Homework Task: Read the following handout on Michel Foucault

and the Theory of Power while keeping in mind the opening four
chapters of 1984.

MICHEL FOUCAULT seeks throughout his work to make sense of how our
contemporary society is structured differently from the society that
preceded us. He has been particularly influential precisely because he
tends to illustrate the dangers inherent in those Enlightenment reforms
that were designed to correct the barbarity of previous periods (the
elimination of dungeons, the modernization of medicine, the creation of
the public university, etc.). As Foucault illustrates, each process of
modernization entails disturbing effects with regard to the power of the
individual and the control of government. Indeed, his most influential
work, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, paints a picture of
contemporary society that sometimes resembles George Orwell's 1984. He
explores the ways that government has claimed ever greater control over
and enforcement of ever more private aspects of our lives.
In particular, Foucault explores the transition from what he terms a
"culture of spectacle" to a "carceral culture." Whereas in the former
punishment was effected on the body in public displays of torture,
dismemberment, and obliteration, in the latter punishment and discipline
become internalized and directed to the constitution and, when necessary,
rehabilitation of social subjects.
Jeremy Bentham's nineteenth-century prison reforms provide Foucault
with a representative model for what happens to society in the nineteenth
century. Bentham argued in The "Panopticon" that the perfect prison
would be structured in a such a way that cells would be open to a central
tower. In the model, individuals in the cells do not interact with each other
and are constantly confronted by the panoptic tower (pan=all;
optic=seeing). They cannot, however, see when there is a person in the
tower; they must believe that they could be watched at any moment: "the
inmate must never know whether he is being looked at at any one
moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so".

Bentham saw this prison reform as a model for how society should
function. To maintain order in a democratic and capitalist society, the
populace needs to believe that any person could be surveilled at any time.
In time, such a structure would ensure that the people would soon
internalize the panoptic tower and police themselves: "He who is
subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility
for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon
himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he
simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own
subjection"
This system of control has, arguably, been aided in our own culture by new
technological advancements that allow federal agencies to track your
movement and behavior (the internet, telephones, cell phones, social
security numbers, the census, ATMs, credit cards, and the ever increasing
number of surveillance cameras in urban spaces). By carceral culture,
Foucault refers to a culture in which the panoptic model of surveillance
has been diffused as a principle of social organization.
Some of the effects of this new model of organization include :
1) The internalization of rules and regulations.
As we naturalize rules, society could be said to become less willing
to contest unjust laws. Of course, Foucault has Nazi Germany in mind
when he thinks about conformity; however, studies of American society
(Philip Zimbardo, Stanley Milgram) have suggested that Americans are, in
fact, just as willing to follow authorities even when it means doing violence
to innocent subjects.
2) rehabilitation rather than cruel and unusual punishment.
This reform was implemented because of nineteenth-century outcries over
the inhumane treatment of prisoners and the insane. Foucault however
questions the subsequent emphasis on the "normal," which entails the
enforcement of the status quo on ever more private aspects of our lives
(for example, sexuality). As he puts it, "The judges of normality are
present everywhere. We are in the society of the teacher-judge, the
doctor-judge, the educator-judge, the 'social-worker'-judge; it is on them
that the universal reign of the normative is based; and each individual,
wherever he may find himself, subjects to it his body, his gestures, his
behaviour, his apptitudes, his achievements.
3) surveillance into ever more private aspects of our lives,
which, once again, is aided by new surveillance technology
4) information society
All of this surveillance and information-gathering leads, of course, to
huge challenges for the organization and retrieval of data. Perhaps the
very move of society into this new mode of social organization made the
invention of the computer inevitable since it allows us to organize ever
more vast amounts of data.
5) bureaucracy
A new white-collar labor force is necessary to set up the procedures
for information retrieval and storage. This form of organization encourages
a separation from real people since it turns individuals into statistics and
paperwork. A classic example is Nazi Germany's Adolf Eichmann.
6) efficiency
Value is placed on the most efficient means of organizing data and
individuals to effect the mass production and dissemination of more goods

and information, even if at the expense of exploitation or injustice.

7) specialization.
Members of the workforce are organized into increasingly specialized
fields, so much so that we increasingly rely on other "experts" to complete
tasks that had previously been shared or common knowledge (the
preparation of meats and other food products, building construction,
transportation, etc.)

MICHEL FOUCAULT's understanding of power changes between his

early work on institutions (Madness and Civilization, The Birth of the Clinic,
Discipline and Punish) and his later work on sexuality and governmentality.
In the early work, Foucault sometimes gives a sense that power
somehow inheres in institutions themselves rather than in the
individuals that make those institutions function. Of course, what
Foucault explores in those books is how the creation of 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. The Panopticon becomes Foucault's model for the way other
institutions function: the Panopticon "is an important mechanism, for it
automatizes and disindividualizes power. Power has its principle not so
much in a person as in a certain concerted distribution of bodies, surfaces,
lights, gazes; in an arrangement whose internal mechanisms produce the
relation in which individuals are caught up"..
The idea of discipline itself similarly functions as an abstraction of
the idea of power from any individual: "'Discipline' may be identified
neither with an institution nor with an apparatus; it is a type of power, a
modality for its exercise, comprising a whole set of instruments,
techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets; it is a physics' or an
'anatomy' of power, a technology". Bureaucracies, like disciplines,
contribute to the process of disindividuation since they promote the
facelessness of the bureaucrat ("I'm just doing my job"; "I'm just a cog in
the machine") and tend to continue functioning even after major
revolutions. (After the fall of Nazi Germany, for example, the general
bureaucratic structure, and most of its workers, remained in place.)
The effect of this tendency to disindividualize power is the
perception that power resides in the machine itself (the "panoptic
machine"; the "technology" of power) rather than in its operator.
For this reason, one can finish reading Foucault's Discipline and Punish
with the paranoid feeling that we are powerless before such an effective
and diffuse form of social control. Foucault makes clear in his later work,
however, that power ultimately does inhere in individuals, including those
that are surveilled or punished. A power relationship can only be
articulated on the basis of two elements which are each indispensable if it
is really to be a power relationship: that 'the other' (the one over whom
power is exercised) be thoroughly recognized and maintained to the very
end as a person who acts; and that, faced with a relationship of power, a
whole field of responses, reactions, results, and possible inventions may
open up. Foucault therefore turns in his later work to the concept of
"government" in order to explain how power functions:
Basically power is less a confrontation between two adversaries or
the linking of one to the other than a question of government. This word

must be allowed the very broad meaning that it had in the sixteenth
century. "Government" did not refer only to political structures or to the
management of states; rather it designated the way in which the conduct
of individuals or of groups might be directed: the government of children,
of souls, of communities, of families, of the sick. It did not only cover the
legitimately constituted forms of political or economic subjection, but also
modes of action, more or less considered and calculated, which were
destined to act upon the possibilities of action of other people. To govern,
in this sense, is to structure the possible field of action of others. The
relationship proper to power would not therefore be sought on the side of
violence or of struggle, nor on that of voluntary linking (all of which can, at
best, only be the instruments of power), but rather in the area of the
singular mode of action, neither warlike nor juridical, which is government.
The turn to this concept of "government" allowed Foucault to include a
new element to his understanding of power: freedom. "Power is exercised
only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free"., Foucault
explains. Conversely, "slavery is not a power relationship when man is in
chains. (In this case it is a question of a physical relationship of
constraint.)".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 of the will and the
intransigence of freedom. Foucault thus provides us with a powerful model
for thinking about how to fight oppression when one sees it: "the analysis,
elaboration, and bringing into question of power relations and the
'agonism' between power relations and the intransitivity of freedom is a
permanent political task inherent in all social existence.
TASK
The panopticon, lauded by Foucault, was designed by Jeremy Bentham in
the late 18th century as a structure that allowed a few number of guards to
control a large number of occupants. When applied to prisons the
architecture of the Panopticon allowed guards to maintain surveillance
over all prisoners. The structure exerts discipline because inmates are
constantly under the gaze of a guard, or at least they should assume that
they could be watched at any time.
Identify the similarities between Foucaults description of the
prison system as a model of society and Orwells imagined society
in 1984.
Consider how the method of control used by the party parallels
Foucaults description of the power of surveillance as a type of
discipline.