Stanley Foucault Power Relations

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

This part of the paper will provide a comparison with a theorist previously discussed in a lecture. The theorist with whom Michael Foucault’s arguments will be compared to is Emile Durkheim. Durkheim sees crime as functional. He says that if there was no crime, all our values would be dispersed--these values are laws. These laws are observed by sanctions and punishments attached to it. However, in order for these laws to exist, there must be a punishment, thus, for there to be a punishment, there has to be crime. Repressive law, according to this classical theorist was based on punishing for the evil doing of the criminal through revenge. Durkheim believes that a crime is not collective and when one goes against the core values of society, one threatens the entire order of society. Therefore, this theorist would agree with Foucault that when disciplining a criminal, he or she should be stripped of their freedom and when

Often time power can be understood as control of material resources and wealth, control of politics and the institutions that make up society (Hutchison,2015). It is important to recognize and identify the core concepts of power or lack of power with individuals in society. The conflict theory allows examination within the text of those who hold power and lack power. The end result of power to hold dominance over another person, group, or society. As a result of the control and power is causes those who lack power to be devalued or alienated from a setting or even society (Hutchinson, 2015).

Foucault wanted to look for alternative ways to learn how society dealt with power. He didn’t want to turn to the state for answers so decided that finding alternative ways would get him the answers he needed in more detail. Foucault stated, “…first of all because the State, for all the omnipotence of its apparatuses, is far from being able to occupy the whole field of actual power relations, and further because the State can only operate on the basis of other,

In the chapter, “The body of the Condemned,” Foucault addresses the evolution of the punishment system and how it has gone from being a public spectacle to something that is done behind closed doors. Foucault opens the chapter with an extremely descriptive and gory representation of a public execution. The purpose of this was to display how execution have changed from being in the public eye to behind closed doors using the electric chair and legal injections. It was done in this fashion to deter individuals from committing heinous crimes. Today, the cost of prison time, fines, etc.. deter individuals instead. Punishment has become less about effecting the body and more about the changing the souls and integrating them back into society.

“Discipline and Punish the Birth of Prisons” goes beyond the walls of the prison system. Foucault gives a detailed description of the transition of discipline and punishment beginning in the seventeenth century. Foucault begins with insight into the tortures forms of punishment common in the seventeenth century. The torture involved prisoners being placed on a scaffold while holding a two pound torch of burning wax. There the flesh would be torn from their body with hot pincers before their bodies were quartered by four horses attached to each limb.

Michel Foucault is a very famous French intellectual who practiced the knowledge of sociology. Foucault analyzed how knowledge related to social structures, in particular the concept of punishment within the penal system. His theory through, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, is a detailed outline of the disciplinary society; in which organizes populations, their relations to power formations, and the corresponding conceptions of the subjects themselves. Previously, this type of punishment focused on torture and dismemberment, in which was applied directly to bodies. Foucault mentions through his literary piece, “the soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy: the soul is the prison of the body (p.30). However, today, the notion of punishment involves public appearances in a court and much more humane sentences. However, it is important to note and to understand the idea of power and knowledge; it is fundamental to understand the social system as a whole.

In his book “Discipline and Punish”, Foucault theorizes that we live in “disciplinary society,” and that power exercised through disciplinary means is found in modern day institution i.e. schools, Universities, prisons, the military and hospitals. Focalult says “classical times discovered the body as a target of power to be manipulated, trained, which obeys, responds, becomes skillful and increases in forces” (p.136) Focalult states through the historical moment of discipline came the art of controlling the body. Which formed a policy coercion that acted on the body, and breaking it down. Thus Foucault says discipline makes practiced and subjected bodies “ docile bodies” that increase economic terms of utility and diminishes the body in terms of domination i.e. the body becomes a vessel of aptitude and capacity and a relation of complete subjection” Foucault states “if the economic exploitation separates the force and the product of labor, he would say disciplinary coercion establishes in the body a link between the increased aptitude and increased domination.(Foucault p.138) A blueprint for of general disciplinary methodology that overlapped, repeated and transformed spilling from education, to prisons, hospitals to the workplace according to the disciplines domains of application.

In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault (1977) asserts that the “panopticon” as an architectural composition began as a component to keep prisoners under surveillance that prospered as the modern mechanism of discipline, surveillance and control. This mechanism targeted to manipulate the bodies’ “elements, its gestures, its behaviour”, terminating an era of public punishment that directly contacted the bodies of the citizens by the sovereign power (Foucault, 1977: 200). Instead, this shift in

(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.

Authoritative bodies uses many techniques to regulate every aspect of their citizens’ lives. Those with power impose certain moral rules for a myriad of reasons, many of which are less transparent than they seem. Some individuals are more responsive to these moral standards than others. Michel Foucault’s historical research focuses on the way that systems of power control people’s behavior by create self affirming discourses. His book “Discipline and Punishment” focuses on ways in which modern governments enforce their authorities psychologically rather than physically. The graphic novel Persepolis follows a girl as she grows up in a country that is seemingly in constant revolution against some newly developed oppressive regime. She

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)

In this essay I shall compare James Scott’s theory of power and resistance with Michel Foucault’s, as in what similarities do they share in their structure of theories; and contrast the difference as in their understanding of power, position they take to look for/into power, exercise of power and resistance in response. By contrasting the two approaches on the subject of power and resistance, I shall argue, if one wish to look for the powerful and the weak, Scott’s approach is the go to. But for now, I find Foucault’s idea more plausible that we are surrounded by or inescapable from power, and that by any means, are not necessarily forced to submission; rather as freedom the same time.

In Michel Foucault’s, “Power/ Knowledge”, there are two chapters titled “Truth and Power” and “The Eye of the Power”. Foucault’s conception of power is that power is everywhere. Everyone has power and has the ability to make use of their power, but often times citizens don’t make use of their power. It seems that they are in fear of those who enforce their power already, which prevents them to make use of their power. An everyday individual sees power to be in the hands of who the people have “chosen”. We should not always think about power as the private property of government or state, but rather as an equal common ground for all of those who share the land. It is not the state that doesn’t matter, but the power is bigger than the state; although the state has power, it does not have all power. A

Discourses have a different set of meanings, metaphors, images and stories so that together it can create a version of events and representing it in a certain structural form. Discourses make us see the world in a certain way. Each discourse has a different story about the topic in question and shows a different way of representing the topic to the world. Discourses have another suggestion for what we do every day. Discourses claim that truth and knowledge are not important and is the centre of the discussion of identity, power and change. There is a notion ‘attitude’. Attitude is a dispositional model that is used in the discipline of psychology and opinions. Michel Foucault was a French philosopher and has a background in psychology. He was interested in how knowledge and power were used as a shape of social control through institutions. Discourses displays our knowledge of the world. In Foucault’s view, knowledge and power goes together as a pair. There is a close relationship between discourse, knowledge and power; this becomes clear through social practices. An individual’s understanding of the relationship between power and knowledge is that knowledge can raise an individual’s power. In Foucault’s eyes, knowledge is connected closely with power. ‘What it is possible for one person to do to another, under what rights and obligations, is given by the version of events currently taken as knowledge. Therefore, the power to act in particular ways, to claim resources, to