Michel Foucault

His Work

 He’s well known for his critiques of various

social institutions, most notably psychiatry,
medicine and the prison system, and also
for his ideas on the history of sexuality.
 Power/knowledge
 Hallmark of contemporary society is melding
(combining) of knowledge and power and its
use for social control
 Means more than simply “knowledge is
power” => by knowing, we control
 In contemporary societies, power is exercised
through discipline rather than repression
 Discipline

 We are produced by this system; we replicate

it; it is not external to us
 “Discipline ‘makes’ individuals; it is the specific
technique of power that regards individuals both
as objects and as instruments of its exercise.”
 Why did you come to class today?

 Why are you taking this class at all?

 Hierarchical observation

 Watching people provides a great way to control

them

 Perfect disciplinary apparatus = single gaze sees

everything constantly
Michel Foucault: Biopower
 Some aspects of Biopower
• The internalization of scientific concepts of
health and normality which are administered
by professional groups on the basis of their
claim to scientific knowledge (biopolitics).
• Linking the human body to organized
knowledge.
• To achieve 'social control' – the link between
the individual and social structures.
 Foucault speaks:

- “Power is everywhere, not because it embraces

everything, but because it comes from
everywhere.”
- Biopower: “numerous and diverse techniques
for achieving the subjugation (to bring under
complete control) of bodies and the control of
populations.”
 More Foucault speaks:
• “institutions of power” [the family, the army, the
schools, medicine/public health, the police, etc]
• Biopower – “an indispensible element in the
development of capitalism.”
• Biopower: “what brought life and its mechanisms
into the realm of explicit calculations and made
knowledge-power an agent of transformation of
human life.”
 The body & modern society
• The body is a target of and is constituted by
power relations focused on it which render it
obedient and docile (easily managed or handled)
• Power relations are not external forces but
internalized self-control
– Power – all embracing – flows like an electrical field
• Medical power that shapes and forms the body is
relational
– Bodies that are shaped react back on medicine
 distinction between power and authority

• power: ability to bring about results

– power may be informal and based on force
– coercive power versus persuasive power

• authority is the socially recognized right to

exert power
• legitimacy - the socially recognized right to
hold, use, and allocate power
 Foucault’s Sociology of Health
Medicine is a manifestation (to make clear or evident to
the eye or the understanding) of an administered
society.

• Centralization of information about citizens is essential

for social planning
• Medicine is a record of cultural, political, social
changes in European society
Foucault & the Demographic Transition
• 18 & 19th cent.
– Infant mortality decreases
– Life expectancy increases
– Economic developments & large scale growth or
urban life
• Cities developed & capitalism matured
• New forms of knowledge about people
developed
• Disciplines of knowledge – knowledge/power
 Knowledge/Power
- More to modern societies than economics.
- The development of bureaucratic surveillance
(continuous observation of a place, person, group, or
ongoing activity in order to gather information) of
the population as dominant feature of modern
societies
- Development of professional groups who:
– Claim to understand human beings (knowledge)
– Prescribe to them how to act (power)
- Medicine is a case study of this process
 Foucault’s History of Medicine
- From bedside medicine
– Patronage and patient driven
– Disease happened to the whole person: holistic orientation
- To the Hospital
- Patient becomes dependent on professional doctor
- Disease a problem of pathology distinct from the individual
- Medical practitioner wants & elicits specific information
- Both patient and doctor displaces by the tests – the examination &
experiment
- Statistical tests of biological normality vs charismatic ability of the
practitioner
 Comparison
• Classical Medicine • Modern Medicine
– Individual person – Universal body
– Body & soul – Materialistic body
– Container of energies – Body as a complex
machinery