(Intro) Power, what is power? Is it a thing, something that can be controlled by a person or group? Or is it an omnipresent force with no clear distinction of what it is and what it is not? My views before being introduced to Foucault was: power is an attainable thing, but elusive. For example, it is said one has power, if one has enough money. Another example I commonly hear is that, the government (the State, the law, police) holds too much power. My final example is, in my opinion, power is usually viewed as a negative thing by ones that do not hold said power. Michel Foucault, a philosopher, challenged the traditional view of power by analyzing power in a series of studies of different forms of power, such as from his books: Madness and Civilization, Discipline and Punish, and The Order of Things to name a few. What Foucault found through his critical observations was that the concept of power in the traditional views were too narrow and specific; not a singularity composed of only negative aspects but also a dualism that leans much heavier on the side of positivity than vice versa and an omnipresent force (or rather relationships) that may be used through various techniques but not owned at all.

This essay will discuss Foucault’s and Bauldrillard’s views on today’s society. Foucault sees the current state of the society as a system of domination, while Baudrillard says that the society we knew has collapsed in to a world of images produced by the mass media. Both of them focus on the cultural dimension of the progression of the society and sees society as having moved on from modernity. Though both have different views when it comes to Power, Foucault focuses on the changing nature of power and the historical circumstances which assist the rise of specific discourses while Bauldrillard on the other hand says that power is a mere product of images, signs, and simulacra generated by the mass media which makes it not real.

Foucault begins his ideas on power through the hypothesis that institutions create power that people in their positions posses. Power recognition 's difficult because to the naked eye power is seen to be held by the people, but Foucault shows that in truth, power is created by the institutions and transferred to those people within their respective positions. It 's hard to recognize the power in institutions due to the lack of knowledge in society and this mistake is based on the idea that whoever is holding a position of power actually created that power, but in reality the power has always existed just transferred from one position holder to the next. It 's a sobering thought that Foucault had over the idea that power transfers. In his

Foucault felt it necessary to dispense with ideologies such as socialism, communism and liberalism, which had all made claims to ‘absolute truth’ and which had resulted in widespread devastation (Taylor and Vintges 2004: 2). Foucault’s work focussed on the ways in which power operates throughout society. In his earlier work this was on the ways in which societies govern their subjects; his later focus was on the ways in which humans are subjectified within society, and the ways in which conduct is guided by self-governance (Mills 2003). He wanted to move beyond an analysis of behaviours and ways of thinking that relied on the concept of ideology, and throughout his work he highlighted the oppressive function of ‘truths’ and the effects of ‘norms’, when they are adopted unquestioned and uncritically (Mills 1997:30). Although Foucault openly refused the label of sociologist, poststructuralist, or postmodernist, his work has been aligned with these disciplines, and he has had a significant impact within these schools of thought (Smart 2002).

In modern society, we are always being watched and documented by a certain power or institution, an authoritative one in certain cases. This creates a sense of carcerality in these societies. The powers or institutions that are always observing the individuals in a population and analyzing them do so in order to classify each individual and to judge them so that they don’t deviate from the masses in terms of behavior and health. The institution that illustrates this the best, which is what Michel Foucault focused on most as an example for

Both Goffman and Foucault want to understand how social order is made, and they both look at bigger ways in which to understand it. However, Goffman focuses on society at a micro level, to help him understand the bigger picture of how social order is created. His work is very much centred on the individual. Goffman believes that social order is created by everyone’s individual actions. He likens people’s everyday interactions to a stage, where the front of stage is where people put on ‘performances’ to meet the demands of maintaining social order, and backstage as a place where an individual could let go of that (Silva, 2009, p.317). Foucault looks at the micro level, but also sees the big picture, the macro level of social order. He claims that social institutions (schools, workplaces, families), have a certain knowledge and power over an individual, and it is by using that power that social order is created, through the discourse of creating rules and regulations. (Silva, 2009, p.319). By concerning himself with people who have