Born:15-Oct-1926
Birthplace: Poitiers, France
Died: 26-Jun-1984
Location of Death: Paris, France
Cause of Death: Aids
 Disciple and punishment 1975
 The history of sexuality 1976
 The order of things 1966
 Madness and civilization 1964
 The archaeology of knowledge 1969
 Power is the major theme of the book as Foucault calls
his study a micro-physics of power. He is looking at
how power operates in our society. The prison, court,
school, hospital are all just the technical implements
for the exercise of power.
He states: For the definition of power, I do not have in
mind a general system of domination exerted by one
group over another (class oppression), a system whose
effects, through successive derivations, pervades the
entire social body.
The analysis made in terms of power, must not assume
that the sovereignty of the astute, the form of the law,
or the overall unity of domination are not fundamental
forms, rather these are the terminal forms or shapes
that power takes.
So each of these forms of power (sovereignty, law,
domination) may in fact be present in certain contexts
as terminal forms, but none are fundamental. And
Foucault's first task in understanding power is
therefore to develop a new method – based on a richer
theory – that begins with the basic molecules of power
relations and then builds to more complex forms.
 These ideologies (sovereignty, law,..) have functioned
by which most of the actual meaning of power is
obscured.
 Panopticon: “seeing all”, or the idea of control over
people and their actions by very few people.
‫کنترل اکثریت به وسیله اقلیت‬
 Birth of Panopticon: some people say it has a
utilitarian purpose ‫سودمند بودن برای پیشبرد اهداف جامعه‬
 The Panopticon is a type of institutional building
designed by the English philosopher and social
theorist Jeremy Bentham in the late 18th century.
The concept of the design is to allow a single
watchman to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) inmates
of an institution without them being able to tell
whether they are being watched or not. Although it
is physically impossible for the single watchman to
observe all cells at once, the fact that the inmates
cannot know when they are being watched means
that all inmates must act as though they are
watched at all times, effectively controlling their
own behavior constantly.
 The name is also a reference to Argus Panoptes from
Greek mythology; he was a giant creature with a
hundred eyes and thus was known to be a very
effective watchman.
‫‪ ‬فوکو مفهوم پانوپتیکون (نظارت فراگیر) را از ایده های جرمی بنتام درباره‬
‫طراحی زندان ها‪ ،‬بیمارستان ها و تیمارستان ها گرفت و برای توضیح تعیین‬
‫کنندگی بستر و ساختار از آن بهره برد‪ .‬پانوپتیکون به طراحی معمارانه ای‬
‫اشاره دارد که بنتام در آنجا نگهبانان را در مرکز (معموال در تاریکی) زندان‬
‫قرار می دهد و فوکو از این طرح به عنوان استعاره ای برای زندگی مدرن‬
‫بهره برده است‪ .‬استعاره ای حاکی از آنکه نظارت به ساختار پانیپتوکونی بدون‬
‫کشیدن دیوار‪ ،‬امکان وجود می دهد‪ .‬امروزه همه مردم به لطف فناوری های‬
‫الکترونیکی با بهره گیری از ترکیب انگاره های اجتماعی و هنری در معرض‬
‫تماشا هستند و اما با نظارت کنندگان و سایر نظارت شوندگان در ارتباط‬
‫نیستند‪ .‬گیدنز نیز زمانی که ویژگی جامعه مدرن را سازمان و مراقبت ذکر‬
‫کرد‪ ،‬از این مثال متاثر بوده است‪ .‬امروز‪ ،‬اندیشه افکار عمومی دنیا برگرفته‬
‫از اسطوره ها و استعاره ها و نمادها (سمبل) و انگاره (ایماژ) های رسانه ای‬
‫و عموما مونتاژ شده است و دستکاری افکار عمومی از رهگذر شناخت انگیزه‬
‫های درونی آنها و به صورت پروژه ای انجام می پذیرد‪.‬‬
 In this form of power domination, the ideal city is
where peace and love are sovereign. Everybody likes to
try to put everything in order to guarantee their own
peace and love., esp. those in power. They rule, they are
selfish. The whole city is made up of multiple circles
controlled by three commanders:
 Power: surveillance
 Knowledge: control everything based on information, it
controls arts, science, schools ‫کارت شناسایی‬, you are
constantly controlled
 Love: Limits people’s productions of thought, creates
selfishness
 Bentham says this is a new mode of obtaining power of
mind over mind.
 Panopticon: It aimed to be a tool for distributing
individuals in space, for ordering them in a visible way.
He is seen, but does not see. He is the object of
information.
 Foucault however points to an additional rationality
built into the project of panopticon. It offered a logic
of efficiency but also of normalization.
 By normalization Foucault means a system of finely
gradated and measurable intervals in which
individuals can be distributed around a norm – a norm
which both organizes and is the result of this
controlled distribution.
 Normalization needs the following elements:
 A - a new legitimized rationality
 B - a new social epistemology
They lead to new transformation known as new
normative laws
 A system of normalization is opposed to be a system
of law or a system of personal power. There are no
fixed pivot points from which to make judgments, to
impose will. Normative, serialized (to use the Sartrean
term) order is an essential component of the regime of
the bio-power, for a power whose task is to take charge
of life needs continuous regulatory and corrective
mechanisms.
 Why are these powers important?
 What is important about these concepts? Why do we
care?
 How can they help us to understand the world around
us?
 Does power repress?
 Does power manage to repress our needs, desires,
resistance…?
 Michel Foucault believes that power doesn’t not
repress so much as it incites.
 So what is the advantage of carrying such a false power,
which does not lead to repression?
 In regard to power in one main way it is called Right to




Death or Juridical Power
It is an unfair excuse of power
Judricial Power is exercised by monarchs
Enlightenment theorists like john lock, Thomas
Hobbes, and Rousseau inherit this idea from monarch
They believe that monarchs use the power
illegitimately
 The sovereign exercised his right of life only by
exercising his right to kill, or by refraining from killing;
he evidenced his power over life only through the
death he was capable of requiring. The right which was
formulated as the “power of life and death” was in
reality the right to kill or let live. Its symbol, after all,
was sword.
 Prohibitions
 Punishment
Foucault comments:
This juridical form must be referred to a historical type of
society in which power was exercised mainly as a means of
deduction, a subtraction mechanism, a right to appropriate
a portion of the wealth, a tax of products, goods and
services, labor and blood, levied on the subjects. Power in
this instance was essentially a right of seizure; of things,
time, bodies, and ultimately life itself. It culminated in the
privilege to seize hold of life in order to suppress it.
 Therefore judricial power is a power that prevents you
from doing something.
 The law of speed control: if you cross the speed limit,
you will be fined. Here we see prohibition and
punishment in a form of subtraction.
 Hence, this model of subtraction encourages us to
think that power is exercised over us as a loss on our
parts; the exercise of power takes away something
from us. So it prohibits and then punishes.
 The agent of this prohibition and punishment is
official institution.
 Laws
 Government
 Police
 Legislative branch
This is usually what we think of political or
governmental organization. So juridical power is
housed and used by the official institutions – the
power owned by these institutions is exercised on
individuals.
 In juridical power, power is quantifiable, tangible: you
have it or you don’t. if you exercise it by
subtraction(taking away s.th from you), then you must
be able to measure the subtraction.
 When something is taken away from you, so it is
tangible, which means you have it but you don’t have it
right now, and you don’t know how much you had or
that you don’t have that part right now.
 We think of power in terms of more or less, like I had
power and now I don’t have, or my gaining of power
maybe somebody else’s loss of power- it is a zero-sum
game; my gain is your loss.
 Means: prohibition (subtract possibility of action) and
punishment ( subtract a fee for transgression --imprisonment or capital punishment)
 Location: official institutions
 Individuals as both subjects and objects of power: they
exercise power and power is exercised upon them
 It is juridical because it is modeled upon law, upon
prohibition: “it is a power [more precisely a
representation of power] whose model is essentially
juridical, centered on nothing more than the
statement of the law and the operation of taboos.
 But as Foucault makes clear, the actual operation of
power cannot be reduced to one model – the law, the
state, the domination – but instead functions in a
variety of forms and with varying means and
techniques.
 Second, according to this view, power is discursive (can
be found in various forms), its prohibitions are tied
together with what one can say as much as what one
can do; in this way restrictions on language should also
function as restrictions upon reality and actions. This
is the heart of the logic of censorship.
 While this view emphasizes discourse as a primary
arena in which power’s effects manifest, Foucault
notes that discourses are related to power in much
more complicated ways than this view could suggest:
“discourses are not once and for all subservient to
power or raised up against it … discourse can both be
an instrument and an effect of power, but also a
hindrance, a stumbling-block, a point of resistance,
and an starting point for an strategy;”
 According to this Juridio-discursive theory, power has
five principal characteristics:
 First, power always operates negatively: that is by
means of prohibition.
 Second, power always takes the form of a rule or law.
This entails a binary system of permitted and
forbidden, legal and illegal.
 These two characteristics together constitute the third:
 3.power operates through a cycle of prohibition, a law
of interdiction (exclusion).
 4. Hence, this power manifests in three forms of
prohibition: A)affirming that such a thing is not
permitted, B) preventing it from being said C)denying
that it exits – which reveal a logic of censorship
 Fifth and finally, the apparatus of this power is
universal and uniform in its mode of operation: From
top to bottom, in its overall decisions and its capillary
interventions alike whatever the devices or institutions
it relies, it acts in a uniform and comprehensive
manner, it operates in a simple and endlessly
reproduced mechanism of law, taboo, and censorship.
 It is this image that we must break free of, that is of the
theoretical privilege of law and sovereignty, if we wish
to analyze power within the concrete and historical
framework of its operation. We must construct an
analytics of power that no longer takes law as a model
and a code.
 It must be understood as: 1) the multiplicity of the
forced relations immanent (present everywhere) in the
sphere (the area) in which they operate and constitute
their own organization;
 2) the process which through ceaseless struggles and
confrontations, transforms, strengthens, or reverses
them (force relations)
 3)the support which these force relations find in one
another, thus forming a chain or a system, or on the
contrary the disjunctions, differences and
contradictions which isolate them from one another.
 The strategies in which they take effect whose general
design or institutional crystallization is embodied
(included) in the state apparatus, in the formulation of
the law, in the various social hegemonies (controlling
system).
 Synopticon: the control of minority by majority. This
concept was introduced in 1987 by Thomas Matheisen
(like a president who is constantly under close watch
by a country)
 Monopticon: the control of individual by individual
and individual by himself
 In the “subject and Power” Foucault states his aim: “he
wanted to study the how of power” not how does it
manifest itself, but “by what means is it exercised?”
 Power in a given society is “unspoken warfare”. It is a
silent, secret civil war that reinscribes conflict in
various social institutions in economic inequalities, in
language, in every one of us
 The self is seen chiefly as a tool of power ; selfhood
was normalized subjectivity; the self remains a prey to
power
 Foucault developed the concept of power as “able to
take the form of subjectification, “I” the self as a tool of
power, a product of domination, rather than as a tool
of personal freedom. This became Foucault's main
theme.
 His aim has not been to analyze the phenomenon of
power nor to elaborate the foundation of such an
analysis; it’s been to create a history of different modes
by which in our culture, human beings are made
subjects.
 1. dividing practices: the most famous is “isolation of
lepers” during the middle ages. The confinement of
the poor, the insane and the vagabond; e.g. the rise of
modern psychiatry and its entry into hospitals and
prisons in the 19th century and finally the
mediclization, stigmatization. Society decides the
social abnormalities
 In different fashions the subject is objectified by a
process of division either within himself or from
others. In this way human beings are given both a
social and personal identity. Those ‘dividing practices”
are modes of manipulation that combine the
mediation of science or pseudo-science
 2. Scientific classification
Those modes of inquiry that give themselves the status
of science
 3. Subjectification
The way a human being turns him or herself into a
subject. e.g. Foucault says it is a self-formation in
which the person is active. Not power, but the subject
has been the main theme of Foucault’s research
 Foucault is primarily concerned with isolating those
techniques through which the person initiates an
active self-formation. This self-formation has a long
and complicated genealogy; it takes place through a
variety of “operations on [people’s] own bodies, on
their own souls, on their own thoughts, on their own
conducts”.
 These operations characteristically entail a process of
self-understanding but one which is mediated by an
external authority figure, be he confessor (priest) or
psychoanalyst. Foucault encourages us to reflect
critically upon why it is that we desire someone else to
tell us what to think and what to do , why we must
believe that we have absolute and universal norms that
dictate our thoughts and actions as well as the effects
upon the effects of that desire (1982:8). “The subject and
Power” in Michel Foucault beyond structuralism and
hermeneutics
 “What is good”? Foucault tells us that comes through
innovation. The good does not exist… in an atemporal
sky, with people who be like the astrologers of the
Good, whose job is to determine what is the favorable
nature of the stars. The good is invented by us, it is
practiced, it is invented. And this is a collaborative,
joint work.
 Foucault states: “each new work profoundly changes
the terms of thinking which I had reached with
previous work. In this sense I consider myself more of
an experimenter than a theorist; I don’t develop
deductive systems to apply uniformly in different felids
of research. When I write I do it above all to change
myself and not to think the same thing before. (1991,
27) “how an ‘experience book’ is born”. In Remarks on
Marx
 During most of the 1960s, Foucault sought in a variety
of ways, to analyze and isolate the structures of the
human sciences treated as discursive systems. It is
important to stress that Foucault did not see himself as
a practitioner of these human sciences. They were his
objects of study.
 It exercises power over life beyond the juridical. It is
the reform of the soul, rather than the
punishment of the body. It talks about norms like
body size, gender presentation, and Statistics like IQ
rates, mortality rates…
 The power over life wants us to have a better life and
more life through micromanaging it. You try to
manage your life by micromanaging its details.
 Bio-power contains two disciplines that are like two
poles that move forward side by side in a
cmp0lemenary mode. The first one as Foucault says is:
an anatomo-politics of the human body.
 The second, formed somewhat later, focused on the
species body, the body imbued with the mechanics of
life and serving as the basis of the biological processes,
propagation, birth, and mortality, the level of health,
life expectancy, and longevity, with all the conditions
that can cause these to vary.
 The power over life channels through unofficial
channels, like opinion or social norms. It functions
through production not deduction. It enforces itself
through positive and negative reinforcement. It can be
direct or indirect reinforcement.
 Upbringing of children can be along the positive and
negative reinforcements.
 Kinds of dressing in a private party.
 Bio-power has two poles; discipline and governmentality.
Discipline operates on particular individuals in a particular
space. It collects information about an individual and acts
according to that information. In the Classical Age it occurs
in schools and workshops. In the Modem Age it spreads to
families and hospitals and begins to be exercised by
marginal religious groups, psychiatrists, psychologists, and
social workers. Governmentality, on the other hand,
operates on particular groups of individuals. It receives
information through statistical analyses, financial reports
and population registers. Its techniques of power are
directed to making adjustments in the population and
their economic condition. Legislation is one technique
which is used to make these adjustments. It works
alongside the other governmental devices which, in the
eighteenth century, were collected under the name of the
police.
 There are some parts of the society that are
appropriate for law to regulate and some parts for the
opinion to regulate. By opinion it means the accepted
social norms, which are accepted through regular
repetition by the individuals.
 Mill says opinion can regulate individuals’ social
relationships. He believes that people cannot remain
indifferent to one another. He believes: “it would be a
great misunderstanding of this doctrine to suppose
that it is one of selfish indifference, which pretends
that human beings have no business with each other’s
conduct in life and they should not concern
themselves about the well-doing or well-being of one
another unless their own interest is involved.
 Mill says there are things which do not necessarily
affect other people, but do effect that individual, for
instance one’s body size, one’s gender presentation, do
not necessarily affect other people, but do affect that
individual. If there is a distrustful opinion that law
cannot regulate it like your body size, gender
presentation, which do not negatively impact anyone
in a sense that law can regulate they certainly effect the
society. Hence in such a situation opinion can regulate
them. (social power)
 There are lots of acts which are important for social
organizations that are not codified in the law but
defiantly need to be regulated in order to have a
stabilized society.
 Society is interested in regulating it, but according to
liberal-political theory, it is unjust for law to regulate
it. So here opinion takes action.
 Another consequence of the development of this biopower was the growing importance assumed by the
action of the norm at the expense of the juridical
system of the law. Law cannot help but be armed and
its norm, par excellence is death, to those who
transgress it ,it replies with absolute menace. The law
always refers to the sword. But power whose task is to
take charge of life needs continuous regulatory and
corrective mechanisms.
 It is no longer a matter of bringing death into play in
the field of sovereignty, but of distributing the living in
the domain of value and utility. Such a power has to
qualify, measure, evaluate, and hierarchize, rather
than display itself in its murderous splendor. It does
not have to draw the line that separates the enemies of
the sovereign from his obedient subjects. It effects
distributions around the norm.
 Foucault further says that I don’t mean that the law
fades into the background or that the institutions of
justice tend to disappear, but rather the law operates
more and more as a norm and that the juridical
institution sis increasingly incorporated into a
continuum of apparatuses (medical administrative and
so on) whose functions are for the most part
regulatory. A normalizing society is the historical
outcome of the technology of power centered on life.
We have entered a phase of juridical regressing in
comparison with pre-seventeenth century societies we
are acquainted with.
 Foucault gives the following remarks on power over life: A
power that exerts a positive influence on life that endeavors
to administer, optimize, and multiply it. Subjecting it to
precise control and comprehensive regulations . We are no
longer waged in the name of the sovereign who must be
defended; they are waged on the behalf of the existence of
everyone; entire population is mobilized for the purpose of
wholesale slaughter in the name of the life necessity;
massacres have become vital. It is as managers of life and
survival, of bodies – and the race that so many regimes
have been able to wage so many wars , causing so many
men to be killed.
 By the time the right of life and death was framed by the
classical theoreticians, it was in a considerably diminished
form. It was no longer considered that this power of the
sovereign over his subjects could be exercised in an
absolute and unconditional way. But in cases where the
sovereign's very existence was in jeopardy; a sort of right of
rejoinder. If he were threatened by external enemies who
sought to overthrow him or contest his rights, he could
then legitimately wage war, and require his subjects to take
part in the defense of the state, without directly proposing
their death. He was empowered to expose their life.
 In this sense, he wielded an indirect power over them
of life and death. But if someone dared to rise up
against him and transgress his laws , then he could
exercise a direct power over the offender’s life. As
punishment the latter would be to death. In this sense,
this power was in fact for the survival of the sovereign.
 Disciplinary power deals with normalization of
individual bodies = birth of normative law. (each
normalization leads to internalizing gaze).
It is a kind of taming body and making it docile. It is
how you make your body work efficiently. You
micromanage it. Some other common examples can be
as follows:
Diet: you either want to appear more normal or feel
more healthy
Beauty Regiment
Learning a New language
 A comparative glance at Bio-power of individual
bodies and species bodies:
 Individual bodies is the discipline in small scale, while
species bodies is the discipline in large scale.
Individual bodies is about social norms . Species
bodies is about statistical average
 Bio-power of individual bodies: it intends to optimize
the individual power as individual bodies does It
makes sure that the population life is most optimized.
It believes that society must be defended
 In terms of surveillance:
A) Individual Bodies: between the literal surveillance of
then gaze
B) Species Bodies: then surveillance is so abstract. The
bell curve is well monitored. It is more metaphorical
kind of surveillance
 Foucault says in the 20th century Racism became
institutionalized as a form of the Bio-political
administration. Race did not remain as a natural
representative of a group or a community, but it
became part of the institutionalized apparatus in the
welfare safe. Race was used as a means of
differentiating between who was invested with life,
whose was optimized, and who was left to die.