Born:15-Oct-1926

Birthplace: Poitiers, France

Died: 26-Jun-1984

Location of Death: Paris, France

Cause of Death: Aids

Michel Foucault

Disciple and punishment 1975The history of sexuality 1976The order of things 1966Madness and civilization 1964The archaeology of knowledge 1969

Major Books

Power is the major theme of the book as Foucault calls his study a micro-physics of power. He is looking at how power operates in our society. The prison, court, school, hospital are all just the technical implements for the exercise of power.

Discipline and Punishment: the birthplace of prison

He states: For the definition of power, I do not have in mind a general system of domination exerted by one group over another (class oppression), a system whose effects, through successive derivations, pervades the entire social body.

Power

The analysis made in terms of power, must not assume that the sovereignty of the astute, the form of the law, or the overall unity of domination are not fundamental forms, rather these are the terminal forms or shapes that power takes.

So each of these forms of power (sovereignty, law, domination) may in fact be present in certain contexts as terminal forms, but none are fundamental. And Foucault's first task in understanding power is therefore to develop a new method – based on a richer theory – that begins with the basic molecules of power relations and then builds to more complex forms.

These ideologies (sovereignty, law,..) have functioned by which most of the actual meaning of power is obscured.

Panopticon: “seeing all”, or the idea of control over people and their actions by very few people.

اقلیت وسیله به اکثریت کنترل

Birth of Panopticon: some people say it has a utilitarian purpose اهداف پیشبرد برای بودن سودمندجامعه

The Panopticon is a type of institutional building designed by the English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the late 18th century. The concept of the design is to allow a single watchman to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) inmates of an institution without them being able to tell whether they are being watched or not. Although it is physically impossible for the single watchman to observe all cells at once, the fact that the inmates cannot know when they are being watched means that all inmates must act as though they are watched at all times, effectively controlling their own behavior constantly.

The name is also a reference to Argus Panoptes from Greek mythology; he was a giant creature with a hundred eyes and thus was known to be a very effective watchman.

) جرمی ) های ایده از را فراگیر نظارت پانوپتیکون مفهوم فوکوها تیمارستان و ها بیمارستان ها، زندان طراحی درباره بنتام

بهره آن از ساختار و بستر کنندگی تعیین توضیح برای و گرفتدر. بنتام که دارد اشاره ای معمارانه طراحی به پانوپتیکون برد

) می ) قرار زندان تاریکی در معموال مرکز در را نگهبانان آنجازندگی برای ای استعاره عنوان به طرح این از فوکو و دهد

. به نظارت آنکه از حاکی ای استعاره است برده بهره مدرن . دهد می وجود امکان دیوار، کشیدن بدون پانیپتوکونی ساختار

بهره با الکترونیکی های فناوری لطف به مردم همه امروزهتماشا معرض در هنری و اجتماعی های انگاره ترکیب از گیری

در شوندگان نظارت سایر و کنندگان نظارت با اما و هستند . را مدرن جامعه ویژگی که زمانی نیز گیدنز نیستند ارتباط . است بوده متاثر مثال این از کرد، ذکر مراقبت و سازمانو ها اسطوره از برگرفته دنیا عمومی افکار اندیشه امروز،

) ( ) و ) ای رسانه های ایماژ انگاره و سمبل نمادها و ها استعارهرهگذر از عمومی افکار دستکاری و است شده مونتاژ عموما

انجام ای پروژه صورت به و آنها درونی های انگیزه شناخت. پذیرد می

In this form of power domination, the ideal city is where peace and love are sovereign. Everybody likes to try to put everything in order to guarantee their own peace and love., esp. those in power. They rule, they are selfish. The whole city is made up of multiple circles controlled by three commanders:

Power: surveillance Knowledge: control everything based on

information, it controls arts, science, schools کارتyou are constantly controlled ,شناسایی

Love: Limits people’s productions of thought, creates selfishness

Bentham says this is a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind.

Panopticon: It aimed to be a tool for distributing individuals in space, for ordering them in a visible way. He is seen, but does not see. He is the object of information.

Foucault however points to an additional rationality built into the project of panopticon. It offered a logic of efficiency but also of normalization.

By normalization Foucault means a system of finely gradated and measurable intervals in which individuals can be distributed around a norm – a norm which both organizes and is the result of this controlled distribution.

Normalization/Panopticon

Normalization needs the following elements: A - a new legitimized rationalityB - a new social epistemologyThey lead to new transformation known as new

normative laws

How does normalization take place?

A system of normalization is opposed to be a system of law or a system of personal power. There are no fixed pivot points from which to make judgments, to impose will. Normative, serialized (to use the Sartrean term) order is an essential component of the regime of the bio-power, for a power whose task is to take charge of life needs continuous regulatory and corrective mechanisms.

Why are these powers important?What is important about these concepts? Why

do we care?How can they help us to understand the

world around us?

Does power repress?Does power manage to repress our needs,

desires, resistance…?

Power and repression?

Michel Foucault believes that power doesn’t not repress so much as it incites.

So what is the advantage of carrying such a false power, which does not lead to repression?

In regard to power in one main way it is called Right to Death or Juridical Power

It is an unfair excuse of powerJudricial Power is exercised by monarchsEnlightenment theorists like john lock,

Thomas Hobbes, and Rousseau inherit this idea from monarch

They believe that monarchs use the power illegitimately

Classical liberalism 18th century

The sovereign exercised his right of life only by exercising his right to kill, or by refraining from killing; he evidenced his power over life only through the death he was capable of requiring. The right which was formulated as the “power of life and death” was in reality the right to kill or let live. Its symbol, after all, was sword.

According to Foucault:

ProhibitionsPunishmentFoucault comments:This juridical form must be referred to a historical

type of society in which power was exercised mainly as a means of deduction, a subtraction mechanism, a right to appropriate a portion of the wealth, a tax of products, goods and services, labor and blood, levied on the subjects. Power in this instance was essentially a right of seizure; of things, time, bodies, and ultimately life itself. It culminated in the privilege to seize hold of life in order to suppress it.

The common features of juridical power

Therefore judricial power is a power that prevents you from doing something.

The law of speed control: if you cross the speed limit, you will be fined. Here we see prohibition and punishment in a form of subtraction.

Hence, this model of subtraction encourages us to think that power is exercised over us as a loss on our parts; the exercise of power takes away something from us. So it prohibits and then punishes.

The agent of this prohibition and punishment is official institution.

Laws Government Police Legislative branchThis is usually what we think of political or

governmental organization. So juridical power is housed and used by the official institutions – the power owned by these institutions is exercised on individuals.

In juridical power, power is quantifiable, tangible: you have it or you don’t. if you exercise it by subtraction(taking away s.th from you), then you must be able to measure the subtraction.

When something is taken away from you, so it is tangible, which means you have it but you don’t have it right now, and you don’t know how much you had or that you don’t have that part right now.

We think of power in terms of more or less, like I had power and now I don’t have, or my gaining of power maybe somebody else’s loss of power- it is a zero-sum game; my gain is your loss.

Means: prohibition (subtract possibility of action) and punishment ( subtract a fee for transgression --- imprisonment or capital punishment)

Location: official institutionsIndividuals as both subjects and objects of

power: they exercise power and power is exercised upon them

The summary of Judricial Power

It is juridical because it is modeled upon law, upon prohibition: “it is a power [more precisely a representation of power] whose model is essentially juridical, centered on nothing more than the statement of the law and the operation of taboos.

Why is termed “juridico-discursive” representation of power?

But as Foucault makes clear, the actual operation of power cannot be reduced to one model – the law, the state, the domination – but instead functions in a variety of forms and with varying means and techniques.

Second, according to this view, power is discursive (can be found in various forms), its prohibitions are tied together with what one can say as much as what one can do; in this way restrictions on language should also function as restrictions upon reality and actions. This is the heart of the logic of censorship.

While this view emphasizes discourse as a primary arena in which power’s effects manifest, Foucault notes that discourses are related to power in much more complicated ways than this view could suggest: “discourses are not once and for all subservient to power or raised up against it … discourse can both be an instrument and an effect of power, but also a hindrance, a stumbling-block, a point of resistance, and an starting point for an strategy;”

According to this Juridio-discursive theory, power has five principal characteristics:

First, power always operates negatively: that is by means of prohibition.

Second, power always takes the form of a rule or law. This entails a binary system of permitted and forbidden, legal and illegal.

These two characteristics together constitute the third:

3.power operates through a cycle of prohibition, a law of interdiction (exclusion).

4. Hence, this power manifests in three forms of prohibition: A)affirming that such a thing is not permitted, B) preventing it from being said C)denying that it exits – which reveal a logic of censorship

Fifth and finally, the apparatus of this power is universal and uniform in its mode of operation: From top to bottom, in its overall decisions and its capillary interventions alike whatever the devices or institutions it relies, it acts in a uniform and comprehensive manner, it operates in a simple and endlessly reproduced mechanism of law, taboo, and censorship.

It is this image that we must break free of, that is of the theoretical privilege of law and sovereignty, if we wish to analyze power within the concrete and historical framework of its operation. We must construct an analytics of power that no longer takes law as a model and a code.

Foucault's own theory of power is meant to replace all these “juridico-discursive” account:

It must be understood as: 1) the multiplicity of the forced relations immanent (present everywhere) in the sphere (the area) in which they operate and constitute their own organization;

A Foculdian view of power

2) the process which through ceaseless struggles and confrontations, transforms, strengthens, or reverses them (force relations)

3)the support which these force relations find in one another, thus forming a chain or a system, or on the contrary the disjunctions, differences and contradictions which isolate them from one another.

The strategies in which they take effect whose general design or institutional crystallization is embodied (included) in the state apparatus, in the formulation of the law, in the various social hegemonies (controlling system).

Synopticon: the control of minority by majority. This concept was introduced in 1987 by Thomas Matheisen (like a president who is constantly under close watch by a country)

Monopticon: the control of individual by individual and individual by himself

Foculdian Panopticon (discipline) and its extension

In the “subject and Power” Foucault states his aim: “he wanted to study the how of power” not how does it manifest itself, but “by what means is it exercised?”

Power in a given society is “unspoken warfare”. It is a silent, secret civil war that reinscribes conflict in various social institutions in economic inequalities, in language, in every one of us

The self is seen chiefly as a tool of power ; selfhood was normalized subjectivity; the self remains a prey to power

Foucault developed the concept of power as “able to take the form of subjectification, “I” the self as a tool of power, a product of domination, rather than as a tool of personal freedom. This became Foucault's main theme.

His aim has not been to analyze the phenomenon of power nor to elaborate the foundation of such an analysis; it’s been to create a history of different modes by which in our culture, human beings are made subjects.

Subjectification/Objectification

1. dividing practices: the most famous is “isolation of lepers” during the middle ages. The confinement of the poor, the insane and the vagabond; e.g. the rise of modern psychiatry and its entry into hospitals and prisons in the 19th century and finally the mediclization, stigmatization. Society decides the social abnormalities

Three modes of Objectification

In different fashions the subject is objectified by a process of division either within himself or from others. In this way human beings are given both a social and personal identity. Those ‘dividing practices” are modes of manipulation that combine the mediation of science or pseudo-science

2. Scientific classification Those modes of inquiry that give themselves

the status of science 3. SubjectificationThe way a human being turns him or herself

into a subject. e.g. Foucault says it is a self-formation in which the person is active. Not power, but the subject has been the main theme of Foucault’s research

Foucault is primarily concerned with isolating those techniques through which the person initiates an active self-formation. This self-formation has a long and complicated genealogy; it takes place through a variety of “operations on [people’s] own bodies, on their own souls, on their own thoughts, on their own conducts”.

These operations characteristically entail a process of self-understanding but one which is mediated by an external authority figure, be he confessor (priest) or psychoanalyst. Foucault encourages us to reflect critically upon why it is that we desire someone else to tell us what to think and what to do , why we must believe that we have absolute and universal norms that dictate our thoughts and actions as well as the effects upon the effects of that desire (1982:8). “The subject and Power” in Michel Foucault beyond structuralism and hermeneutics

“What is good”? Foucault tells us that comes through innovation. The good does not exist… in an atemporal sky, with people who be like the astrologers of the Good, whose job is to determine what is the favorable nature of the stars. The good is invented by us, it is practiced, it is invented. And this is a collaborative, joint work.

Foucault states: “each new work profoundly changes the terms of thinking which I had reached with previous work. In this sense I consider myself more of an experimenter than a theorist; I don’t develop deductive systems to apply uniformly in different felids of research. When I write I do it above all to change myself and not to think the same thing before. (1991, 27) “how an ‘experience book’ is born”. In Remarks on Marx

During most of the 1960s, Foucault sought in a variety of ways, to analyze and isolate the structures of the human sciences treated as discursive systems. It is important to stress that Foucault did not see himself as a practitioner of these human sciences. They were his objects of study.

It exercises power over life beyond the juridical. It is the reform of the soul, rather than the punishment of the body. It talks about norms like body size, gender presentation, and Statistics like IQ rates, mortality rates…

The power over life wants us to have a better life and more life through micromanaging it. You try to manage your life by micromanaging its details.

Neo-Liberalism: Power over life

Bio-power contains two disciplines that are like two poles that move forward side by side in a cmp0lemenary mode. The first one as Foucault says is: an anatomo-politics of the human body.

The second, formed somewhat later, focused on the species body, the body imbued with the mechanics of life and serving as the basis of the biological processes, propagation, birth, and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy, and longevity, with all the conditions that can cause these to vary.

The power over life channels through unofficial channels, like opinion or social norms. It functions through production not deduction. It enforces itself through positive and negative reinforcement. It can be direct or indirect reinforcement.

Upbringing of children can be along the positive and negative reinforcements.

Kinds of dressing in a private party.

Bio-power has two poles; discipline and governmentality. Discipline operates on particular individuals in a particular space. It collects information about an individual and acts according to that information. In the Classical Age it occurs in schools and workshops. In the Modem Age it spreads to families and hospitals and begins to be exercised by marginal religious groups, psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers. Governmentality, on the other hand, operates on particular groups of individuals. It receives information through statistical analyses, financial reports and population registers. Its techniques of power are directed to making adjustments in the population and their economic condition. Legislation is one technique which is used to make these adjustments. It works alongside the other governmental devices which, in the eighteenth century, were collected under the name of the police.

There are some parts of the society that are appropriate for law to regulate and some parts for the opinion to regulate. By opinion it means the accepted social norms, which are accepted through regular repetition by the individuals.

John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) Philosopher and political economist

Mill says opinion can regulate individuals’ social relationships. He believes that people cannot remain indifferent to one another. He believes: “it would be a great misunderstanding of this doctrine to suppose that it is one of selfish indifference, which pretends that human beings have no business with each other’s conduct in life and they should not concern themselves about the well-doing or well-being of one another unless their own interest is involved.

Mill says there are things which do not necessarily affect other people, but do effect that individual, for instance one’s body size, one’s gender presentation, do not necessarily affect other people, but do affect that individual. If there is a distrustful opinion that law cannot regulate it like your body size, gender presentation, which do not negatively impact anyone in a sense that law can regulate they certainly effect the society. Hence in such a situation opinion can regulate them. (social power)

There are lots of acts which are important for social organizations that are not codified in the law but defiantly need to be regulated in order to have a stabilized society.

Society is interested in regulating it, but according to liberal-political theory, it is unjust for law to regulate it. So here opinion takes action.

Another consequence of the development of this bio-power was the growing importance assumed by the action of the norm at the expense of the juridical system of the law. Law cannot help but be armed and its norm, par excellence is death, to those who transgress it ,it replies with absolute menace. The law always refers to the sword. But power whose task is to take charge of life needs continuous regulatory and corrective mechanisms.

Bio-Political Adminstration

It is no longer a matter of bringing death into play in the field of sovereignty, but of distributing the living in the domain of value and utility. Such a power has to qualify, measure, evaluate, and hierarchize, rather than display itself in its murderous splendor. It does not have to draw the line that separates the enemies of the sovereign from his obedient subjects. It effects distributions around the norm.

Foucault further says that I don’t mean that the law fades into the background or that the institutions of justice tend to disappear, but rather the law operates more and more as a norm and that the juridical institution sis increasingly incorporated into a continuum of apparatuses (medical administrative and so on) whose functions are for the most part regulatory. A normalizing society is the historical outcome of the technology of power centered on life. We have entered a phase of juridical regressing in comparison with pre-seventeenth century societies we are acquainted with.

Foucault gives the following remarks on power over life: A power that exerts a positive influence on life that endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply it. Subjecting it to precise control and comprehensive regulations . We are no longer waged in the name of the sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on the behalf of the existence of everyone; entire population is mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of the life necessity; massacres have become vital. It is as managers of life and survival, of bodies – and the race that so many regimes have been able to wage so many wars , causing so many men to be killed.

By the time the right of life and death was framed by the classical theoreticians, it was in a considerably diminished form. It was no longer considered that this power of the sovereign over his subjects could be exercised in an absolute and unconditional way. But in cases where the sovereign's very existence was in jeopardy; a sort of right of rejoinder. If he were threatened by external enemies who sought to overthrow him or contest his rights, he could then legitimately wage war, and require his subjects to take part in the defense of the state, without directly proposing their death. He was empowered to expose their life.

In this sense, he wielded an indirect power over them of life and death. But if someone dared to rise up against him and transgress his laws , then he could exercise a direct power over the offender’s life. As punishment the latter would be to death. In this sense, this power was in fact for the survival of the sovereign.

Disciplinary power deals with normalization of individual bodies = birth of normative law. (each normalization leads to internalizing gaze).

It is a kind of taming body and making it docile. It is how you make your body work efficiently. You micromanage it. Some other common examples can be as follows:

Diet: you either want to appear more normal or feel more healthy

Beauty RegimentLearning a New language

Bio-Power Discipline Anatomo-politics of Bodies

A comparative glance at Bio-power of individual bodies and species bodies:

Individual bodies is the discipline in small scale, while species bodies is the discipline in large scale. Individual bodies is about social norms . Species bodies is about statistical average

Bio-power of individual bodies: it intends to optimize the individual power as individual bodies does It makes sure that the population life is most optimized. It believes that society must be defended

In terms of surveillance:A) Individual Bodies: between the literal

surveillance of then gazeB) Species Bodies: then surveillance is so

abstract. The bell curve is well monitored. It is more metaphorical kind of surveillance

Foucault says in the 20th century Racism became institutionalized as a form of the Bio-political administration. Race did not remain as a natural representative of a group or a community, but it became part of the institutionalized apparatus in the welfare safe. Race was used as a means of differentiating between who was invested with life, whose was optimized, and who was left to die.