Foucault’s concepts and arguments on Power, Discipline, knowledge vs. Information, and
Expertise.
Postmodernism:
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Deconstructing our sense of self, culture and existence
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a philosophical movement away from modernist viewpoint
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Much like Einstein, relativity and quantum mechanics that entirely changed what we understood as the physical universe
• the belief that apparent realities are only social constructs
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they are subject to change inherent to time and place
e.g., the role of language, power relations, and motivations
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Attacks the sharp classifications such as male vs. female, straight vs. gay, white vs. black, imperial vs. colonial.
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Realities are plural and relative, and
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Realities change according to the interested parties and their interests.
• Foucault’s archaeology:
• The ‘history of ideas’ usually means the conscious thought of the various thinkers in different periods
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But, for Foucault, the context of their thought is more important as it provides the structural clues to why they thought that way and with what implications.
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What did Darwin say is not as important as what made Darwin possible (Gutting, 2005).
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Instead of vague causes for the emergence of social institutions, Foucault points to the structural roots that underlie social inventions and ideas of the time from which unwittingly a radically new system of social control arises:
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Prison system: Invention of a new kind of rifle (to control prisoners)
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Clinics: Space organization in hospitals (to monitor patients)
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Schools: Methods of teaching penmanship to children (to shape uniformity in students’ writing)
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Foucault does not imply that some deeper meaning in thought must be deciphered.
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He does not wish to embark upon a psychoanalysis of the thinkers to understand their thought.
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An episteme is a general mode of thinking –the factual beliefs and actions that lay behind the diverse range of ideas and practices:
• e.g., the deviant being thrown into a mad-house & confined –the details about its extent in different regions at different times may represent a distinctive classical way of thinking about madness
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The philosophical or scientific thinkers are shaped or structured by the episteme
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Foucauldian genealogy is a historical causal explanation that is material, multiple, and corporeal
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The objects of these diverse and specific causes are human bodies.
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The forces that drive our history do not so much operate on our thoughts, our social institutions, or even our environment as on our individual bodies
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Prisons, clinics and schools have structured regimen designed to produce ‘ docile bodies ’
The ‘Self’ disappears as body becomes passive, Docile, Normalized, Objectified
“Consensual conformity” of students/faculty and constraining the “docile bodies” through admissions/hiring , financial and behavioural control.
Faculty/students are examined, tested and isolated by administrative experts to become passive and docile bodies
Willingly they subject themselves to Internet education, research technologies and become normalized and subjectivized
Power transforms the frameworks that underlie our knowledge
Government and other institutions control power and make rules – power and violence go together to discipline us
Thesis of Foucault's Discipline and Punish:
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Disciplinary techniques that keep criminals under control become the model for controlling/operating other modern institutional social sites: schools, hospitals, factories, and other social institutions
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Prison discipline pervades all of modern society
Foucault
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Process of Constructing the Docile Bodies through Disciplines, the new political technology of the body (137) :
1.
Cellular (located bodies in enclosures)
2.
Organic (Specified repetitive activities)
3.
Genetic (Trained and timed in hard work of production)
4.
Combinatory (Division of labour and organizing ranks & classes as units of production- Marx, Capital , vol. 1. 311-12) (isolation)
COG-D of L
• Applying Foucauldian framework to articles: Morrison, Giroux, Tsoukas & Oliviery’s case
We can argue how Morrison’s (2000) arguments show how to resist being ‘disciplined’ (in the
Foucauldian sense) by Power:
(Cellular) Spatial Enclosures : University must teach students to examine their own values and those of society. As otherwise they will unquestioningly assume the ‘norms’ of the institutions or
Spatial Enclosures in which they are confined.
(Organic) Specified Repetitive Process: must interrogate the institution’s purpose. A critical inquiry into the society/institutions in which an individual is required to follow/perform the
‘norm’ repetitively for ensuring obedience, the individual body will become docile.
(Interrogation of U’s purpose:
(Genetic) : Trained and Timed :Society/institutions train individuals and rigorously impose time and order on the body to make it follow the norm. This vicious cycle of training can be broken only by encouraging Students/ profs to:
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do public volunteer service
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debate readings and their political implications
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do research for public good not private profit
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interrogate complex ethical problems
Hierarchical Isolation by organizing ranks: Instead of hierarchically imposing a power structure, the society/ institutions, e.g., University should :
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Guard civic freedoms through ensuring democratic practices
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Examine social problems and individual responsibilities in establishing ethics/truth in behaviour
Morrison (2000) thesis is that the university must examine, evaluate, posit and reinforce values.
Giroux: (we apply F’s concepts to this article)
Higher education
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is seen as a commodity and is enclosed as a market (C spatial Enclosures )
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embodies value of market driven self interest in which both educators and students are trained to follow the norms (G Trained and Timed )
• promotes consumer life styles and are normalized as a consumer through repetitive behavior in the market (O Specified Repetitive activities )
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produces market identity as the individual is trained and routinized.(G Trained and
Timed )
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lacks accountability & social responsibility as each is individualized and isolated using a hierarchical system of power ( Hierarchical Isolation )
Giroux: Corporate funding of and corporate culture in higher education:
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Corporate control over what and how we learn/research in univ. reduces ability of the state and civil society spatial Enclosures (univ. not open to shape self or social values)
• Driven by profit motive - ‘applied’ (vs. ‘pure’) research Trained and Timed
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Experiments at the cost of ethics Specified Repetitive activities
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Advances vocational learning vs. pure knowledge Trained and Timed
Tsoukas (1997): (Apply F’s concepts on Knowledge/power)
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We have begun to think in this information society that greater knowledge would lead us to transparency in society
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Knowledge has come to mean information
• Useful information is understood as “objectified, abstract, decontextualized information”
Olivieri: (F’s concept of isolating the researcher and disciplining her work)
Corporate profit vs. ethical research Hierarchical Isolation
The university, a school of learning, has turned into an industry: Why and How?
University is a:
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Key component in a meritocracy, the sine qua non of an open market
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Billion $ business - most high school graduates attended college
• Profit producing machine : Six times the revenue the steel industry generates
Lack of ethics in corporate strategies & in stock markets
Disciplinary power
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Cultural values determine how society exercises control over its people.
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Who defines what is ‘normal’?
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What impact does ‘non-normal’ label have on those who are so designated?
• Who are those who get to control the ‘non-normal’ people?
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Why and how the designators control the designated?
The answers to these questions change over time as power arrangements in society shift. e.g:
Historical periods in ‘knowledge’ construction and dissemination:
1.
Priests controlled knowledge & dissemination
2.
State and private Endowments set up universities & curricula.
3.
Professionals as experts accredit & regulate ‘ what’
is knowledge
4.
Information technologies create and disseminate so called ‘ knowledge
’
5.
Corporate funding impacts, regulates and interferes with the autonomy of the university
(a repository of knowledge).
Foucault’s argument:
The ruling/regulating power ultimately decides and develops the systems for managing and controlling people: e.g.,
In different periods, power creates or changes:
Law
Education
Professions
Market regulations, etc.
Tsoukas (1997):
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As we have begun to think in this information society that greater knowledge would lead us to transparency in society
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Knowledge has come to mean information
• Useful information is understood as “objectified, abstract, decontextualized information”
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‘Know How’ of those participating in the events reported, is transformed into the ‘Know
That’
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Information reductionism
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Knowledge is viewed as a manual
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Information is defined by the chosen representations – they exist independently of human agents
• “A world that is seen as consisting of sums of information, makes social engineering a very tempting way of thinking and acting.
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Foucault dubbed the kind of action associated with social engineering ‘governmentaIity’
• Popular public assumption is: “if those in charge ‘know’ what is going on, they can manage a social system better. ‘To know’ in this context means having information on the variation of certain indicators that are thought to capture the essence of the phenomenon at hand”.
• Giddens’ ‘expert systems’ - the significant growth of specialized, codified, abstract knowledge.
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Social engineering presupposes that a real phenomenon can be reduced (Reductionism) to be measurable, standardizable and auditable
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Applying Foucault’s concepts to the article by
Winter (2002), Media Monopoly
1.
State power vs. Corporate concentration of power
2.
State vs. corporate Surveillance and reinforcement of obedience
3.
State vs. Corporate Punishment (of firing from jobs)
Foucault’s argument:
The ruling/regulating power ultimately decides and develops the systems for managing and controlling people: e.g.,
In different periods, power creates or changes the way people are managed and controlled : e.g.,
tools of control in the areas of :
• Education: F’s power/knowledge - knowledge of how people's behavior can be affected. It is based on new techniques of social engineering, education, etc.
•
Professions : institutionalization of knowledge by those in power
Power is invisible and continuous in its control over the self
Norm is placed by power in a binary system as normal/abnormal:
Maintained by:

Hierarchical surveillance e.g.: normal/ abnormal in race or ethnicity

Normative judgment e.g., IQ tests as Intelligence indicators
Michel Foucault’s Disciplinary power :
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Normalizes social behaviour by monitoring and regulating it.
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Makes sure of Certainty of control
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Not being able to resist the capillaries of power, the society unconsciously and unquestioningly accepts its disciplinary control
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