By Laura

Critique Foucault, Critical Essay Foucault, Explaining Foucault From Postmodernism Rousseau Skepticism Socialism, Foucault Cultural, Foucault Anthropology

Michel Foucault is known for his critique of enlightenment ideals. The production of knowledge in discourses of science, reason and rationalism was thought to bring about more human freedom. Foucault critiques this enlightenment discourse and instead shows how knowledge is inextricably linked to power and the enlightenment emphasis on science and reason has brought forth new and invisible forms of control. In, “Two Lectures”, “What is Enlightenment” as well as his three books, Discipline and Punish, The History of Sexuality, and The Birth of the Clinic, Foucault describes power; its mechanism, modality, where it is situated, disseminated, and the way it is exercised both visibly and invisibly. He describes his view of power, “What I mean is this: in a society such as ours, but basically in any society, there are manifold relations of power which permeate, characterize, and constitute the social body, and these relations of power cannot themselves be established, consolidated, nor implemented without the production, accumulation, circulation, and functioning of a discourse” (Foucault 1994: 211). He attempts to look beyond structures and enlightenment discourse to see the power that exists invisibly behind it. Foucault emphasizes the duality of power and knowledge. Knowledge gives power and power disseminates knowledge. Power is not just exercised; the invisible aspect of power comes with knowledge. He uses examples of the changing views of punishment, sexuality and medicine to describe the less evident “manifold relations of power” that have been created by the post enlightenment era.

In Discipline and Punish Foucault describes the development of the knowledge of prisons and their relationship to power. He explains how punishment used to be about inflicting pain on the body. This was a rather obvious form of control; the prisoners knew that power was being exercised over them in the form of physical punishment. After the French revolution the development of prisons became not a place to inflict pain on the body (although it is important to note that violence is still necessarily afflicted on the body because it is imprisoned and not in a state of freedom), instead it was about the regimentation of the prisoners time. The new prison system used regimentation in order to create docile bodies with the intent of transforming and rehabilitating these docile bodies. The intent of transforming the prisoners was surrounded in a discourse of truth. The prisoners would be rehabilitated if they followed the regimentation. This type of power, the invisible power to create self governing yet controlled, “docile bodies” is one type of power that “is susceptible of producing discourses of truth that in a society such as ours are endowed with… potent effects” (Foucault 1976: 210).

In The History of Sexuality, we see how truth discourses surrounding sexuality give rise to forms of invisible power. Foucault explains how repression indicates a place to analyze mechanisms of power, “We have in the first place the assertion that power is neither given, nor exchanged, nor recovered, but rather exercised, and that it only exists in action….if power is exercised, what sort of exercise does it involve? In what does it consist? What is its mechanism?...power is essentially that which represses…So should not the analysis of power be first and foremost an analysis of the mechanisms of repression?” (Foucault 1994: 208). When Foucault traced the genealogy of sexuality in the west he found a long history of fixation or “repression” of sexuality. The social convention, of not discussing sexuality, has created a discourse around it. This would not have been the case, had it been thought of as something quite natural. The concept "sexuality" itself is a result of this discourse. The prohibitions surrounding this concept also have constructive power: they have created sexual identities and a multiplicity of sexualities that would not have existed otherwise. The powerful discourses surrounding sexuality certainly caused the following to be true for Foucault and many others, “In the end, we are judged, condemned, classified, determined in our undertakings, destined to a certain mode of living or dying, as a function of the true discourses which are the bearers of the specific effects of power” (Foucault 1976: 211).

The birth of the “clinical gaze” after the French revolution is another example of power and repression described by Foucault and is depicted in the invisible paradigm of science. Before the French revolution disease was social, there was a situating of the individual in the society, social milieu was important. The goal was to get rid of distress and restore well-being. The birth of the “clinical gaze” along with the clinic itself occurred after the French revolution. The diseased body itself became the central point of the clinical gaze. The doctor has the power to “see” the symptoms of illness. The mechanism creating the power relationship has changed and we see a momentous shift in medicine. Now the doctor has the knowledge to transform the invisible and “see” it into fact. The docile bodies go and hear “truth” from the physician who has the ability to transform symptoms into a visual reality. The common sense notion of "health" was uprooted with the aim of mending the patient to a condition of "normalcy". The discipline of medicine began to change into a science. This change brings medicine into a place that associates it with other political and social institutions. Foucault puts the body in the foreground as the area which medicine and other disciplines act as the locus of discourses of regulation and control. Foucault is not arguing ‘against’ medicine or professional practice, but rather he seeks to problematise the taken-for-granted categories or reality within which they operate and deploy power/knowledge. Foucault further explains, “We are concerned, rather with the insurrection of knowledges [sic] that are opposed primarily not to the contents, methods, or concepts of a science, but to the effects of the centralizing powers which are linked to the institution and functioning of an organized scientific discourse within a society such as ours” (Foucault 1976: 204).

It is worth comparing Foucault’s view of power to anthropologist Eric Wolf’s view in “Facing Power-Old Insights, New Questions”. Foucault was not an anthropologist; Wolf adds an anthropological slant to the view of power. Wolf specifically relates these concepts of power to current issues in anthropology. He creates four power types:

1. Situational or Nietzschean –power as the attribute of the person

2. Interaction or Transaction-ability of ego to impose its will on another
3. Tactical or Organizational-power that controls a setting
4. Structural- both operates within settings or domains but also organizes and orchestrates the settings themselves

The fourth type, structural power, is the type of power that Foucault describes. Wolf explains the importance of structural power in anthropology, “The notion of structural power is useful precisely because it allows us to delineate how the forces of the world impinge upon the people we study, without falling back into an anthropological nativism [sic] that postulates supposedly isolated societies and uncontaminated cultures” (Wolf 1990: 223). Wolf goes on to explain how the interaction of the different types of power adds depth to anthropological study.

I have spoken of different modes of structural power, which work through key relations of governance. Each such mode would appear to require characteristic ways of conceptualizing and catergorizing people…When one mode enters into conflict with another, it also challenges the fundamental categories that empower its dynamics. Power will then be invoked to assault rival categorical claims. Power is thus never external to signification—it inhabits meaning and is its champion in stabilization and defense. We owe to social anthropology the insight that the arrangements of a society become most visible when they are challenged by crisis. The role of power also becomes most evident in instances where major organizational transformations put signification under challenge (Wolf 1990: 230).

Wolf takes Foucault’s idea of structural power along with other specific views of power and describes how the interaction of these different types of power is realized in contemporary societies. “The development of the Merina state in Madagascar gives us another example. As the state became increasingly powerful, centralized around an intensified agriculture and ever more elaborate social hierarchy, the royal center also emerged as the hub of the ideational system. Local rites…were increasingly synchronized and fused with rituals of the state” (Wolf 1990: 231).

Foucault describes power that “not only operates within settings or domains but that also organizes and orchestrates the settings themselves, and that specifies the distribution and direction of energy flows” (Wolf 1990: 223), he is interested in power that governs consciousness. He uses examples of prisons, sexuality and medicine to demonstrate this type of power. Eric Wolf uses a paradigm of four different types of power (of which one is Foucault’s power type) and explains how the interaction of these different types of power explains societal transformations. A better understanding of Foucault’s view of power and other types of power helps anthropologists better understand invisible forms of control that act on societies.