Michel Foucault 1926-1984

• Identity

• Power

• Technologies of the self

• Biopolitics

IDENTITY

For Foucault, people do not have a 'real' identity within themselves; that's just a way of talking about the self -- a discourse.

An 'identity' is communicated to others in your interactions with them, but it is not a fixed thing within a person. It is a shifting, temporary construction.

SHIFT IN THE IDEA OF SELF

From the Cartesian self : individual as the subjectof his/her actions; as a construction alwayscoherent to the principle of the self-same….

….to a self as a process; ….as a negotiation; ….as a continuous stream of more or less unstableheterogeneous elements: a self produced by itsinteraction with power structures.

POWER• Power is never unilateral, but is always a strategic

relation of forces

• People do not 'have' power implicitly; rather, power is a technique or action which individuals can engage in

• Power is not possessed; it is exercised. And where there is power, there is always also resistance

• It is not merely physical force, but a pervasive human dynamic determining our relationships to others. It is not necessarily "bad," since it can also be productive

SO WHAT IS POWER?

• It is a network that brings things and events in relation

• it is a multiplicity of force relations• it is a complex of modes of negotiation of

practises discourses, events• it is a system of technologies that link the

big cultural discourses of society with the everyday life

HOW POWER IS EXERCISED?

• For Foucault power is constantly exercised upon our bodies

• Bodies are the object and the instrument of power: they are the means through which power is exercised

modern times

BODIES

They are shaped by different regimes of power; marked, controlled and structured by the rhythms of work/education/entertainment/etc

Bodies may seem to be the passive object of power. However, as power is above all a relation of forces, every relation of forces always implies a resistance.

It is the materiality of the body that is capable of resistance.

HOW POWER SHAPES BODIES

• The body is the privileged object of the operations of power: it is power that produces bodies.

• Power does not produce only the body but also what we call interiority: the soul is the result of specific operations of ‘political anatomy’.

• Power controls bodies not via its ideologies but through the supervision over behaviours and modes of interaction.

• "The soul is the prison of the body" writes Foucault.

• Specific conceptions of the body arise from practices, habits and behaviours which, in turn, structure bodily practices, habits and behaviours that limit and constrain the body potentials along predictable and “normal" pathways (i.e. enforced self-observation to detect flaws and to internalize norms)

technologies of self-change

Technologies of the selfdefined by Michel Foucault:

• ”procedures available or prescribed to individuals in order to fix their identity, to maintain it or to transform it in relation to a certain number of goals, thanks to relations of self-mastery and self-knowledge”

• A ”reflection upon ways of life, choices of existence, modes of managing one’s behaviour, of providing one self with goals and instruments”

Technologies of the self: more definitions

• ways in which people put forward, and police, their "selves" in society; and ways in which they are enabled or constrained in their use of different techniques by available discourses.

• specific practices by which subjects constitute themselves within and through systems of power, and which often seem to be either 'natural' or imposed from above.

Technologies of self-production

• The various procedure for inscribing bodies are not simply imposed on the individual form the outside; they do not function coercively but are sought out

• They are commonly undertaken voluntarily and usually require the active compliance of the subject.

• There is no ‘natural’ norm.

• There are only cultural forms of body, which do or do not conform to social norms.

• The issue is not the conformity to cultural patterns or stereotypes, but which particular ones are used and with what cultural effects

SELF POLICINGSELF MONITORING

EXAMPLES:

Dieting

Fitness

Bodybuilding

……

Disciplinary society• Foucault examines the history

of the forms of punishments as a variable series of technologies of the body: procedures for the subjugation, manipulation and control of the body.

• Between the 17th and 18th century there a shift from spectacular and ritual punishment to forms of disciplinary punishment: from public executions to…….

TOTAL SURVEILLANCE

• We have a shift from punishment as a legalised form of torture to a discipline no longer public but intensely private, whose aim is not revenge on the body of the condemned but the rehabilitation of his soul.

• This shift requires a change in the way bodies are organised, controlled and monitored, and requires the invention of a completely new field of surveillance, what Foucault calls TOTAL SURVEILLANCE taking place within total institutions (i.e. the prison)

Spectacle is replaced by surveillance: the prison-panopticon

• Panopticon: an architectural structure made by a central tower surrounded by a circular building divided into cells;

• each cell extends to the entire thickness of the building so to allow inner and outer windows.

• the occupants of the cells are not only isolated from one another by walls, but they are subjected to a constant control

• collectively and individually they are watched by an observer in the tower who remains always unseen

THE PANOPTICON

• The Panopticon is a machine of total control.

• A machine that allows seeing without being seen.

• This asymmetry of seeing-without-being-seen is the very essence of power: ultimately the power to dominate rests on the differential possession of knowledge.

• Not knowing whether or when they are on view, we ultimately internalize the notion of a surveyor.

• This prison-panopticon serves as Foucault's central metaphor for the rise of a society in which discipline is self-internalized

• Television can be seen as

a panoptic institution• It is disciplinary in the

sense that it provides its own defining discourses, variations on the themes of entertainment, desire, and consumerism.

• Genre rules, for instance, constitute a discourse.

• Television promise of desire keeps audiences still and attentive.

BIOPOLITICS

• From the Greek bios politikos = public life • Foucault introduces the idea of biopolitics at the

end of the 70s• While disciplinary power works by controlling

bodies one by one, this new form of power works upon not the individual body but the bodies as a mass, as a multiplicity of living beings, as a population.

• Specifically, it controls and charts the elements common to an entire population: birth, death, production and reproduction.

FROM DISCIPLINARY POWER TO BIO-POWER

• It is a shift to a power exercised at a level of the mass, no longer directed on the human being as body, but on the human being as species.

• It is a shift from anatomo-politics, a politics and power that act on individual bodies….

• …..to bio-politics, a politics and power that act on entire population with the aim of controlling life and forms of life.

• Demography - the scientific analysis of birth rate, control of patterns of reproduction and death, as determining factors for the rationalization of production- 18th century

Biopolitics now

Examples:

Technologies of

assisted

Reproduction (IVF)

In vitro fertilization

What is Biopower? A definition

• Biopower: power exercised through a series if technologies upon the life of a population with the aim of controlling and monitoring its biological processes, such as health, birth, death, and reproduction.

• Biopower creates a new body, a multiple body, no longer discrete, i.e. numerable and countable…..but continuous, i.e. it can’t be counted (mass)