5/19/2009 POSC 304 Gershenson Final Essay: Foucault

This essay is about the book The Foucault Reader which is a compilation of Michel Foucaults writings. Michel Foucault is a political theorist who wrote about the relationship between power and knowledge and how power works in the world. He believes that the state created controlling institutions such as the education institutions, the prison system, the asylums, and sexual norms in order to control the populace and make them do whatever the state wants them to do. In his work, he traced the history of these institutions in order to show the insidious way that they use power to coerce people to be obedient. I compare the writing of Michel Foucault to Hannah Arendt, a woman who completely disagrees with him, and with Freud and Nietzsche, two men who generally agree with him. I believe that Michel Foucaults theories make a lot of sense and I believe in them on the whole but I think that he gives too little credit to the power of the individual will to overcome overpowering forces against it. Michel Foucault was born in Poitiers, France, in 1926. His father, Paul Foucault, was an eminent surgeon. He lectured in many universities throughout the world and served as director at the Institut Francais at Hamburg, and the Institut de Philosophie at the Faculte des Letteres at the University of Clermont-Ferrand. He wrote frequently for French newspapers and reviews and held a chair at Frances most prestigious institution, the College de France (Foucault End page). Foucault wrote Madness and Civilization, The Order of Things, The Archeology of Knowledge, The Birth of the Clinic, Discipline and Punish, and The History of Sexuality.

Michel Foucaults early education was a mix of success and mediocrity and then he attended Jesuit Collge Saint-Stanislas, where he excelled. During World War II, Pontiers came under German occupation and after World War II he was admitted to the prestigious cole Normale Suprieure (rue d'Ulm), the traditional gateway to an academic career in the humanities in France at the time. His personal life at the cole Normale was difficult because he suffered from acute depression. He decided to see a psychiatrist about it which led to his fascination with psychiatry. Foucault would dedicate much of his writings to psychiatry and the way that the state controls people in Madness and Civilization. He earned a license in psychology as well as a degree in philosophy in 1952. He then became involved in the clinical side of psychology which exposed him to thinkers such as Ludwig Binswanger. Foucault joined the French communist party from 1950-1953. He was inducted into the party by Louis Althusser. Foucault was a homosexual and I believe this had an effect on his work, especially his work concerning the control of sexuality. I also believe that his homosexuality influenced his views on the nature of power because he belonged to a group of people at a time period in which they were severely persecuted and marginalized. He spent a lot of time working with prisoners in prisons and mentally ill patients in asylums before he wrote his books. The time that he spent at these institutions and the conversations he had with these people greatly shaped his views on how these people were mistreated. Also, his time as a member of the communist party influenced his work because it showed him the power dynamics between people in a party that supposedly treated everyone equal. Foucault died in June 1984. The Foucault Reader is a book that gives a very complete idea of Michel Foucaults ideas by including sections form almost all of his writings. One of the central ideas that Foucault focuses on are his theories concerning discipline and punishment. He regard[s] punishment as a

political tactic (Foucault 170). He doesnt see punishment the way it is normally is seen as a way to correct something that is incorrect, a way to deter criminals, a way to teach, and a way to improve. He sees punishment as a way to control people and as a form of power. He talks about discipline in the schools and how it is used to correct the behavior of children. By the word punishment , one must understand everything that is capable of making children feel the offence they have committed, everything that is capable of humiliating them, of confusing them:a certain coldness, a certain indifference, a question, a humiliation, a removal from office (Foucault 194). And he also talks about discipline in the prisons and how it is used to correct the behavior of criminals and those considered anomalies. Discipline for him is simply a tool of the state to control its people, to make them whatever it considers good citizens, to get them to do whatever the state wants. It was a questionof making the slightest departure from correct behavior subject to punishment (194). Foucault supports many of his theories by tracing the history of what he is writing about. He traced the history of insane people and mental institutions in order to write Madness and Civilizations, his book about how the state controls the people it considers abnormal. He wrote about how the penal institution is a form of power and control by tracing the history of prisons in Discipline and Punish. And he traces the history of sexuality form ancient times and how the state and society perceived sexuality both then and today in The History of Sexuality. He sees the general pattern that by the 18th century forms of control become very much more common in society. More asylums are erected, more penal institutions are created, discipline and normalization are increased, there is more surveillance going on, and sexuality is becoming more and more repressed and controlled.

Foucault writes about docile bodies (Foucault 179). The purpose of the state is to make bodies malleable; to make them useful to the state. He comes up with this idea from tracing the history of the military. Hundreds of years ago military men were much different from what they are today, they fought differently and they fought in a stiffer manner as they marched in rows with large guns and pikes. But as history wore on military personnel were forced to become more regimental and disciplined. The military man of today is taught to follow orders, to be a cog in a very large and sophisticated machine, and the soldier of today is less glorified than the soldier of the past. The soldier of today is expendable to the state. In The History of Sexuality, Volume I, Foucault writes about the history of the states power over taking the lives of its citizens. In Ancient Rome, patrias protestas was the right that the father in a family had to take the life of his wife or children if he wanted to. He had the power to give life and to take it away. Throughout history, the sovereign had the power to use the lives of his subjects to protect himself and his country. Then in more modern times the state has less power over death but more power over life. Over time power would no longer be dealing simply with legal subjects over whom the ultimate dominion was death, but with living beings, and the mastery it would be able to exercise over them would have to be applied at the level of life itself; it was the taking charge of life, more than the threat of death, that gave power its access even to the body (Foucault 265). The laws and the court system is just another tool of the state to control its people. Law cannot help but be armed, and its arm par excellence is death (Foucault 266). The death penalty is used to control the behavior of citizens as well as prisoners. Prisons punish people by taking away their time making prisoners feel that one is in prison to pay ones debt for their crimes against the state (Foucault 216). Foucault writes quite a bit about Jeremy Benthams idea of the

panopticon. The panopticon is an architectural design for a prison building in which the prison guard can see all of the prisoners without the prisoners being able to see the prison guard. This creates a feeling among the prisoners and the prison guard that they are being constantly watched and so that changes their behavior. The theme of the panopticon [is] at once surveillance and observation, security and knowledge, individualization and totalization, isolation and transparency (Foucault 217). There are two ways that he talks about power; the power to control knowledge and the power to control bodies. Knowledge and truth arent written in stone for Foucault. For him, power and knowledge are connected and in an internal cycle with each other. Power is used to control bodies through the control of sex and reproduction. Foucault says that at the beginning of the seventeenth century, sex was pretty much open and there was no shame in talking about it (Foucault 292). But as the Victorian age came around sex became a shameful thing to express in any way in public. Sexuality was pushed into the private realm and everyone started to pay attention to it. Sexual deviances were frowned upon such as homosexuality and sensualism. All this garrulous attention which has us in a stew over sexuality, is it not motivated by one basic concern: to ensure population, to reproduce labor capacity, to perpetuate the form of social relations: in short, to constitute a sexuality that is economically useful and politically conservative? (Foucault 317). The two political theorists that I will put the writings of Michel Foucault into a dialogue with are Hannah Arendt and Sigmund Freud. Hannah Arendt wrote much about the purpose of life and what gives life meaning. She also wrote about power. In The Vita Activa, Hannah Arendt writes that the only way a person can have a fulfilling life is to speak and be seen by many people. Hannah Arendt holds a very different opinion than Michel Foucault when it comes to

seeing and being seen in the public realm. Ones true identity is distorted when one is being watched by others. When he talks about the panopticon, he says that when the prisoner is being seen he feels that he needs to change his behavior. He feels that he is always being watched and that makes him very conscientious of what he is doing because if the prison guard even suspects that he is doing something wrong he can be punished. Hannah Arendt, on the other hand, would totally disagree with that. She believes that being seen in the public realm is the only way a person can truly gain their identity. She saw the state as a place where no one could be called happy without his share in public happiness,no one could be called free without his experience in public freedom, and no one could be called either happy or free without participating, and having a share, in public power (Arendt 516). She also writes much about revolutions. She sees revolutions as a natural phenomenon that happens periodically. Revolutions tear bad regimes apart and help build better and more equitable regimes like the American Revolution and the French Revolution. Arendt would say that Foucaults theories concerning the enormous power that the state has over individuals is flawed because the individuals could rise up and overthrow the state if they were really so oppressed. Foucault does not really mention revolutions in his writings. He sees governments going in the opposite direction and there being less and less freedom and more and more oppression. Sort of like the state overthrowing the people instead of the people overthrowing the state. Arendt would also disagree with Foucaults theory of power. For Arendt, power comes from individual work while for Foucault it comes from coercion from the most powerful group. Arendt writes that man, the fabricator of the human artifice, his own world, is indeed a lord and master, not only because he has set himself up as master of all nature, but because he is master of

himself and his doings (Arendt 175). Actions express themselves and through action an individual can define himself to everyone around him. For in every action what is primarily intended by the doeris the disclosure of his own image (Arendt 179). The products that are created through work can last forever. For Foucault, the world is master of man, man is not master of the world. People dont really act as much as they are acted upon. People are less proactive and more reactive. For Foucault, actions dont really lead anywhere because the forces of coercion of the outside are so powerful that they overpower you and shape you. Arendt believes that man has a lot more freedom to chose than Foucault does. Freud would agree with most of what Foucault says about how people are controlled through punishment and discipline. Freud believed strongly that human beings only want to be happy, that is our goal in life. In order to be happy, he says, human beings try to experience as much pleasure as they can and to avoid as much pain and unpleasant experiences as they can. The type of punishment that Foucault describes is the type of pain that human beings would do anything to avoid. So punishment would inevitably lead to modifications in peoples behavior because people would go to great lengths to avoid pain. Freud would also agree with Foucault concerning sexuality. Freud would very much agree that sexuality was being progressively repressed from the 17th century onward especially during the Victorian era and that even though sexuality was being represses it came out in other ways. Freud would also agree with Foucault that society is sexually centered and sex crazed, so much so that it is seriously concerned with everything sexual such as infant sexuality, child sexuality, homosexuality, sexual deviance, and what goes on in the bedroom. But I think Foucault and Freud differ in that Freud agrees that it is right and natural for society to be so interested in sex while Foucault sees it as unusual and simply as a way that the state is grasping

for power. They would both agree that repressing sexuality is a bad thing but they believe so for different reasons. Repressing sexuality for Freud is bad because it leads to mental illness and personal problems For Foucault it is bad because it is controlling the individual ability to express itself. It is taking away the individuals personal power over her body and giving it to the state and that includes the power to feel pleasure and the power of procreation. Friedrich Nietzsche is another political theorist that would strongly agree with Foucault. Foucault got many of his ideas form Friedrich Nietzsche and worked them further. Nietzsche believes that conceptions of what is good and what is evil, morality in short, is based upon the beliefs of the hegemonic group, Christianity. Morality is derived from Christianity and he traces this back through history in his work The Genealogy of Morals. Foucault also uses history and genealogy to trace how the history of discipline, punishment, the asylum, and sexuality developed in order to support his theories. Their basic theories about the nature of power are basically the same I believe. The only difference is that Nietzsche traces the slave morality of the Jews all the way back before the creation of Christianity and how that slave morality came to power. With the Jews there began the slave revolt in morality: that revolt which has a history of two thousand years behind it and which we no longer see because ithas been victorious (Nietzsche 7). Foucault, on the other hand, traces the more modern history of the institutions of power and in todays world it is the state and state institutions that have the power. Nietzsche focuses on the weak coming to power while Foucault focuses on the more powerful overcoming the weak. Even though I agree with most of Foucaults ideas I think he really treats the ability of people to shape their own lives as very small. Arendt thinks the exact opposite of this. Arendt thinks that people have all of the power in the world in order to shape their own lives through

their work and the things that they create. Foucault sees people as little more than clay to be molded at the states will. For Foucault, people are very weak and cant fight the powers that be. I think that this is wrong. In my opinion, People arent as weak as Foucault says they are. The Power of the state is very coercive and great but I believe that the spirit of the individual is even greater to overcome it in the end. Michel Foucault is a very interesting political theorist. He wrote a great volume of work concerning the way that power works through state institutions such as the prison system, the asylums, and the educational system. His works were greatly influenced by the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Emmanuel Kant, and Sigmund Freud. His works have greatly influenced the works of many political theorists that came after him. I have compared his work to Hannah Arendts, Sigmund Freuds, and Friedrich Nietzsches and I have found that his work is the exact opposite of Arendts and is very similar to Nietzsches and Freuds. I, for the most part, agree with his theories that power is a coercive force that works through many institutions and power is basically what the stronger group has over the weaker group. Even though I agree for the most part in what Foucault has to say about how power and knowledge work, I have to disagree with him on the extent of power that the state is able to influence over the individual. I feel that Foucault doesnt give the individual enough credit in his or her ability to resist state power and shape him or herself.