Power is Everywhere - Michael Foucault. In the books Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality the expression of the relationship between power and knowledge were examined

He goes onto explain how power relations were exercised. Relationships in society, activities, obedience, goals, and communication all in relation to power. How we ‘value’ one another and our levels of knowledge. He claims that one should look at ’power relations’ as opposed to ‘power’ itself. Power exists only when it is used. When it is exercised by some on others. Violence is also a relation to power. It can control, dominate, it bends, breaks and destroys, when put into use.

Unsurprisingly one of Foucault key concepts set out in his book Discipline and Punish is “Discipline”. For him “”Discipline” may be identified neither with an institution nor with an apparatus; it is a type of power, a modality for its exercise, comprising a whole set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets; it is a “physics” or an ‘anatomy” of power, a technology”. Discipline is one of the ways that Power can be exercised. He looks at its use within the apparatuses like education, military, medical, industrial and within institutions like prisons and asylums.

He refers to it in the context of the ‘disciplinary society’. The formation of the disciplinary society is connected with a number of broad historical processes- economic, juridico-political, and lastly, scientific- of which it forms part.

Setting it a historical context Foucault links the development of the prevailing form of ‘discipline’ arose from the “growth of a capitalist economy” that he argues “gave rise to the specific modality of disciplinary power, whose general formulas, techniques of submitting forces and bodies, in short, “political anatomy, could be operated in the most diverse political regimes, apparatuses and institutions”

Foucault refers to what he calls Panopticism (a term based on a design for a prison produced by Jeremy Bentham in the late eighteenth century. The cells of the prison were grouped around a central viewing tower which Foucault saw as a metaphor for how power and more specifically surveillance works in post modern society and a prime example of the ‘technology of power’).

The Panoptic on was neither operated by the juridico-political structures nor was it entirely independent of it. Compare this with clarity of the Althusserian ideological superstructure and its direct type of relationship with the economic base. In a representative democracy ‘the representative regime makes it possible, directly or indirectly, with or without relays, for the will of all to form the fundamental authority of sovereignty, the disciplines provide, at the base, a guarantee of the submission of forces and bodies.”

In Discipline and Punish, Foucault claims that ’the power of normalisation’ is exercised by our social mechanisms to gain health, knowledge and comfort.

‘We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it “excludes”, it “represses”, it “censors”, it “abstracts”, it “masks”, it “conceals”. In fact, power produces: reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production.’

This normalization is summed up by McNay as a kind of trade of between Government and individual. ‘In Foucault’s words, individuals are supplied with a little extra life while the government is supplied with a little extra strength’.

The fact that individuals were resistant to the process of normalization was also an important part of the overall theory.

“The theory of government…permits Foucault to explain how individuals are always resistant to complete incorporation within the normalizing process of subjectification. The idea of the government of individualization denotes, therefore, both the way in which norms are imposed on forms of individuality and the multiplicity of ways in which individuals exceed such constraints”

The full title of his 1975 work (Translated into English in 1977 ) was, in English, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison.  The book largely concerned itself with the role and mechanisms within modern western societies’ penal systems. For Foucault a Prison was a form of the ‘disciplines’ referred to earlier. It was an institution that alongside military barracks, asylums, schools, hospitals etc. It was a ‘technology of power’.

Foucault identified from history three distinct ways of organizing the power to punish. Firstly, the most violent was Penal Torture. This was a ‘technology of power’ that was used as ‘sovereign power’. As Smart puts it -

“The punishment was extremely spectacular, violent and ritualistic. Penal torture charted a set of techniques for inflicting pain, injury and in some cases, death! Torture also was used as a means of extracting a confession from the criminal during investigation. The relations of power and truth in the form of penal torture were articulated on the body. Many of these punishments were put into force to make an example of. Even the minor of offences would be punished. Also to encourage gathering crowds to take part by insulting and attacking the criminal.”

Foucault begins his seminal work with a gruesome description of the execution of Damiens, the would be assassin of Louis XV. It turned out to be the last of these most appalling styles of execution – drawn and quartered - that was reserved for Regicides.

Secondly, he identified ‘humanitarian reform’ that comes as a reaction to the ineffectiveness of the torture based punishments.

“During the course of the eighteenth century, reformers began to criticise the amount of violence associated with penal torture. Public executions were deemed non-affective in deterring crime so another form of punishment was needed. The reformers desired a more humane and lenient form of punishment. Foucault stated that there was just a different termed tendency towards a more finely tuned justice.” 

Finally there was ‘Penal Incarceration’ the form of punishment that prevailed during the time of his writing.

Turning to Foucault’s studies on the history of sexuality he seeks to set out the evolution of attitude from the Victorian era to the modern day. It is true that in Victorian times, sex and sexuality was hardly spoken of, there was all pervading prudery and the whole subject of sex was taboo. For Foucault a power of repression was behind the Victorian treatment. It was kept contained within the domestic four walls an unspoken phenomenon.

 

This is where concept of ‘pastoral power’ comes in. Foucault believed that throughout the ages we as individuals have changed and evolved in the way we see ourselves and others. Christianity plays a role in this. Pastoral power exercises a major influence over our lives. It defines modern societies and economic relations throughout social life. It consists of a set of ‘techniques, rationalities and practices’ that guide and inform our behaviour. Another concept related to Sexuality was ‘bio-power’ i.e. power over birth, death and reproduction. The emergence, the expansion and consolidation of bio-power was an element in the development of capitalism.

When asked in an interview conducted by Pierre Boncenne, whether Foucault wanted to show that it was more useful for power to admit sex than forbid it? He replied

‘All Western Catholics have been obliged to admit their sexuality, their sins against the flesh and all their sins in this area, committed in thought or indeed, one can hardly say that the discourse on sexuality has been simply prohibited or repressed…  I think that once again we are confronted by a phenomenon of exclusive valorisation of a theme: power must be repressive; since power is bad, it can only be negative, etc. In these circumstances, to speak of one’s sexuality would necessarily be liberation. However, it seemed to me, that it was much more complicated than that’

The idea of repressed sex isn’t therefore, just a theoretical matter. To say that sex is not repressed, or the relations between sex and power isn’t categorised by repression, is a platform for a well-accepted argument.

‘Power lays down the laws by which sex functions and by which its workings are to be interpreted. It operates on the individual subject and his sex through his very acquisition of language; language is the means by which the individual is initiated into society; as he acquires it he encounters the law. The law tells him what he desires by forbidding it. The pure form of power is that of the legislator; its relation to sex is of a juridical-discursive type. Power operates on sex in the same way at all levels.’

Of course Foucault’s concept of power knowledge reminds us of Bacon’s assertion that ‘Knowledge is Power’. Though Foucault distances himself from this association. Power Knowledge is a mechanism that is concerned with the gathering and collation of information about an individual. He argues that there is a relationship between power and knowledge but that they were not the same.

The power of the government etc. A governing body who dictates the state of our lives by only allowing certain housing, funds and living for certain classes. Foucault stresses in many statements that ‘power and knowledge’ go hand in hand. Going over the ‘struggles’ of exercising power, the question is clear that looking at the ‘knowledge’ part of it, would they not have to have the ‘knowledge’ to gain the ‘power?’

Foucault was asked in an interview by Bernard-Henri Levy. ‘Should we now think that power must be viewed as a form of war?’

‘One thing seems certain to me: it is that the moment we have, for analysing the relations of power, only two models a) the one proposed by law (power as law, interdiction and institutions) and b) the military or strategic model in terms of power relations.’   

In an interview with Bernard Henri Levy, Foucault states that he is certain of one thing:

‘For the moment we have, for analyzing the relations of power, only two models: a) the one proposed by law (power as law, interdiction, institutions) and b) the military or strategic model in terms of power relations. The first one has been much used and its inadequacy has, I believe, been demonstrated: we know very well that law does not describe power. The other model is also much discussed, I know. But we stop with words; we use ready-made ideas or metaphors “the war of all against all,” “the struggle for life” or again formal schemata.’

In his claims that power is everywhere, Foucault also claims that spatial relations play an essential role in the exercise of power. In an interview conducted by Paul Rabinow, Foucault was asked how the technology of power opposed to discipline; did space play a central role? ‘Space is a fundamental in any form of communal life; space is fundamental in any exercise of power. To make a parenthical remark, I recall having been invited, in 1966, by a group of architect to do a study of space, of something that I called at that time “heterotopias,” those singular spaces to be found in some given social spaces whose functions are different or even the opposite of others. The architects worked on this, and at the end of the study someone spoke up-a Sartrean psychologist- who firebombed me saying that space is reactionary and capitalist, but history and becoming are revolutionary.’

The question that followed asked if Foucault’s concerns were more on space than architecture, and that the physical walls were only one aspect of the institute. He was then asked to explain the difference between the architecture and space? To which he replied that architecture was an element of space that performed the functions of “allocation” and “canalization”.

On the subject of different forms of government he has stated;

Despite differences of objective from one period to another, the image of power has remained troubled by monarchy. To consider a power is to do so from within a historical form that is peculiar to our own societies. Peculiar, for although many of its forms have survived and will continue to do so, it has been gradually penetrated by quite a new mechanism of power that is probably complex to the representation of law.

Foucault’s concept of power – the critical perspectives

Throughout his book  Discipline and Punish he uses the terminology ’technology of power’ along with other terms i.e. ’micro-physics of power’ and ’mechanisms of power’ etc. However, they all seem to amount to the same meaning. The reproach of Foucault’s concept of power is that of the word ’power’ is quite elusive. The critics want to know, that if power is everywhere, the prospect of democratization is remote. This view leads to doubt.

Jurgen Habermas (1929 - ) highlighted his objections to Foucault’s concept of power when stating:

‘We must not limit our critique of relationships of power to those institutions in which power is overtly declared, hence to political and social power only; we must extend it to those areas of life in which power is hidden behind the amiable countenance of cultural familiarity.’ 

In response to Foucault’s assertion that ‘power is everywhere’ Habermas retorts that, it is in  social classes of various power, mechanisms, power relations, relations of force, are themselves the very basis that underpins society.

Habermas elaborates on his critique thus; “Foucault cannot adequately deal with the persistent problems that come up in connection with an interpretation approach to the object domain, a self-referential denial of universal validity claims, and a normative justification of critique. The categories of meaning, validity and value are …. Eliminated.”

Another of Foucault’s critics was Nicos Poulantzas (1936-1979) the leading Marxist structuralist   he disagreed with the idea put forward in Foucault’s power theory. The Poulantzas/Foucault discourse was later summed up by Barry Smart in 1985. Poulantzas believed that class relations were at the heart of all struggles and that ‘modern forms of power are grounded in the organisation of consent rather than of physical violence in schools, workshops’.

This point of view runs counter to Foucault’s belief “everyone was and always is inside ‘power’ and that there was no escaping it, there was no outside where power was concerned, because individuals were subject to the law itself”

Smart continues, Although Foucault has been credited with revealing ‘the materiality of the techniques for exercising power’, he has been criticised for neglecting the role of law and physical repression in the functioning of the state. For Poulantzas, the foundation of power seems to lie with the repressive state apparatus e.g. the army, police, and judicial system, with the means for exercising violence.

There is another possible criticism that Smart himself suggests and that is that he “may have revealed the materiality of particular modern techniques for exercising power but that he simultaneously underestimated the role of the law and of violence in grounding power”

Another major philosopher who was critical of Foucault’s approach was Noam Chomsky. Chomsky was a linguist based approach. He believed that there was a human nature , “a biophysical structure underlying the mind that enables us both as individuals and as a species, to deduce from the multiplicity of individual experiences a unified language. “ This viewpoint could not of course be accepted by Foucault who rejected this concept of human nature.

It would be remiss for any consideration of Foucault and his work on power not to emphasise the changes his work went through. Perhaps the most dramatic and controversial change of direction (if that is what it was) concerned his travel to and writings on Iran.

He has drawn criticism for unpredictability and contradiction these have included feminists like Simone de Beauvoir who saw the ‘political spirituality’ that Foucault saw in Iran more in terms of repression of women as demonstrated in their compulsory veiling. The treatment of homosexuals by the Islamist government, including executions, in Iran also caused many to renounce Foucault. His apparent support of Israel made an uneasy bedfellow of his attachment to the Iranian Revolution.

In defence of Foucault, should any be needed, he was no fan of the regime of the Islamist clergy that came to power after the Revolution. In May 1979 a statement appeared in Le Monde newspaper in which he stated “The spirituality which had meaning for those who went to their deaths has no common measure with the bloody government of an integrist clergy. The Iranian clerics want to authenticate their regime by using the same significations that the uprising had.”

The Iranian experience did, however, have consequences for his work on Power. At this time in the late 1970’s his attention shifted from the ‘technologies of dominance’ that had underpinned his work up to that point to a new focus on what he called the ‘technologies of the self’ these technologies were the basis for a new form of spirituality and resistance to power.

Conclusion

Throughout his work Foucault has been “highly suspicious of claims to universal truths. He doesn’t refute them: instead, his consistent response is to historicize grand abstractions.” Furthermore “For Foucault there is no external position of certainty, no universal understanding beyond history and society” With this in mind his assertion that ‘power is everywhere’ is perhaps as close as he comes to proclaiming a ‘universal truth’.

Looking at the critical side of Foucault’s concept of ‘power’ and that ‘Power is Everywhere’ there are maybe too many relations of looking at his reason to think that power is in every aspect of our social lives. Whether we look at it from a critical point of view or not, we cannot deny that power is and has been part of our social evolvement. For Foucault the body is the main battleground that has witnessed the discourse on power. He has highlighted the development of physical incarceration in prisons and the ‘surveillance’ of our bodies in medicine.

From way back taking the concept of ‘power and knowledge’, we can begin to see that gaining the right knowledge, with learning, education, teaching, experience, and the right punishment had to change. In today’s society, the prisoners no longer walk with balls and chains around their ankles, no longer have bread and water for their daily meal, the system has evolved and changed so now the prisoners have activities, luxuries, privileges, etc for good behaviour. So having the right punishment system has changed the way the prisoners behave, thus giving a good example of gaining the knowledge and using the power accordingly.

This proffered theory, is and always will be questioned by many philosophers, critiques etc. Having studied the concept of power through Michele Foucault’s eyes I can accept the value of his approach. The power which is used in the government, prisons, mental institutes, and law itself has changed society to what it is today. Rules, punishment etc have enforced an organised order within society.

Foucault believed that power was omnipresent existed everywhere and comes from everywhere, he saw it as the key concept that should be used to explain people’s behaviour. Power, he argued, shapes our behaviour and even who we are in a subtle almost secret way. In a decisive and deliberate break with Marxist thought he made it clear that he did not see power as being necessarily malign, used to repress, exclude or censor. For him power was something that generated knowledge and created reality.

If power is everywhere how can we step out from its searchlight in order to analyse it from the ‘outside’. Foucault never claimed to have achieved this in fact he stated in the History of Sexuality that “There is no binary and all encompassing opposition between rulers and ruled at the root of power relations, and serving as a general matrix”

In ‘post modern’ western society it is clear that we cannot simply assert that power is a repressive one way concept used by the ruling class to control the population and maintain order. Foucault offers us an alternative strategy that can be usefully applied to a wide range of areas from sexuality, criminology, mass media and theology to name just a few they enable us to gain valuable new insight into modern society. If we revisit Foucault in the light of developments since his death almost a quarter of a century ago we can certainly find a degree of resonance.

With regard to the theoretical frameworks advocated by Foucault it can be concluded that they can certainly be used to contribute to but probably not to solve a range of the issues and dilemmas of postmodern political thought and politics itself.

Foucault’s power has been released from any rigid structure and fragmented into a series of strategies and mechanisms.

While some of his contemporaries were happy to follow the logic of their theories and research to the point of drawing conclusions and making recommendations in terms of how society should best be organised Foucault admitted ‘to not being able to define, nor for even stronger reasons to propose, an ideal social model for the functioning of our scientific or technological society’.

Add to this his statement during the same debate that ‘I've never concerned myself, in any case, with philosophy. But that is not a problem’. All points to support the argument that Foucault was to fluid in his work, in some ways too difficult to ‘pin-down’.

Throughout Foucault’s body of work he identifies and examines a range of power regimes arriving finally at bio-power.

We are always hearing about the ‘power of advertising’ or the ‘power of the media’ and these are two areas where Foucault approach could be applied and another phrase the ‘surveillence society’ with its cctv’s acting like a panoply of panopticons, and bio-metric passports as possibly an example of bio-power.

Power does appear to be everywhere and is exercised in a whole range of situations and relations that do appear to go beyond a simple class based struggle.

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