Knowledge/Power

Week 4 Tutor

Dr Claudia SteinLink opens in a new window

Introduction

Michel Foucault has been hugely influential in shaping an radical new understanding of power that was no longer centred on actors or underlying structures as suggested by Marxists. He suggested that modern forms 'power' cannot be explained by mere underlying strutures but that power is more diffuse. Indeed power, he argued, is everywherel operating through epistemes and discourse, inherent to all knowledge and its ‘regimes of truth’. Fundamentally he argued that modern power is always directed at the human body. Knowledge is always power; power is always inherent to knowledge, partticularly scientific knowledge about the human condition.

The lecture and seminar investigates how his understanding of power differed from earlier understandings (e.g. Marxism). It particularly focus on the relationship of power and the making of human subjectivities, the subject of his later works. In The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, Foucault not only clarifies his understanding of the ‘power/knowledge’ nexus but also presents his ideas of ‘biopower’, a concept that has gained considerable influence in the political sciences, social sciences, philosophy, and literary studies over the past decade.

Lecture powerpoint:

Core Reading

• Michel Foucault, 'We other Victorians', The History of Sexuality. Volume 1. An Introduction [ebook in Library]
• also see chapter (https://suplaney.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/foucault-the-history-of-sexuality-volume-1.pdf)
• Michel Foucault, 'Body/Power' in Power/knowledge: selected interviews and other writings, 1972-1977, pp. 55-62.

Seminar/Essay Questions

1. According to Foucault, what is 'modern' about 'modern’ power?
2. What does Foucault understand by the ‘repressive hypothesis’ and how does it relate to practices of power?
3. According to Foucault, what is the relationship between knowledge and power?
4. How can sex be a form of power?
5. According to Foucault, what makes 'truth' true?
6. One of Foucault's main claims about power is that it is 'productive'. What does this mean?
7. What does Foucault understand by ‘biopower’ and how does it differ from ‘sovereign power’?
8. “Where there is power, there is resistance.” (Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction), Discuss.
9. “It is not the activity of the subject of knowledge that produces a corpus of knowledge, useful or resistant to power, but power-knowledge, the processes and struggles that transverse it and of which it is made up, that determines the forms and possible domains of knowledge.” (Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1). Discuss.
10. “Modern man is not the man who goes off to discover himself, his secrets, and his hidden truth; he is a man who tries to invent himself”. (Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction), Discuss.

Further Reading

• Michel Foucault, ‘The Birth of Social Medicine’, in Michel Foucault, Power, ed. J.D. Faubion, (2000),134-156.
• Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1977).
• ibid, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France 1977–78 (2007).
• ibid.,‘The Right of Death and Power over Life’, in Michel Foucault, The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (1984), pp. 258-272.
• ibid., ‘The Politics of Health in the Eighteenth-Century, in Michel Foucault, The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (1984), pp. 273-290.
• ibid. ‘Truth and Power’, in Michel Foucault, The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (1984), pp. 51-75.
• ibid. ‘The Subject and Power’, in Afterword to Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, ed. H.L. Dreyfuand, Paul Rabinow (1982) [Also available on JSTOR: Critical Inquiry, Summer 1982, http://www.jstor.org/pss/1343197].
• ibid., 'Power/Knowledge', in Colin Gordon, ed. Power/Knowledge (Brighton, 1980), pp. 55-62.
• Davidson, Arnold L., Foucault and His Interlocutors (1997), pp. 107-182.
• Gutting, Gary, A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2005) [A very, very good and affordable introduction!]
• Rabinow, Paul and Rose Nicklas, ‘Thought on the Concept of Biopower’ [see http://www.lse.ac.uk/sociology/pdf/rabinowandrose-biopowertoday03.pdf].
• Rabinow, Paul, and Rose, Niklas, ‘Biopower Today’, BioSocieties 1 (2006): 195–217.
• Please also consult the Handbook of the Historiography Module for further secondary readings on Foucault....they are endless.