Structuralist Disposition Of Foucault ' The Works Of Derrida

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

Michel Foucault and Erving Goffman’s work was centralised around there two different concepts of how your identity is formed through the process of power and expert knowledge. This Essay will discuss the ideas of Michel Foucault who was a French Social Theorist. His theories addressed the relationship between power and knowledge and how both of these are used as a form of social control through society. The essay will look at Foucault’s work in The Body and Sexuality, Madness and Civilisation and Discipline and Punish which displays how he conceptualised Power and identity on a Marxist and macro basis of study. The Essay will also address the Ideas of Erving Goffman who was A Canadian Born Sociologist who’s key study was what

“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

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

The United States has emerged into a disciplinary society where power is not only in certain institutions or is undivided in a particular social class, but power is dispersed through the people. The oppression by abiding people to discipline helps portray the diffusion of power. In order to analyze and fully comprehend how the United States consists of a disciplinary society it is best if we look through a Foucault lens. One of the reasons why its best to look at it through Foucault’s lenses is because he has always been interested in the way that knowledge and power increase knowledge. Also, according to Foucault, people ae dominated by surveillance, knowledge and discipline.

Derrida was right in asserting that "there is no 'outside' to the text." His claim is that every text is

Although Foucault believes that people are not the authors of society, discourses are governed independently of anyone’s purpose (Learning Companion 2), the institutions he mentions help to keep order in society, although he is concerned about who can claim the authority of who has the power to rule how others should behave (Foucault cited by Silva, 2009, p319).

Foucault dug into the past investigating historical documents to question what is in familiar in the present ,The present order of things was thus made visible by accessing it from the past ,by viewing how it has been made through processes of social development .He did this through processes of social development ,through reading texts and documents to find traces of the present .In doing so he found a way of exploring his concerns about social life from a political and philosophical point of view. Discourses that organise particular fields of knowledge and power.P.323 E.B. Silva.

“Our society is not one of spectacle, but of surveillance; under the surface of images, one invests bodies in depth; behind the great abstraction of exchange, there continues the meticulous concrete training of useful forces; the circuits of communication are the supports of an accumulation and a centralization of knowledge; the play of signs defines the anchorages of power; it is not that the beautiful totality of the individual is amputated, repressed, altered by our social order, it is rather that the individual is carefully fabricated in it, according to a whole technique of forces and bodies. (pp.333-34)”

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

Even the best-intentioned reformers who use an impoverished and debased language to recommend renewal, strengthen the very power of the established order they are trying to break. (Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1944; translated John Cumming, 1972; London: Verso, 1979, p. xiv)

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.

In order to deconstruct a text, one must take it apart along the structural “fault lines” (IEP) created by ambiguities that are fundamental in one or more of its key themes in order to reveal the contradictions that make the text possible. For example, Derrida, in “Plato’s Pharmacy,” deconstructs Socrates’ criticism of written word. He contends that it suffers not only from inconsistencies internally because of Socrates analogy between memory and writing, but also because his ideas come to us only through his written word. Many deconstructive arguments center on the analysis of its oppositions. The person

It was by doing this that the disciplinary self was created - “discipline ‘makes’ individuals”, a phenomenon of the disciplinary era (1977, p.170). Our movement through the institutions defined our individualisation; normalising, examining and hierarchically observing each member of society (Foucault, 1977) - our sense of self emerged from their intersections. In Postcript on the Societies of Control (1992), Deleuze states the S.O.D have made way for the S.O.C. He mainly attributes this shift to the environments of “enclosure” (1992, p.4) – the institutions – beginning to crumble, and the factory – a typical workplace on the S.O.D – being replaced by the corporation (1992). In the S.O.D Foucault claimed that the soldier can be moulded like “a formless clay” (1977, p.135) – these rigid institutions formed us. Now without these institutions we lose this mould, and therefore our concept of the ‘self’. Imagine if instead of pushing clay into a mould we placed it on a desk; it would be shapeless and adaptable. This according to Deleuze is a defining characteristic of the S.O.C; flexibility in our structures moving us from moulds to “modulations” (1992, p.4). These modulations are “a self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other” (1992, p.4). Instead of experiencing these rigid disciplines, we are left in this soft, malleable environment, which constantly

As poststructuralism would have it, human consciousness is constructed discursively. Our subjectivity is constructed by the shifting discourses of power which endlessly speak through us, situating us here and there in particular positions and relations. In these terms we are not the authors of ourselves. We do not construct our identities, we have it written for us; the subject cannot be sovereign over the construction of selfhood. Instead the subject is decentered, in that its consciousness is always being constructed from positions outside of itself. It follows then that the individual is not a transparent representation of the self but an effect of discourse. Spivak argues that surprisingly for these figures, when Foucault and Deleuze talks about oppressed groups such as the working classes they fall back into precisely these uncritical notions of ‘sovereign subjects’ by restoring to them a fully centred consciousness. In addition they also assume that the writing of intellectuals such as themselves can serve as a transparent medium through which the voices of the oppressed can be represented. The intellectual is cast as a reliable mediator for the voices of the oppressed, a mothpiece through which the oppressed can clearly speak.