Foucault I:

Power, Knowledge, and Discourse

Introduction to Michel Foucault
(FOO CO)
1926-1984

Born in Paris

Studied philosophy and psychology in early life,
Interned at a mental hospital in Paris

Began studying the history of psychiatry in 1954, wrote
Madness and Civilization on the topic in 1960.

1970s - activism for prisoners rights, gay liberation, the
rights of psychiatric patients.

He died of AIDS-related symptoms in 1984.

Readings and Key Concepts
The History of Sexuality
Power as- productive
Subject of power vs. subjectivity
Sovereign power-- disciplinary power-- Biopower
Characteristics of power

Truth and Power
Power-knowledge
Discourse
Intellectual Tradition
Work turned to a focus on the institutional representation of
power: Foucault concerned with how power works through the
development of different discourses madness, medicine,
punishment, sexuality.

Key question: How does power work to regulate bodies and
control populations?
Structuralism: Reality exists as a product of our categories of
thought. Social life studied as symbolic systems.

Post-structuralism: Subjects are created by the symbolic
systems (or discourses) in which they are embedded.
The politics of meaning
Formalism- seeks to discern what sets up the hierarchy
of literature
Structuralism- the structures that underlie narratives
Post structuralism- the politics and ideology that
determine meaning- in that how do we make
assumptions about meaning based on pre-determined
notions of race, class and gender? Are these meanings
unquestionable and set in stone, or are they adopted
beliefs that are ingrained in a societys ways of thinking?
Discourse
Discourse The categories of knowledge that
form our consciousness. The scope of what is
knowable. A way of seeing the world that
implies the organization of power.

Discourses are limiting as well as enabling
Discourse can be both an instrument of power
and an effect of power, but also a hindrance, a
stumbling block, a point of resistance and a
starting point for an opposing strategy

Examples
Mental illness and the birth of the clinic
Punishment and the birth of the prison
Sexuality
Michel Foucault
What Is an Author?
(1969)
Premise:
The authors disappearance (death):
1. Todays writing is an interplay of signs
arranged less according to its signified
content than according to the very nature of
the signifier (890). The writing subject is
irrelevant to this.
2. The writing subject cancels out the signs of
his particular individuality (891). Think
modernism.
2 ways we conceal the true meaning
of the authors disappearance:
1. We deny that the idea of a unified
work is arbitrary (891).
2. We have pseudo-religious ideas about
the nature of writing, that aesthetic
works will outlive, transcend, exceed
authors: the notion of writing seems
to transpose the empirical
characteristics of the author into a
transcendental anonymity (892).
What can we learn from the authors
absence/disappearance?
An authors name is an arbitrary sign--its
signified, its implied presence in a text, its
explicit presence in the text are all
arbitrarily associated (892-3).
An authors name marks off the edges of
the text, designates its meaning (893).
What can we learn from the authors
absence/disappearance?
An authors name is an arbitrary sign--its
signified, its implied presence in a text, its
explicit presence in the text are all
arbitrarily associated (892-3).
An authors name marks off the edges of
the text, designates its meaning (893).
The author function is Foucaults
way to address this problematically
disappeared author.
The author function characterizes the
mode of existence, circulation, and
functioning of certain discourses within
a society (894).
It describes and prescribes a works
cultural context.
4 characteristics of the a.f.
1. Discourses are objects of appropriation; a.f.
indicates ownership and $ status (894).
Think anti-capitalism, I.P. and copyright
law.
2. The a.f. is historically & culturally relative
(894). Think post-structuralism.
3. The a.f. results from a complex social,
cultural, economic system not an individual
genius (895). Think anti-Romanticism.
4. The a.f. does not refer to an individual (895).
Think anti-liberal bourgeois subject.
The author is not an indefinite source of
significations which fill a work; the
author does not precede the works, he
is a certain functional principle by
which, in our culture, one limits,
excludes, and chooses; in short, by
which one impedes the free
composition, decomposition, and
recomposition of fiction. . . . The author
is therefore the ideological figure by
which one marks the manner in which
we fear the proliferation of meaning.
(899)
Body-Centeredness
Foucault felt that the current Discourse
defining humanity has to do with the Body
everything about who and how we are is
understood along medical/physical lines.
We make sense of our life through our
body everything we experience is
explained this way.
Good vs. Evil has become Health vs.
Sickness, the primary concern of our age.


The Medicalization of Experience
Foucault thought that every aspect of modern
life plugs in one way or another w/ the Health
Care System:
Childbirth
Education
Marriage & The Family
Old Age
Death
Body Fetishism
This focus on the body also manifests as an
obsession with our physical appearance.
Living a good/happy life becomes less
important, as we focus more on
material/physical virtues rather than spiritual
ones.
In modernity, we develop our bodies,
decorate them, clothe them, apply various
lotions and paints all to convince the world
that we are beautiful: that we are healthy.
Body Fetishism, continued
According to sociologist Pip Jones, not
only do fashion and non-prescribed
medications contribute to this idea of
healthiness, but body fetishism is
rampant, fuelled by the beauty industry,
the fashion industry, the youth industry,
the diet industry, and the fitness
industry. (Jones, p. 130)
Capitalism as the Root Cause
Foucault posits that capitalism and the
organized, mechanistic market system
requires healthy workers, with healthy, fit
bodies in order to maximize production.
It thus becomes no wonder that our culture
focuses on the materialistic here and now, as
opposed to other belief systems that
preferred a more spiritualistic approach to
meaning.
The History of Sexuality
In the 18
th
and 19
th
centuries, sexuality became
an object of scientific knowledge and social
concern
Repressive Hypothesis Victorian-era controls
sought to repress human sexuality and desire.
Foucault argued against the repressive
hypothesis.
Repression was actually an incitement to sex
More focus on sex, more discussion
Tightening of laws sexual perversion
Sex seen as secretive, suspicious obsession
Establishment of powerful categories of
normal/abnormal
Power is productive.
Female Sexuality As Property
This can be seen in pre-modern societies
which lack the infrastructure of our modern
times: individuals have to rely on the family or
kin-group for basic life necessities.
As a result, the female ability to give birth
became a central issue, as did marriage.
Without marriage, the male can produce no
legitimate heirs to inherit his wealth when he
dies, and so the kin-group dies with him.
Female Body Regulation
As a result, the womans body belongs not to
herself but to her kin-group: biology and
reproduction are linked very closely to
property production, management, and
distribution (Jones, p. 133) of wealth.
Group survival depends on the birth of heirs
to inherit group wealth and pass it on to
subsequent generations.
Sexuality as Productive Power:
The Purity Ball
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_KL92oB
WcQ

FGM
By mutilating the female reproductive organs
in this manner, a womans sexuality is
seriously curbed or eliminated, ensuring her
virginity.
This affects property ownership since now any
husband can be assured that his heirs are
indeed his own, and so the kin-groups
wealth is protected for the next generation.
Modern Body Regulation
Female Body Regulation continues in modern
society as moral sanctions regarding sexuality:
Promiscuity (having non-monogamous
relationships), bearing children outside of
marriage, and same-sex partnerships have all
been eschewed by mainstream Western
religious traditions
Notice how each of these different lifestyles
threatens the transmission of property.
Discourse & Language
Clues to Discourse Theory in action can be
reduced to the very words chosen to describe
reality, and how they are used.
For instance, recently men have begun to be
described as promiscuous in the manner
women have been described for generations,
although the idea of the non-sexual
frigid/prudish man still awaits.
Discourse & Language, cont.
The sexual power structure can be seen to be
in a state of change (Bergers 3-Part Process)
most clearly, however, in the homosexual
community:
What were once derogatory terms regarding
same-sex relationships have given way to
common, accepted terms such as gay or
lesbian, showing a new respect not evident
in years past.
Foucault, History of Sexuality:
A singularly confessing
society
Justice
Medicine, psychiatry
Education
Family relationships
Love relations
The Confessional Box
The Roman Catholic tradition of Confession:
Typically the penitent begins the confession by saying,
"Bless me Father, for I have sinned. It has been [time
period] since my last confession." The penitent then must
confess mortal sins in order to restore his/her connection
to God's grace and not to merit Hell.
The Confession as Double
Subjection
Subject
As person under the rule of
authority
Subject (Subjectivity)
As person with a narrative,
identity who testifies, brings their
own Actions, Thoughts, Desires,
Experiences to light
The Confession in Therapy
* Psychiatrist patient
creates a power
dynamic (subject of
power)

* Discourse of normal-
abnormal established
(Subjectivity through
discourse)

* Productive power
Characteristics of Power-as-Productive
A new theory of power: Power is not restricted to
political or economic elites, nor is it narrowly
defined by repression.
Power is productive, focused on the power to
administer and regulate life, rather than bring
death
Not a fixed property held by certain groups
Decentralized, diffuse
Fluid and present in all interactions
Where power is exercised, resistance develops.
From Truth and Power Understanding
Foucaults notion of power
Power/knowledge
Power not institutions themselves, but institutions can
carry the mechanisms of power to accomplish discipline
Not a mode of subjugation
Power is the structure of force relations in a society, tied to
cultural modes of understanding discourse

Rules of power/knowledge
Power decentralized: from below as much as above
Power marks areas of life as objects of inquiry
Power implies a limit on the freedom of ways of being
Power is always tied to transformation implies
contention and sites of resistance

Comparing Views of Power
Power as sheer force
Based on physical, economic, or political power
Repressive rule through violent or non-violent coercion
Marx: capitalist domination
Foucaults sovereign power kings right to order death

Power as legitimate force
Rule through gained consent, common interest
Webers version of bureaucratic domination, legitimate
authority
Durkheim: Shared beliefs and values reinforce social order

Power as knowledge and discourse
Consciousness shaped by dominant discourse
Foucaults disciplinary society, biopower, knowledge-power
Foucaults analysis of power
Sovereign power
Disciplinary power
Biopower
The Two Poles of Knowledge-Power (193)
In your groups, define each phase of power with evidence
from the readings. Give an example of each kind of power at
work.

Why does Foucault see sexuality as such an important case
within the growth of knowledge-power?
Foucaults Great Transformation
One might say that the ancient right to take life or
let live was replaced by a power to foster life or
disallow it to the point of death The setting up,
in the course of the classical age, of this great
bipolar technology anatomic and biological,
individualizing and specifying, directed toward
the performances of the body characterized a
power whose highest function was perhaps no
longer to kill, but to invest life through and
through (193-94).
More Group Work Answer these
Questions!
1. Is Foucaults theory of power linear (ie, does it
move from one phase to the next) or should we
think about it as messier, more complex?
2. Put Foucault into dialogue with Marx Is
Foucaults theory of power compatible with
Marxist logic? [Hint, pg. 194]
3. Explain the symbolic distinction Foucault
makes between sex and blood (198).
4. Explain the difference between discourse and
ideology (202-203).