Michel Foucault, Power / Knowledge

Michael Simpkins
Philosophy 352 – Report #2
Deeper insight into difficult texts is often aided through dialogues with the respective author of a particular work. Power/Knowledge, a collection of interviews, conversations, and lectures with or by Michel Foucault does exactly that. It offers the invaluable interpretation of Foucault’s work by Foucault himself and raises a number of questions that can assist to further the understanding of his different projects. Foucault covers a range of topics from architecture to the medical profession and even infant sexuality. This is not, however, a haphazard focus. Through these different topics Foucault continually attempted to portray both how power operates and what exactly it has become.
The primary misunderstanding of contemporary thought with regards to power stems from a vestige of medieval life. During the feudal period the idea of the sovereign as the seat of power worked well to explain, at a minimum, how power was acquired, how it was held, and how it operated. Foucault likened power to a commodity either taken by an individual or passed from one to another. This worked, albeit incompletely, for that period because the theory need only remain “confined to the general mechanisms of power, to the way in which its forms of existence at the higher level of society influenced its exercise at the lowest levels.”[i] Power was assumed by an individual and their decrees were eventually passed down to the lowest subjects. Their acquiescence was attained through a number of measures, but mainly by example. If one refused to obey, harsh measures were taken, but not to adjust the behavior, simply to frighten others into not disobeying. Obviously, this is an oversimplification, but the presentation works to elucidate how power has evolved.
This idea of the sovereign is inadequate to account for how power began shifting during the eighteenth century and continues to evolve, how it moved beyond the exclusive realm of the State. Contemporary theory errs because it continues to conceptualize power in this antiquated form. With the Industrial Revolution, power became dispersed and “conceived” in a manner in which production was assured alongside class domination.[ii] Furthermore, it became clear that it was “more efficient and profitable” to surveil rather than punish.[iii] With the rise of the State apparatus, however, a parallel theory failed to materialize. Thus many revolutionaries continue to view the State as the locus of power when in fact, no such center remains. Power is “a machine in which everyone is caught, those who exercise power just as much as those over whom it is exercised.”[iv] A flawed understanding results from “locating power in the State apparatus, making this into the major, privileged, capital and almost unique instrument of the power of one class over another.”[v] This is key to much of Foucault’s thought, “we need to cut off the King’s head: in political theory that has still to be done.”[vi]
Rather than searching for the apex of power to identify the genesis of oppression, Foucault contends that to understand power one must search it out at the margins to see not where it comes from, but how it operates. Power is now extended on a level never realized under the feudal system, it “goes much further, passes through much finer channels, and is more ambiguous, since each individual has at his disposal a certain power, and for that very reason can also act as the vehicle for transmitting a wider power.”[vii] This explains much of Foucault’s interest in people on the periphery: criminals, children, and the infirm. He is seeking out the “mechanisms” of power at the margins, and these groups are ideal for understanding how power is effected on certain groups of people. Undoubtedly, these are the most repressed groups of society and if power is “an organ of repression…should not the analysis of power be first and foremost an analysis of the mechanisms of repression?”[viii] This type of analysis results in a less muddled image of power because, with these people, the transmission is largely one-way. Power in society exists much like a hierarchical web and nearly everyone shares in it. It is many things, but one thing it is certainly not is a chain that stretches from the top.[ix] Therefore, to identify and understand it, it must be sought out at the lowest levels and then constructed from the bottom up. This is why the Sovereign theory of top-down power is simply no longer useful.
One of the more interesting theories explained in this work is that of genealogies. Empirical history focused on nothing but kings and wars, almost entirely ignoring the struggles of the masses. Though the transitory periods whereby power was taken or lost are important, Foucault emphasizes the importance of the periods of so-called peace. After the armed conflict is over and the new political process is established by the victors, the only thing achieved is a sort of “pseudo-peace.” The resulting structure ensures that the inequity achieved by the dominant in war is protected. Far from being any type of compromise, “the role of political power…is perpetually to re-inscribe this relation through a form of unspoken warfare; to re-inscribe it in social institutions, in economic inequalities, in language, in the bodies themselves of each and every one of us.”[x] The project of combating oppression, given this awareness, must take on the task of teasing out these inequities and injustices. This is where genealogy comes in. Foucault believes that the people have a history that may be accessed, though it remains very much suppressed. In these popular histories are recorded all of the “struggles together with the rude memory of their conflicts.”[xi] But this other history is not a subject itself, that is, the people or any other group within that heading (the insane, degenerate, etc.) is not an entity continually acted upon by different forces through history. This whole notion of subject must be avoided, and in its place should be genealogy, “a form of history which can account for the constitution of knowledges, discourses, domains of objects etc., without having to make reference to a subject which is either transcendental in relation to the field of events or runs in its empty sameness throughout the course of history.” Rather than asking, “how is it that things occurred?” ask instead, “what underlying conditions would be necessary for the things which happened to have happened?” Underlying these numerous mechanisms that allow for power to be affected is the economy; “the historical raison d’etre of political power is to be found in the economy.”[xii] Power is dispersed throughout the modern economy as each individual within the system is both subject to power and exercises it over others. Because of this vast interconnection Foucault attempts investigations into the natures of these connections and especially those connections which remain largely unexplored.[xiii]
This new interpretation of power allows for the explanation of how certain situations, previously unintended, result, and are then absorbed by the structure to further the aims of the ruling class. Two examples will better explain how this works. The first is criminality and imprisonment. The original idea, though quickly disproven, was to reform criminals in prisons so they would better operate in a market economy, in a word, to be productive. From the outset, however, it was almost immediately realized that prisons not only failed in this aim, it made the situation even worse. Those who engaged in criminal behavior became even more consistent in their tendencies and those innocents sent to prison became, upon their release, more likely to commit crimes. Instead of abolishing the system those in charge became aware that these individuals could perform a valuable function, for “criminals come in handy.”[xiv] This new “criminal class” was used as justification for expanded police powers. These new forms of surveillance were imperative in a society where the masses are in physical contact with the means of production—the machines and each other. The more crime was committed, which primarily affected the poor, the more the people desired expanded police protections and powers. It served as a way to expand their powers over the people and to drive a wedge between the “moral” populace and the delinquents who might damage the stability of the system. Instead of reforming criminals, prisons served the purpose of insuring that they were taught nothing and could therefore do nothing but engage in criminal activity. The second example is that of infant sexuality, i.e. masturbation. Foucault, by researching primary documents of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, recognized that infant sexuality was never an issue until the latter century. And it is not that the subject was taboo either, manuals were published that discussed it quite openly but for the purpose of suppressing the behavior. Foucault argues that the ruling class never cared a moment for infant sexuality, what they cared about was control. But this new control had unforeseen benefits for the economy. If sex is repressed you can sell sexuality. Foucault mentions how this is done by the sell of such products like suntan lotion, and today the examples are nearly endless: clothes, beer, cologne, etc. The result of this repression, and many others, is continually re-inscribed by the ruling class for productive ends.
While much of this work may seem intended for intellectual discourse, Foucault was attempting something more applicable for the common people. He sought to redirect focus away from the State and towards the mechanisms that actually opposed the people on a daily basis. Only by this correct understanding of power could anything progress, “the problem is not changing people’s consciousness—or what’s in their heads—but the political, economic, institutional regime of the production of truth.”[xv]





[i] Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 104.
[ii] Foucault, 88.
[iii] Foucault, 38.
[iv] Foucault, 156.
[v] Foucault, 72.
[vi] Foucault, 121.
[vii] Foucault, 72.
[viii] Foucault, 90.
[ix] Foucault, 98.
[x] Foucault, 90.
[xi] Foucault, 83.
[xii] Foucault, 89.
[xiii] Foucault, 194.
[xiv] Foucault, 40.
[xv] Foucault, 133.