MICHAEL FOUCAULT - RECONCEPTUALISING POWER IN

To assess Foucault’s theory of power in 50 pages would be challenging, to do so in one, an insult. For this I can only apologise.

There are few 20th century thinkers whose influence has been as vast as that of Michel Foucault. Perhaps, one may consider those sitting on the table across from him in the smoke ridden intellectual confines of the Café de Flore; Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. In this article, however, I seek to demonstrate that Foucault provides a radical view of how power functions and permeates into our everyday reality. The actuality of human existence and knowledge is actively shaped by such a force. However, in the ink which follows I aim to demonstrate that this is not a critique which undermines human agency but facilitates a higher understanding of modern society.

Foucault felt that work in the field of psychoanalysis, principally Freud and Jacques Lacan, had done much ‘to posit a new understanding of human relations’. Nevertheless, Foucault felt that power could not be understood solely from within, forces external to oneself need to be taken into consideration. Foucault was an admirer of Marx’s work, but the power relations emerging from relations of production again seemed too simplistic for Foucault. Foucault certainly would not deny that there is a power relation between the bourgeois manager and worker. However, he would suggest that we look further at the wider forces governing such a dynamic.

Foucault separates power into two distinct areas: ‘normalising’ and ‘repressive power’. The latter is what one would commonly assume as power. For example, a police officer arresting a citizen, a judge sentencing a defendant or the military invading the state in which you live. This is a form of power which is visible and common to our ontology. Such power acts to make an individual do what they otherwise would not do. An individual would not voluntarily place themselves in a cell. Rather, a relation of power has made such a thing occur.

Let us turn to ‘normalising power’. Foucault argues across his work that most power is not visible but rather operates in a more subversive way, ‘society is an archipelago of different powers’. Take the relation between a parent and child. The child, largely, does as the parent says, their behaviour is regulated in this manner. Further, take a university, prison, or society as a whole; what Foucault states is that what we know, understand and do, is regulated and informed by our relation to institutions and the societal forces we engage with. That is to say, we think what we do because we are conditioned to do so by our place in the world. In a sense we become occupied by a norm. Our desire to ‘fit in’ or ‘be normal’, is part of a wider internalisation of what is expected from us.

A greater understanding of this internalisation can be seen through Foucault’s assessment of the Panopticon. Jeremy Bentham proposed the idea of a Panopticon in prisons. A tower which can see outwards, but no prisoner can see in. Thus, one would never know if they were being watched, or if anyone had ever entered the building. Under such a system, the subject would behave as if they were being watched. The fear and threat of the tower watching you is enough for the internalisation of the norms which you are asked to follow. Thus, direct power is expanded into every aspect of the prisoner’s life, through a pervasive symbol of power.

This carries over into ideas of surveillance and ‘Stop and Search’. The mass tracking of individuals online or policies of ‘Stop and Search’, which seldom result in convictions, seem to exist to remind us of the state’s presence. Foucault argues that this is a form of control. Such power is never politically neutral. If those who design the Panopticon or carry out surveillance are racist, sexist or homophobic, the behaviour these modes of power induce will express these prejudices.

Foucault, through the term Episteme, also states that we do not understand things because we have gradually become more intelligent, instead we know what we do because the societal conditions which we find ourselves in allow us to. We commonly assume that we have become more humane in our approach to justice. Yet, Foucault rejects this. Foucault indicates that when punishments, around the 18th century, slowly developed from public hangings to private executions and incarceration, this was not out of developing notions of humanity. Rather, this represents a more insidious operation of power. By hiding the exercise of power from direct view, the means of power, which were often protested against at executions, become concealed within physical confines.

Moreover, Foucault stresses the neo-liberal transformation of the self. Modern society induces the individual to conceive themselves in the image of the economy, remaking our experience of the world by using the market as the base from which all human relations are understood. One becomes ‘Homo Economicus’. That is, more than a worker, but an entrepreneur of the self. For Foucault, we are all induced to become producers of human capital, subjects for life within a capitalist society. It is through this relation that we are constituted as subjects.

This may seem to be a pessimistic denial of human agency. However, it is only through observing and understanding the structures of power and forces subjugating human existence that one can comprehend their position in the world and be emancipated from the normalising forces of power.