Bourdieu and Foucault

Pierre Bourdieu
The Social Institution of Symbolic Power

Rites of Institutions
To speak of rites of institution is to suggest that all rites tend to consecrate or legitimate an arbitrary boundary, by fostering a misrecognition of the arbitrary nature of the limit and encourage a recognition of it as legitimate; or, what amounts to the same thing (118).

By solemnly marking the passage over a line which establishes a fundamental division in the social order, rites draw the attention of the observer to the passage (whence the expression 'rites of passage'), whereas the important thing is the line (118).

Thus sexually differentiated rites consecrate the difference between the sexes: they constitute a simple difference of fact as a legitimate distinction. as an institution. The separation accomplished in the ritual (which itself effects a separation) exercises an effect of consecration (118-119).

To institute, in this case, is to consecrate, that is, to sanction and sanctify a particular state of things, an established order, in exactly the same way that a constitution does in the legal and political sense of the term (119).

In short, if it wishes to understand the most fundamental social phenomena, which occur as much in pre-capitalist societies as in our own world (degrees are just as much a part of magic as are amulets), social science must take account of the symbolic efficacy of rites of institution, that is, the power they possess to act on reality by acting on its representation(119).

None the less, as is very clear in the case of social classes, we are always dealing with continua, with continuous distributions, due to the fact that different principles of differentiation produce different divisions that are never completely congruent. However, social magic always manages to produce discontinuity out of continuity(120).

To institute, to assign an essence, a competence, is to impose a right to be that is an obligation of being so (or to be so). It is to signify to someone what he is and how he should conduct himself as a consequence. In this case, the indicative is an imperative. The code of honour is only a developed form of the expression that says of a man: 'he's a mans man'. To institute, to give a social definition, an identity, is also to impose boundaries (120).

The act of institution is thus an act of communication, but of a particular kind: it signifies to someone what his identity is, but in a way that both expresses it to him and imposes it on him by expressing it in front of everyone (kategorein, meaning originally, to accuse publicly) and thus informing him in an authoritative manner of what he is and what he must be (121).

This is also one of the functions of the act of institution: to discourage permanently any attempt to cross the line, to transgress, desert, or quit (122).

The work of inculcation through which the lasting imposition of the arbitrary limit is achieved can seek to naturalize the decisive breaks that constitute an arbitrary cultural limit those expressed in fundamental oppositions like masculine/feminine, etc (123).

More convincingly than the external signs which adorn the body (like decorations, uniforms. army stripes, insignia, etc.), the incorporated signs (such as manners, ways of speaking - accents -, ways of walking or standing- gait, posture, bearing-, table manners. etc. and taste) which underlie the production of all practices aimed. intentionally or not, both at signifying and at signifying social position through the interplay of distinctive differences, are destined to function as so many calls to order, by virtue of which those who might have forgotten (or forgotten themselves) are reminded of the position assigned to them by the institution(123-124).

Description and Prescription

We know that the social order owes some measure of its permanence to the fact that it imposes schemes of classification which, being adjusted to objective classifications, produce a form of recognition of this order, the kind implied by the misrecognition of the arbitrariness of its foundations: the correspondence between objective divisions and classificatory schemes, between objective structures and mental structures, underlies a kind of original adherence to the established order (127).

The struggle lies therefore at the very root of the construction of the class (social, ethnic, sexual, etc.): every group is the site of a struggle to impose a legitimate principle of group construction, and every distribution of properties, whether it concerns sex or age, education or wealth, may serve as a basis for specifically political divisions or struggles (130).

Indeed, any attempt to institute a new division must reckon with the resistance of those who, occupying a dominant position in the space thus divided, have an interest in perpetuating a doxic relation to the social world which leads to the acceptance of established divisions as natural or to their symbolic denial through the affirmation of a higher unity (national, familial, etc) (130).

Michel Foucault
Discipline and Punish

Panopticisn
Bentham's Panopticon is the architectural figure of this composition. We know the principle on which it was based: at the periphery, an annular building; at the centre, a tower; this tower IS pierced with wide windows that open onto the inner side of the ring; the peripheric building is divided into cells, each of which extends the whole width of the building; they have two windows, one on the inside, corresponding to the windows of the tower; the other, on the outside, allows the light to cross the cell from one end to the other. All that is needed, then, is to place a supervisor in a central tower (200).

The panoptic mechanism arranges spatial unities that make it possible to see constantly and to recognize immediately. In short, it reverses the principle of the dungeon; or rather of its three functions - to enclose, to deprive of light and to hide - It preserves only the first and eliminates the other two. Full lighting and the eye of a supervisor capture better than darkness, which ultimately protected. Visibility is a trap. (200).

Each individual, in his place, is securely confined to a cell from which he is seen from the front by the supervisor; but the side walls prevent him from coming into contact with his companions. He is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication (200).

Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power (201).

In view of this, Bentham laid down the principle that power should be visible and unverifiable. Visible: the inmate will constantly have before his eyes the tall outline of the central tower from which he is spied upon. Unverifiable: 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 (201).

But the Panopticon was also a laboratory; it could be used as a machine to carry out experiments, to alter behaviour, to train or correct individuals (203).

The Panopticon, on the other hand, must be understood as a generalizable model of functioning; a way of defining power relations in terms of the everyday life of men (205).

But the Panopticon must not be understood as a dream building: it is the diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to Its Ideal form; its functioning, abstracted from any obstacle, resistance or friction, must be represented as a pure architectural and optical system: it is in fact a figure of political technology that may and must be detached from any specific use (205).

It is a type of location of bodies in space, of distribution of individuals in relation to one another, of hierarchical organization, of disposition of centres and channels of power, of definition of the instruments and modes of intervention of power, which can be implemented in hospnals, workshops, schools, prisons (205).

In each of its applications, it makes it possible to perfect the exercise of power. It does this in several ways: because it can reduce the number of those who exercise It, while increasing the number of those on whom it is exercised (206).

The panoptic schema makes any apparatus of power more intense: it assures its economy (in material, in personnel, in time); It assures its efficacity by its preventative character, its continuous functioning and its automatic mechanisms (206).

The Panopticon, on the other hand, has a role of amplification; although it arranges power, although It is intended to make it more economic and more effective, it does so not for power itself, nor for the immediate salvation of a threatened society: its aim is to strengthen the social forces to increase production, to develop the economy, spread education, raise the level of public morality; to increase and multiply (207-208).

'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 (215).

it is not that the beautiful totality of the individual is amputated, repressed, altered by our social order, it is rather that the individual is carefully fabricated in it, according to a whole technique of forces and bodies (217).

 Generally

speaking, it might be said that the disciplines are techniques for assuring the ordering of human multiplicities (218).

 Three

criteria of a tactics of power

to obtain the exercise of power at the lowest possible cost (218). to bring the effects of this social power to their maximum intensity and to extend them as far as possible, without either failure or interval (218). to link this 'economic' growth of power with the output of the apparatuses (218).