1. Discussion: Politics in Sociology Memorandum
Discussion: Politics in Sociology MemorandumDiscussion: Politics in Sociology
MemorandumSOC 370 California State University Northridge Politics in Sociology
MemorandumORDER HERE FOR ORIGINAL, PLAGIARISM-FREE PAPERSThe memos need to
be complete in 5 hours with a quote from the attached reading and a brief question or
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Discussion: Politics in Sociology Memorandumpowerfoucault__1_.pdMICHEL FOUCAULT’S
ON POWERMICHEL FOUCAULT’s understanding of power changes between his early work
oninstitutions (Madness and Civilization, The Birth of the Clinic, Discipline and Punish) and
hislater work on sexuality and governmentality. In the early work, Foucault sometimes
gives a sensethat power somehow inheres in institutions themselves rather than in the
individuals that makethose institutions function. Of course, what Foucault explores in those
books is how the creationof modern disciplines, with their principles of order and control,
tends to “disindividualize”power, making it seem as if power inheres in the prison, the
school, the factory, and so on. ThePanopticon (see previous module) becomes Foucault’s
model for the way other institutionsfunction: the Panopticon “is an important mechanism,
for it automatizes and disindividualizespower. Power has its principle not so much in a
person as in a certain concerted distribution ofbodies, surfaces, lights, gazes; in an
arrangement whose internal mechanisms produce therelation in which individuals are
caught up” (Discipline 202). Indeed, Bentham’s goal was tocreate an architectural idea that,
ultimately, could function on its own: it did not matter whoexactly operated the machine:
“Any individual, taken almost at random, can operate the machine:in the absence of the
director, his family, his friends, his visitors, even hisservants” (Discipline 202). The idea of
discipline itself similarly functions as an abstraction ofthe idea of power from any
individual: “‘Discipline’ may be identified neither with an institutionnor with an apparatus;
it is a type of power, a modality for its exercise, comprising a whole set ofinstruments,
techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets; it is a physics’ or an ‘anatomy’of
power, a technology” (Discipline 215). Bureaucracies, like disciplines, contribute to
theprocess of disindividuation since they promote the facelessness of the bureaucrat (“I’m
just doingmy job”; “I’m just a cog in the machine”) and tend to continue functioning even
after majorrevolutions. (After the fall of Nazi Germany, for example, the general
bureaucratic structure, andmost of its workers, remained in place.).The effect of this
tendency to disindividualize power is the perception that power resides inthe machine itself
2. (the “panoptic machine”; the “technology” of power) rather than in itsoperator. For this
reason, one can finish reading Foucault’s Discipline and Punish with theparanoid feeling
that we are powerless before such an effective and diffuse form of socialcontrol. Foucault
makes clear in his later work, however, that power ultimately does inhere inindividuals,
including those that are surveilled or punished. It is true that contemporary forms
ofdisciplinary organization allow ever larger number of people to be controlled by ever
smallernumbers of “specialists”; however, as Foucault explains in “The Subject and Power,”
“somethingcalled Power, with or without a capital letter, which is assumed to exist
universally in aconcentrated or diffused form, does not exist. Power exists only when it is
put into action” (219).Foucault therefore makes clear that, in itself, power “is not a
renunciation of freedom, atransference of rights, the power of each and all delegated to a
few” (220). Indeed, poweris not the same as violence because the opposite pole of violence
“can only be passivity” (220).By contrast, “a power relationship can only be articulated on
the basis of two elements which areeach indispensable if it is really to be a power
relationship: that ‘the other’ (the one over whompower is exercised) be thoroughly
recognized and maintained to the very end as a person whoacts; and that, faced with a
relationship of power, a whole field of responses, reactions, results,and possible inventions
may open up” (220). Power always entails a set of actions performedupon another persons
actions and reactions. Although violence may be a part of some powerrelationships, “In
itself the exercise of power is not violence” (220); it is “always a way of actingupon an
acting subject or acting subjects by virtue of their acting or being capable ofaction”
(220)..Foucault therefore turns in his later work to the concept of “government” in order to
explainhow power functions:Basically power is less a confrontation between two
adversaries or the linking of one tothe other than a question of government. This word must
be allowed the very broadmeaning which it had in the sixteenth century. “Government” did
not refer only topolitical structures or to the management of states; rather it designated the
way in whichthe conduct of individuals or of groups might be directed: the government of
children, ofsouls, of communities, of families, of the sick. It did not only cover the
legitimatelyconstituted forms of political or economic subjection, but also modes of action,
more orless considered and calculated, which were destined to act upon the possibilities of
actionof other people. To govern, in this sense, is to structure the possible field of action
ofothers. The relationship proper to power would not therefore be sought on the side
ofviolence or of struggle, nor on that of voluntary linking (all of which can, at best, only
bethe instruments of power), but rather in the area of the singular mode of action,
neitherwarlike nor juridical, which is government. (221).The turn to this concept of
“government” allowed Foucault to include a new element tohis understanding of power:
freedom. “Power is exercised only over free subjects, and onlyinsofar as they are free”
(221), Foucault explains. Conversely, “slavery is not a powerrelationship when man is in
chains. (In this case it is a question of a physical relationship ofconstraint.)” (221). Indeed,
recalcitrance thus becomes an integral part of the power relationship:“At the very heart of
the power relationship, and constantly provoking it, are the recalcitrance ofthe will and the
intransigence of freedom” (221-22). Foucault thus provides us with a powerfulmodel for
thinking about how to fight oppression when one sees it: “the analysis, elaboration,and
3. bringing into question of power relations and the ‘agonism’ between power relations and
theintransitivity of freedom is a permanent political task inherent in all social existence”
(223).Proper Citation of this Page:Felluga, Dino. “Modules on Foucault: On Power.”
Introductory Guide to Critical Theory.Date of last update, which you can find on the home
page. Purdue U. Date youaccessed the site. . Discussion: Politics in Sociology Memorandum
