Power knowledge michel foucault pdf

In he- Power re- creates its own fields of exercise through knowledge. Foucault incorporates this inevitable mutuality into his neologism power-knowledge, the most important part of which is the hyphen that links the two aspects of the integrated concept together and alludes to their inherent inextricability. Everyday low … Foucault observed that there is a parcel of thought in even the crassest and most obtuse parts of social reality, which is why criticism can be a real power fo r change, depriving some practices of their self-evidence, extending the bounds of the thinkable to permit the invention of others.

His radical reworkings of the concepts of power, knowledge, discourse and identity have influenced the widest possible range of theories and impacted upon disciplinary fields from literary studies to anthropology. Velasquez: Las Meninas, reproduced by courtesy of the Museo del Prado. It is appropriate at this point to consider the work of Michel Foucault, for in any introduction to history and postmodernism, this author along with the influence he has exercised deserves a separate discussion.

His impact has been, in this sphere, enormous. An earlier version of this essay was presented at the meeting of the Conference Group for Political Economy, August 30, , in New Orleans, Louisiana.

What do you think? November Selected Interviews and Other Writings. He is also poststructuralist, and postmodernist. He gives importance to economy and other social institutions. To him social structure is micro-politics of power. This is his deviation from Karl Marx. Power, from this perspec- tive, is not something possessed or held in reserve, it is always in circulation creating the possibilities of resistance that further in- 10 See Kelly b for a sustained defense of Foucault against Habermas's general critique.

What I write does not prescribe anything, neither to myself nor to others. At most, its character is instrumental and visionary or dream-like" Foucault A third call was to study power at its points of application rather than at its central places of legitima- tion Foucault Few in the law and society movement, at least, would disagree with his invitation to examine the "capil- lary" actions of governments and other strategic formations ibid.

Less well observed are the limits implied by the scope of Fou- cault's projects. The prevailing pressure is to read Foucault back into the production of social theory. Whatever Foucault's ambi- tions in this regard, his discussion of power may be most useful as a strategy for conducting a kind of postmodern version of "mid- dle range" research Simon His most insightful discussions are almost always in describing some cluster of practices.

Take him away from the specific contexts he is studying in order to generate evaluative principles and you will end up with provoca- tive but often silly things to say. In brief, Habermas may be precisely right when he says that Foucault's use of the concept power is "utterly unsociological" if sociology codifies for Habermas a commitment to providing a comprehensive account of social ordering.

Others have made similar points. Alan Hunt argues that Foucault's ac- count needs a concept like "hegemony," while Axel Honneth views Foucault as irrationally rejecting any role for inter- subjectivity in social integration.

Habermas, in contrast, has long placed intersubjectivity at the center of his account of the social order although Between Norms and Facts may be a retreat on that line Bohman Habermas's own "reconstructive" approach, as out- lined by Bohman , involves isolating "idealizations" of 13 Middle range in the sense that such work is not deductively related to a theory of the social order or a phenomenology of individual or group consciousness.

The term was used most influentially by Robert Merton Hunt argues the Foucault wrongly conflates the aggregation of tactics with strategy. As a result, in Hunt's view p. Hunt would be right if Foucault is to be read as constructing a comprehensive theory of the social order. Genealogy as a middle-range practice points in a different direction, however. From that perspective the analysis of strategies does not preclude a history of strategists but privileges the history of the technologies of power that such strategists deploy.

In other words, only if Foucault's results are stretched to account for the overall social order do they produce the obviously unsatisfactory claims that Hunt derives from them.

It's interesting in this regard that in Bohman's account Habermas has eschewed discussion of empiri- cal research on law and society in favor of philosophical exercises in modeling in his theory of law. While language is just what makes law in the work of postmodern theorists look dangerous and weird, Habermas offers it as the reason why law is such a privileged site for reforming society.

His critique raises two distinct points of in- terest for legal studies. First, Foucault's historical studies document the role the nor- malizing discourse of "scientific" experts on human life plays in constructing some of the most undemocratic aspects of modem society, but he is unable to provide an account of how critical social theory including his own work escapes from the inter- locking of knowledge and power he describes Habermas a In contrast, Habermas wants to take a redemptive and reconstructive approach to the tradition of rational inquiry into human affairs that has produced the modern social sciences.

Second, Foucault is unable to provide justificatory or norma- tive evaluation. His empirical studies of power practices may offer useful tools for those engaged in conflict, but they provide no answers to how such conflicts should be resolved. If it is just a matter of mobilizing counter-power, of strategic battles and wily confrontations, why should we muster any resistance at all against this all pervasive power circulating in the bloodstream of the body of modem society, instead of just adapting to it?

Then the genealogy of knowledge as a weapon would be superfluous as well. It makes sense that a value-free analysis of the strength and weakness of the opponent is of use to one who wants to take up the fight-but why fight at all? Habermas b In contrast, Habermas subordinates empirical investigation to the philosophical construction of procedural tests that can be 15 Given the current prestige of rational choice theory, this will hardly be counted against it among political scientists and sociologists.

Habermas's critique of Foucault is likely to be highly attrac- tive to those who feel the greatest loss in the clouding of the relationship between science and political reform. Indeed, the intellectual who produces middle-range studies of how power is exercised in particular domains and through a highly specific context of social action, is not in a position to offer critical social theory in the sense of a theory that explains why certain practices or even whole social orders must be changed.

You can say 17things like "down with disciplinary society," but they sound silly. But this is fatal in this regard only if one believes that what philosophers or other intellectuals can hope to do is produce tests which people can apply to determine the acceptability of various social arrangements.

The plausibility of developing such tests that produce more than purely tautological truths should be highly questionable at this point to legal scholars Gaskins In the end, however, refutation of this position may be less im- portant than showing that it does not fit our own traditions of practice and that attractive alternatives remain for scholarship even if that of guaranteeing the validity of social struggles is out.

Knowledge and Human Interests Foucault believed that his work could help people actually engaged in resistance to power by illuminating the relationship between their problems and the way power is exercised within the specific domains they inhabit. What is life like in a psychiatric hospital? What is the job of nurse?

How do the sick react? A colleague who represents mental patients and worries precisely about how to engage them in dialogue about their real interests and needs noted that the problems that patients raised often reflected their own sense of how much of their universe they saw as changeable see Gaventa for an account of this process among Appa- lachian coal miners.

They complain about caps on the number of cigarettes they could have in a day, rather than about why they were in confinement. Such issues are bound to disappoint the lawyer or legal scholar who cares about freedom and justice.

But rather than leaping from cigarettes to talking about the legitimacy of confinement, one might follow the patients' com- plaints in the direction of an analysis of how power is exercised. What kind of power is it that must control how much a person 17 Foucault walked away from the concept although typically by denying he ever held it of a disciplinary society, telling journalist Duccio Trombadori in "I have never held that a mechanism of power is sufficient to characterize a society" Foucault What is the nature of a daily regimen in which smoking would loom as such a central measure of autonomy and self-interest for the patients?

These questions may not yield definitive judgments about the legitimacy of particular institutions, but they may drive deep and wide cracks in the solidity of their authority claims- cracks in which alternative arrangements may become far more plausible. Likewise, we should ask of Habermas's theory of law what it would contribute to such strategic problems of lawyers and legal studies. It is troublesome, in this regard, that Habermas's theory of law in Between Facts and Norms is set at such an abstract level.

On Bohman's account it is a treatment of law as a broad and universal practice, not grounded to the analysis of any specific institutions or examined in the light of any particular historical struggles.

An example of the kind of possibilities and limits of social reform based on middle-range genealogical work is provided by the career of legendary community organizer Saul Alinsky see generally Horwitt Alinksy was trained in the sociology de- partment of the University of Chicago whose founders, men like Robert Park and Ernest Burgess, were intent and largely success- ful on turning out progressive experts anxious to help produce official knowledge for reform.

Alinsky broke away from the Chi- cago path, however, and began to work directly with community groups. His projects were subversive but recognizable mutations of Park's and Burgess's sociology. He deployed the same tech- niques to produce counter-flows of knowledge that established more efficient ways of exercising power from below.

Originally he had been assigned by Park's and Burgess's stu- dent Clifford Shaw to organize neighborhood councils to combat juvenile delinquency in Chicago's slum neighborhoods.

The Shaw strategy was itself quite radical in the light of the prevailing views of delinquency in the s. Shaw viewed delinquency as an outgrowth of disempowered communities that could not ef- fectively generate social control over their young, but his aspira- tions remained in line with the classical normalizing goals of offi- cial criminology. Shaw's strategy involved building a base of social science knowledge about a community in order to identify the critical elements of community power that could be re- aligned in support of antidelinquency efforts.

After building a number of such neighborhood coalitions for Shaw, Alinsky used the same techniques to build a community organization in the notorious Back-of-the-Yards neighborhood in Chicago Horwitt But rather than following Shaw's strategy of bind- 18 Of course, we are increasingly seeing issues like smoking and drinking become matters of first priority for all kinds of institutions.

It is important, of course, to recognize that not having a so- cial theory has its costs. One is that anyone doing local work of this kind needs to worry about who is deploying the technologies of power and for what ends; the genealogy of power itself will tell them little about that. Another is that genealogy may lead one to ignore the way in which people become attached to their own subordination.

Some of his most successful community organizations, like the Back-of-the-Yards Neighborhood Council, utilized the mechanisms he helped in- novate to pursue agendas, like racial segregation, that he never supported ibid. Part of what Habermas objects to about Foucault's genealogy is that it cannot provide a guarantee of its own freedom from dangerous uses. This is accurate, but its bite depends on how much you believe that anything interesting and useful could pro- vide such a guarantee.

In a recent discussion published in the journal 'L' Homme', three eminent anthropologists posed this question once again about the concept of event, and said: the event is what always escapes our rational grasp, the domain of 'absolute contingency'; we are thinkers who analyse structures, history is no concern of ours, what could we be expected to have to say about it, and so forth.

This opposition then between event and structure is the site and the product of a certain anthropology. I would say this has had devastating effects among historians who have finally reached the point of trying to dismiss the event and the 'evenementiel' as an inferior order of history dealing with trivial facts, chance occurrences and so on. For instance, the 'great internment' which you described in Madness and Civilisation perhaps represents one of these nodes which elude the dichotomy of structure and event.

Could you elaborate from our present stand- point on this renewal and reformulation of the concept of event? One can agree that structuralism formed the most system- atic effort to evacuate the concept of the event, not only from ethnology but from a whole series of other sciences and in the extreme case from history. In that sense, I don't see who could be more of an anti-structuralist than myself.

But the important thing is to avoid trying to do for the event what was previously done with the concept of structure. It's not a matter of locating everything on one level, that of the event, but of realising that there are actually a whole order of levels of different types of events differing in amplitude, chronological breadth, and capacity to produce effects. The problem is at once to distinguish among events, to differentiate the networks and levels to which they belong, and to reconstitute the lines along which they are connected and erlgender one another.

From this follows a refusal of analyses couched in terms of the symbolic field or the domain of signifying structures, and a recourse to analyses in terms of the genealogy of relations of force, strategic developments, and tactics. Here I believe one's point of reference should not be to the great model of language langue and signs, but to that of war and battle.

The history which bears and determines us has the form of a war rather than that of a language: relations of power, not relations of meaning.

History has no 'meaning', though this is not to say that it is absurd or incoherent. On the contrary, it is intelligible and should be susceptible of analysis down to the smallest detail- but this in accordance with the intel- ligibility of struggles, of strategies and tactics. Neither the dialectic, as logic of contradictions, nor semiotics, as the structure of communication, can account for the intrinsic intelligibility of conflicts.

In the context of this problem of discursivity, I think one can be confident in saying that you were the first person to pose the question of power regarding dis- course, and that at a time when analyses in terms of the concept or object of the 'text', along with the accom- panying methodology of semiology, structuralism, etc. Posing for discourse the question of power means basically to ask whom does discourse serve? It isn't so much a matter of analysing discourse into its unsaid, its implicit meaning, because as you have often repeated discourses are transparent, they need no interpretation, no one to assign them a meaning.

If one reads 'texts' in a certain way, one perceives that they speak clearly to us and require no further supplementary sense or interpretation. This question of power that you have addressed to discourse naturally has particular effects and implications in relation to methodology and contemporary historical researches.

Could you briefly situate within your work this question you have posed- if indeed it's true that you have posed it?

I don't think I was the first to pose the question. On the contrary, I'm struck by the difficulty I had in formulating it. Yet I'm perfectly aware that I scarcely ever used the word and never had such a field of analyses at my disposal. I can say that this was an incapacity linked undoubtedly with the political situation we found ourselves in. It is hard to see where, either on the Right or the Left, this problem of power could then have been posed.

On the Right, it was posed only in terms of constitution, sovereignty, etc. Where Soviet socialist power was in question, its opponents called it totalitarianism; power in Western capitalism was de- nounced by the Marxists as class domination; but the mechanics of power in themselves were never analysed.

This task could only begin after , that is to say on the basis of daily struggles at grass roots level, among those whose fight was located in the fine meshes of the web of power. This was where the concrete nature of power became visible, along with the prospect that these analyses of power would prove fruitful in accounting for all that had hitherto remained outside the field of political analysis.

To put it very simply, psychiatric internment, the mental normalisation of individuals, and penal institutions have no doubt a fairly limited importance if one is only looking for their economic significance. On the other hand, they are undoubtedly essential to the general functioning of the wheels of power.

So long as the posing of the question of power was kept subordinate to the economic instance and the system of interests which this served, there was a tendency to regard these problems as of small importance. So a certain kind of Marxism and a certain kind of phenomenology constituted an objective obstacle to the formulation of this problematic? Yes, if you like, to the extent that it's true that, in our student days, people of my generation were brought up on these two forms of analysis, one in terms of the constituent subject, the other in terms of the economic in the last instance, ideology and the play of superstructures and in frastructures.

Still within this methodological context, how would you situate the genealogical approach? As a questioning of the conditions of possibility, modalities and constitution of the 'objects' and domains you have successively analysed, what makes it necessary?

Truth and Power I wanted to see how these problems of constitution could be resolved within a historical framework, instead of referring them back to a constituent object madness, criminality or whatever. But this historical contextualisation needed to be something more than the simple relativisation of the phenomenological subject.

I don't believe the problem can be solved by historicising the subject as posited by the phenomenologists, fabricating a subject that evolves through the course of history.

One has to dispense with the con- stituent subject, to get rid of the subject itself, that's to say, to arrive at an analysis which can account for the constitu- tion of the subject within a historical framework. And this is what I would call genealogy, that is, a form of history which can account for the constitution of knowledges, discourses, domains of objects etc.

Marxist phenomenology and a certain kind of Marxism have clearly acted as a screen and an obstacle; there are two further concepts which continue today to act as a screen and an obstacle, ideology on the one hand and repression on the other. All history comes to be thought of within these categories which serve to assign a meaning to such diverse phenomena as normalisation, sexuality and power. And regardless of whether these two concepts are explicitly utilised, in the end one always comes back, on the one hand to ideology-where it is easy to make the reference back to Marx - and on the other to repression, which is a concept often and readily employed by Freud throughout the course of his career.

Hence I would like to put forward the following suggestion. Behind these concepts and among those who properly or improperly employ them, there is a kind of nostalgia; behind the concept of ideology, the nostalgia for a quasi-transparent form of knowledge, free from all error and illusion, and behind the concept of repression, the longing for a form of power innocent of all coercion, discipline and normalisation.

You have called these two concepts, ideology and repression, negative, 'psychological', insufficiently analytical. This is particularly the case in Discipline and Punish where, even if there isn't an extended discussion of these concepts, there is nevertheless a kind of analysis that allows one to go beyond the traditional forms of explanation and intelligibility which, in the last and not only the last instance rest on the concepts of ideology and repression.

Could you perhaps use this occasion to specify more explicitly your thoughts on these matters? With Discipline and Punish, a kind of positive history seems to be emerging which is free of all the negativity and psychologism implicit in those two universal skeleton-keys.

The notion of ideology appears to me to be difficult to make use of, for three reasons. The first is that, like it or not, it always stands in virtual opposition to something else which is supposed to count as truth.

Now I believe that the problem does not consist in drawing the line between that in a discourse which falls under the category of scientificity or truth, and that which comes under some other category, but in seeing historically how effects of truth are produced within discourses which in themselves are neither true nor false. The second drawback is that the concept of ideology refers, I think necessarily, to something of the order of a subject.

Thirdly, ideology stands in a secondary position relative to something which functions as its infrastructure, as its material, economic determinant, etc. For these three reasons, I think that this is a notion that cannot be used without circumspection. The notion of repression is a more insidious one, or at all events I myself have had much more trouble in freeing myself of it, in so far as it does indeed appear to correspond so well with a whole range of phenomena which belong among the effects of power.

When I wrote Madness and Civilisation, I made at least an implicit use of this notion of repression. But it seems to me now that the notion of repression is quite inadequate for capturing what is precisely the productive aspect of power. In defining the effects of power as repression, one adopts a purely juridical conception of such power, one identifies power with a law which says no, power is taken above all as carrying the force of a prohibition.

Now I believe that this is a wholly negative, narrow, skeletal conception of power, one which has been curiously widespread. If power were never anything but repressive, if it never did anything but to say no, do you really think one would be brought to obey it? What makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it doesn't only weigh on us as a force that says no, but that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse.

It needs to be considered as a productive network which runs through the whole social body, much more than as a negative instance whose function is repression.

In Discipline and Punish what I wanted to show was how, from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries onwards, there was a veritable technological take-off in the productivity of power. Not only did the monarchies of the Classical period develop great state apparatuses the army, the police and fiscal administration , but above all there was established at this period what one might call a new 'economy' of power, that is to say procedures which allowed the effects of power to circulate in a manner at once continuous, uninterrupted, adapted and 'individualised' throughout the entire social body.

These new techniques are both much more efficient and much less wasteful less costly economically, less risky in their results, less open to loopholes and resistances than the techniques previously employed which were based on a mixture of more or less forced tolerances from recognised privileges to endemic criminality and costly ostentation spectacular and discontinuous interventions of power, the most violent form of which was the 'exemplary', because exceptional, punishment.

Repression is a concept used above all in relation to sexuality. And when one considers for example the campaign launched against masturbation in the eighteenth century, or the medical discourse on homosexuality in the second half of the nineteenth century, or discourse on sexuality in general, one does seem to be faced with a discourse of repression. In reality however this discourse serves to make possible a whole series of interventions, tactical and positive interventions of surveillance, circulation, control and so forth, which seem to have been in- timately linked with techniques that give the appearance of repression, or are at least lia ble to be interpreted as such.

I believe the crusade against masturbation is a typical example of this. It is customary to say that bourgeois society repressed infantile sexuality to the point where it refused even to speak of it or acknowledge its existence. It was necessary to wait until Freud for the discovery at last to be made that children have a sexuality.

Now if you read all the books on pedagogy and child medicine- all the manuals for parents that were published in the eighteenth century-you find that children's sex is spoken of constantly and in every possible context. One might argue that the purpose of these discourses was precisely to prevent children from having a sexuality. But their effect was to din it into parents' heads that their children's sex constituted a fundamental problem in terms of their parental educational responsibilities, and to din it into children's heads that their relationship with their own body and their own sex was to be a fundamental problem as far as they were concerned; and this had the consequence of sexually exciting the bodies of children while at the same time fixing the parental gaze and vigilance on the peril of infantile sexuality.

The result was a sexu- alising of the infantile body, a sexualising of the bodily relationship between parent and child, a sexualising of the familial domain. Hence a historical problem arises, namely that of discovering why the West has insisted for so long on seeing the power it exercises as juridical and negative rather than as technical and positive. Perhaps this is because it has always been thought that power is mediated through the forms prescribed in the great juridical and philosophical theories, and that there is a fundamental, immutable gulf between those who exercise power and those who undergo it.

I wonder if this isn't bound up with the institution of monarchy. This developed during the Middle Ages against the backdrop of the previously endemic struggles between feudal power agencies. The monarchy presented itself as a referee, a power capable of putting an end to war, violence and pillage and saying no to these struggles and private feuds.

It made itself acceptable by allocating itself a juridical and negative function, albeit one whose limits it naturally began at once to overstep.

Sovereign, law and prohibition formed a system of representation of power which was extended during the subsequent era by the theories of right: political theory has never ceased to be obsessed with the person of the sovereign. Such theories still continue today to busy themselves with the problem of sovereignty. What we need, however, is a political phil- osophy that isn't erected around the problem of sovereignty, nor therefore around the problems of law and prohibition.

We need to cut off the King's head: in political theory that has still to be done. The King's head still hasn't been cut off, yet already people are trying to replace it by discipline, that vast system instituted in the seventeenth century comprising the functions of surveillance, normalisation and control and, a little later, those of punishment, correction, education and so on.

One wonders where this system comes from, why it emerges and what its use is. To pose the problem in terms of the State means to continue posing it in terms of sovereign and sovereignty, that is to say in terms of law. If one describes all these phenomena of power as dependant on the State apparatus, this means grasping them as essentially repressive: the Army as a power of death, police and justice as punitive instances, etc.

I don't want to say that the State isn't important; what I want to say is that relations of power, and hence the analysis that must be made of them, necessarily extend beyond the limits of the State. In two senses: first of all because the State, for all the omnipotence of its apparatuses, is far from being able to occupy the whole field of actual power relations, and further because the State can only operate on the basis of other, already existing power relations.

The State is superstructural in relation to a whole series of power networks that invest the body, sexuality, the family, kin- ship, knowledge, technology and so forth.