Foucault's concept of power

Qn. Comment on Foucault's concept of power. 2023 - 1d - 150 words - Paper 1A

Foucault's concept of power operates through disciplinary norms rather than through a command-and-obedience relationship. He sees power as productive rather than as repressive, for, it produces identity and subjectivity. Identities produced by power are ways of controlling through naming, and this control is exercised in a variety of locations and not constrained at the level of Government in a narrow sense. The individual is perceived as the subject of the governance. The construction of subjectivity to an individual is by those who tell us the 'truth' about who we are - doctors, psychologists, the law - and at the same time we are subjected to the power they exercise.

Foucault gives a concept of 'Governmentality' which operates through 'normalization', by which Foucault means the processes through which every individual is made to conform to the dominant norm.

  1. Governmentality is used in increasing homogenization.
  2. Governmentality facilitates the organization of society
Foucault does not simply mean that 'Knowledge is Power', rather, he means that knowledge is already a function of power relations - knowledge is produced and gained in order to be put to a certain use, in order to achieve power.

'Far from preventing knowledge, power produces it', he says. Understanding power as being merely repressive means failing to see what needs to be explained - how the knowledge required for controlling the human body and labor has emerged. Foucault's study of history is intended to show that the human body could have been constituted as labor power only if there were technology or knowledge of the body that made it possible to organize and subjugate bodies into useful and docile roles.

Power is exercised as a technique - not embodied in an institution or a group of people - not a thing or substance. The only way it can be 'identified' is when it is exercised by some people over others. That's why an important indication of the existence of power is a display of resistance to it.


References:
  1. Political Theory: An Introduction by Rajeev Bhargava

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