Michel Foucault

Foucault's early empirical site was the psychiatric hospital, and the discovery that gives his work its charge arrived in the 1960s: the humane, reforming, therapeutic institutions of the welfare state turned out to be instruments of control in their own right. Not because anyone was lying about wanting to help.

Modern power does not need to be visible, dramatic or even intended. It needs to be continuous.

Trace the mechanism

Step 1 of 6

Test yourself

01

Drop the picture of power as a thing the state holds

Most of us carry a model where power sits at the top, belongs to somebody, and works by saying no: the law that forbids, censors, represses. Foucault says that picture is a decoy, and that in political theory we still have not cut off the king's head.

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The whole sequence

1. 01Drop the picture of power as a thing the state holdsMost of us carry a model where power sits at the top, belongs to somebody, and works by saying no: the law that forbids, censors, represses. Foucault says that picture is a decoy, and that in political theory we still have not cut off the king's head.
2. 02Look at where it actually touches peopleNot the throne. The classroom, the clinic, the workshop, the family. How you were taught to sit, to queue, to speak when spoken to, to be on time. Power circulates through the smallest vessels rather than radiating from one point.
3. 03Notice that it produces rather than repressesIt does not mainly suppress things that already exist. It manufactures them: categories, standards, knowledge, and people who fit them. The Victorians did not silence sex, they generated an enormous discourse about it, complete with new species of person.
4. 04The instruments are boring on purposeArrangement that keeps people permanently visible. A constant low-level correction of anyone slightly off, measured against a norm the institution invented. And the examination, which turns each person into a documented case with a file and a rank.
5. 05Then the watching gets installed inside the watchedBentham's Panopticon puts cells around a central tower so an inmate can always be seen and can never confirm whether he is being seen now. The uncertainty does the work. He behaves as if watched, and becomes the principle of his own subjection.
6. 06The self you find inside is one of the productsPower produces the subject in both senses: subject to authority, and a person with an interior life to examine, confess and improve. Your self-knowledge is not the bedrock underneath all this. It is one of its outputs.

The historical demonstration

Discipline and Punish opens with the public execution and dismemberment of Damiens the regicide in 1757, in appalling detail, then sets against it a drab prison timetable from eighty years later. Every hour accounted for, no blood at all.

The obvious reading is that we got kinder. Foucault's reading is that we got a different and far more efficient technology.

Sovereign power is spectacular, occasional and aimed at the body. It writes the law on the criminal's flesh where everyone can see, and then it goes away and does not touch your Tuesday afternoon. Disciplinary power is continuous, invisible and mundane. It aims to produce useful, obedient people through small constant techniques: the timetable, the drill, ranked rows of desks, the partitioning of space. It manufactures docile bodies, productive and politically harmless at once. Perfected in monasteries, armies and workshops, then generalized to the school, the hospital and the factory.

Power and knowledge are one thing

Power/knowledge, with the slash carrying the argument. They are not two separate things that meet. There is no exercise of power without organizing a field of knowledge, and no field of knowledge that does not carry relations of power inside it. The prison generates criminology, and criminology underwrites the prison.

This is why neutral expertise deserves attention rather than automatic trust. Not because experts lie. Because producing the truth about a domain is at the same time producing power over it.

Two later widenings

Biopolitics. Alongside discipline, which works on the individual body, a power aimed at the population as a biological mass: birth rates, mortality, health, hygiene, the life of the species. The old sovereign right was to take life or let live. The new formula inverts it, to make live and let die. This is the door Agamben walks through.

Governmentality. Liberal government works less by crushing freedom than by shaping it, which he calls the conduct of conduct. It structures the field of possible actions so that free people, doing what feels like their own choosing, conduct themselves in governable ways. You are not forced. You are configured to want what keeps the system running. If that sounds like a description of a well-designed app, that is the point of the behavioural state.

Psychological underpinning

Self-surveillance and internalized evaluation. The confessional mode as a technique for producing a self that can be inspected. The quiet normalizing force of psychometrics and diagnostic categories, which do not merely describe people but supply the categories people then use to understand themselves.

Primary works

• Discipline and Punish (1975). Start here, and read Part Three, "Panopticism", first if you only read one chapter.
• The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 (1976).
• Madness and Civilization (1961) and The Birth of the Clinic (1963).
• The lecture courses Security, Territory, Population and The Birth of Biopolitics (1978 to 1979), where governmentality is worked out.

Serious objections

• Historically loose in places. Specialists have contested his account of the Great Confinement and of how madness was treated before the modern period.
• If power is everywhere and produces the subject, it is unclear what resistance stands on, or on what basis anything is called bad. Habermas and Nancy Fraser press this normative gap hard and Foucault never fully answered it.
• Charged with functionalism. Institutions in his account fit their purpose a little too neatly for something nobody designed.

Where to go next

• Deleuze, "Postscript on the Societies of Control" (1990). Six pages arguing that the enclosures Foucault described were already dissolving as he wrote. Read it immediately after Discipline and Punish, not months later. It is in control after discipline.
• Goffman, Asylums (1961), the microphysics that pairs with this and is much easier to test against your own experience of any institution.
• Illich, who reaches a similar conclusion about institutions from a completely different direction and is more use if you want to build something.