What did Michel Foucault say about power?

Foucault uses the term ‘power/knowledge’ to signify that power is constituted through accepted forms of knowledge, scientific understanding and ‘truth’: ‘Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint.

What were Michel Foucault’s ideas?

In his 1975 book Discipline and Punish, Foucault argued that French society had reconfigured punishment through the new “humane” practices of “discipline” and “surveillance”, used in new institutions such as prisons, the mental asylums, schools, workhouses and factories.

What are Foucault’s views on discourse and power explain?

Discourse, as defined by Foucault, refers to: ways of constituting knowledge, together with the social practices, forms of subjectivity and power relations which inhere in such knowledges and relations between them. Discourses are more than ways of thinking and producing meaning.

What is Foucault disciplinary power?

According to Foucault disciplinary power characterises the way in which the relations of inequality and oppression in modern western societies are (re)produced through the psychological complex.

What does Foucault mean by disciplinary power?

What does Foucault’s concept of biopower add to our understanding of how power operates in modern societies?

The subject (the person, the self, one’s identity) is thus the product of history and power. Foucault’s concept of biopower describes the administration and regulation of human life at the level of the population and the individual body – it is a form of power that targets the population (Rogers et al 2013).

How is power exercised Foucault?

Power always entails a set of actions performed upon another persons actions and reactions. 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” (221), Foucault explains.

What is Foucault’s concept of discipline?

Discipline for Foucault is a type of power, a modality for its exercise. It comprises a whole set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets. This type of power forms a body of knowledge about the individuals it disciplines, rather than the deployment of visible signs of sovereignty.

How is power productive Foucault?

For Foucault, power is productive as well as repressive. Power does not just come from those in authority: it manifests itself in many different ways and from many different points at once. Power directs the transmission of knowledge and discourses and shapes our concepts and self-image.

What is Foucault’s most important claim about power?

For Foucault’s most crucial claim about power is that we must refuse to treat it as philosophers have always treated their central concepts, namely as a unitary and homogenous thing that is so at home with itself that it can explain everything else. Updates on everything new at Aeon.

What is power-knowledge discourse according to Foucault?

According to Foucault, power-knowledge discourse does not mean “knowledge is power.” It is a relationship that shows how certain knowledge is suppressed and other knowledge is produced through power. Power produces knowledge as well as suppressed knowledge.

What is Foucault’s genealogy?

Substantively, Foucault’s genealogy questioned the ways in which knowledge and power interpenetrate in certain types of practices, such as the regulation of the body, governing bodies, and the formation of the self (see Foucault on power and knowledge). Thus, it asks how people govern themselves and others through the production of knowledge.

What can we learn from Foucault’s skepticism?

Foucault’s skeptical supposition thus allowed him to conduct careful enquiries into the actual functions of power. What these studies reveal is that power, which easily frightens us, turns out to be all the more cunning because its basic forms of operation can change in response to our ongoing efforts to free ourselves from its grip.