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Post Structuralism: Foucault, power, surveillance

Dr Jordan McKenzie

SOC207: Lecture 6

What is Structuralism?

• THE SOCIAL SYSTEM – Talcott Parsons (1951)

• With this work, Parsons moves away from social action to view society as a ‘system’ comprising:
• personality system (motivations and needs);
• cultural system (values and beliefs);
• social system (roles and norms).

• Social integration requires bringing these systems into alignment – e.g. individual need (for resources and rewards) must be met, but individuals must also be supplied with the right motivations and values (through socialization) to perform their roles.

Parsons: Functional Prerequisites Of All Societies And Social Systems (AGIP Model)

• Adaptation (use of resources, relation to external environment)
• Goal attainment (directed towards a collective goal)
• Integration (coordination of parts/subsystems)
• Pattern maintenance (which he also called latency) – society’s symbolic order

Foucault as a Poststructuralist

• For Foucault, societies are not logical or rational, they do not abide by rules or consistent phenomena

• Society can be unpredictable
• Lack of cause and effect

• can not assume that there are universal truths about societies or cultures.
• Cultures do not evolve like ecosystems.
• what should we study?

• Discourse, power, genealogies, taboo, oppression.

Foucault’s Method: the Chomsky debate

• Foucault is concerned with the meaning and use of terms to imply answers within social discourse.

• Power is not simply a matter of control over action, but also over ideas. Further, it determines who gets to decide whether a claim is legitimate or not, what words mean and how they can have ‘loaded meanings’.

• Rather than answering ‘What is human nature?’ Foucault asks ‘is there human nature’? And then ‘How has the concept of human nature functioned in our society?’
• See Rabinow (1984) The Foucault Reader and footage of the debate on Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wfNl2L0Gf8

Foucault (1982: 779)

‘Shall we investigate this kind of rationalism which seems to be specific to our modern culture and which originates in Aufkldrung [Enlightenment]? I think that was the approach of some of the members of the Frankfurt School. My purpose, however, is not to start a discussion of their works, although they are most important and valuable. Rather, I would suggest another way of investigating the links between rationalization and power’

Foucault (1982: 780)

“Rather than analyzing power from the point of view of its internal rationality, it consists of analyzing power relations through the antagonism of strategies.

For example, to find out what our society means by sanity, perhaps we should investigate what is happening in the field of insanity.

And what we mean by legality in the field of illegality. And, in order to understand what power relations are about, perhaps we should investigate the forms of resistance and attempts made to dissociate these relations.”

Foucault on Power

• Power is not a thing or an object.

• is something that happens in all forms of interaction

• Therefore, a study of power as a structural property (i.e. Marx) inevitably fails.
• For Foucault, power is an aspect of every relationship

• is embedded in language, sex, education, religion and health.

The ‘Micro-Physics’ Of Power

‘Power must be analysed as something which circulates, or rather as something that functions in the form of a chain. It is never localized here or there, never in anyone’s hands, never appropriated a commodity or piece of wealth. Power is employed and exercised through a net-like organization. And not only do individuals circulate between its threads; they are always in the position of simultaneously undergoing and exercising this power […]: In other words, individuals are the vehicles of power, not its points of application.‘
(Michel Foucault 1980: 98)

Punishment and the Condemned Body:
Pre-Enlightenment

• Discipline and Punish opens with a vivid account of the torture and execution of Robert-François Damiens, who had attempted to kill Louis XV, on 2nd March 1757. Why?
• Foucault wants to trace the ‘disappearance of punishment as a spectacle’ (Foucault 1977: 8); a process in which punishment will ‘tend to become the most hidden part of the penal process.’ (ibid: 9).
• tend to view this as civilizing – cf. Durkheim’s ‘restorative justice’ with its Enlightenment faith in progress. It is just such a faith that Foucault seeks to relativize or subvert.
• not progress, then what? a different modality of power and control: ‘From being an art of unbearable sensation punishment has become an economy of suspended rights.’ (ibid: 11)

Pre-Modern Vs. Modern Punishment

• ‘For a long time, it has been regarded in an overall quantitative phenomena: less cruelty, less pain, more kindness, more respect, more ‘humanity’. In fact, these changes are accompanied by a displacement in the very object of the punitive operation. Is there diminution of intensity? Perhaps. There is certainly a change in objective.’ (ibid: 16)
• ‘Knowledge of the offence, knowledge of the offender, knowledge of the law: these three conditions made it possible to ground a judgement of truth. But now a quite different question of truth is inscribed in the course of the penal judgement. The question is no longer simply: “Has the act been established and is it punishable?” But also: “What is this act of violence or this murder?”’ (ibid: 19)

Modern Discipline: The Docile Body

• ‘The classical age discovered the body as object and target of power. It is easy enough to find signs of the attention then paid to the body – to the body that is manipulated, shaped, trained, which obeys, responds, becomes skilful and increases its forces.’ (Foucault 1977: 136)
• The body and bodily becomes not merely the object of discipline but also of new form of knowledge, of technique (think of the two meaning of the word ‘discipline’).
• The body is a liability, a site of punishment and control

The Panopticon 

From Body To Soul:
Training, Self-Discipline And Care Of The Self

• The Panopticon is also a technique of teaching the internalization of discipline.
• was accompanied by the increasingly scientific understanding of the criminal, insane, etc. mind.
• That knowledge was grounded in a mix of subjectification, division and classification (e.g. into normal/ abnormal; sane/ insane; healthy/ unhealthy, etc.).
• The aim was to ‘normalize’ and ‘responsiblize’ the subject (see Nikolas Rose 1999).

Power As A Technology

• Foucault traces the emergence of modern social scientific disciplines – criminology, scientific management, medical hygiene psychology, sociology – back to the period (late 17th century) when knowledge-based techniques of bodily control were emerging.
• The social sciences emerged alongside, and in close association with, the two central, and intimately linked, institutions of modernity: the state and the market (e.g. as Cameralism and Polizeiwissenschaft):

• ‘These [techniques] were always meticulous, often minute, techniques, but they had their importance: because, they define a certain mode of detailed investment in of the body, a ‘new micro-physics’ of power; and because, since the seventeenth century, they had constantly reached out to ever broader domains, as if they tended to cover the entire social body.’ (Foucault 1977: 139)

While these techniques may have been perfected in institutions (prisons, mental hospitals, workhouses) they can be applied elsewhere: schools, factories, etc.

The Subject and Power

1. is not power but the subject which is the general theme of my research. (1982: 778)
2. sum up, the main objective of these struggles is to attack not so much "such or such" an institution of power, or group, or elite, or class but rather a technique, a form of power.

This form of power applies itself to immediate everyday life which categorizes the individual, marks him by his own individuality, attaches him to his own identity, imposes a law of truth on him which he must recognize and which others have to recognize in him.” (781)

“The conclusion would be that the political, ethical, social, philosophical problem of our days is not to try to liberate the individual from the state and from the state's institutions but to liberate us both from the state and from the type of individualization which is linked to the state. We have to promote new forms of subjectivity through the refusal of this kind of individuality which has been imposed on us for several centuries.” (785)

“In effect, what defines a relationship of power is that it is a mode of action which does not act directly and immediately on others. Instead, it acts upon their actions: an action upon an action, on existing actions or on those which may arise in the present or the future. A relationship of violence acts upon a body or upon things; it forces, it bends, it breaks on the wheel, it destroys, or it closes the door on all possibilities. Its opposite pole can only be passivity, and if it comes up against any resistance, it has no other option but to try to minimize it.” (789)