Power & Freedom Michel Foucault

1. Power & FreedomMichel Foucault Panopticism (Political Science 506)

2. Architecture • “Architectures” of power • The space in which people live & interact • Power more present in these architectures than in individuals • While individuals may occupy particular nodes within these networks of power, the power resides in the architecture • Literal and metaphorical • Networks • What are the beliefs and behaviors encouraged by a particular structure?

6. Panopticism • Plague towns • Freeze life into immobility, tremendous enforcement cost • Panopticon • Allows for dynamic progress & experimentation, once constructed power continuously present but ideally never need be exercised, extraordinarily low cost • A massively plastic & adaptable organization of power • By allowing public examination of the panopticon, remains democratic: a power of no one over all • Surveillance, not spectacle • “the circuits of communication are the supports of an accumulation and a centralization of knowledge; the play of signs defines the anchorages of power” (217) • The individual is constituted w/in this architecture • “a power that insidiously objectifies those on whom it is applied; to form a body of knowledge about those individuals, rather than to deploy the ostentatious signs of sovereignty” (220)

7. The Disciplined Society • The functional inversion of the disciplines • Example: free schools founded on negative justification (combat godlessness, idleness, gangs of beggars), but move to positive justification (prepare child for job market, develop the mind) • The swarming of the disciplinary mechanisms • Disciplinary mechanisms emerge into society • Example: schools supervise children’s families • State control of mechanisms of discipline • Police, interested in everything, omnipresent surveillance • Police are disciplinary mechanism that fills the gaps between other mechanisms

8. The Disciplined Society • Disciplines as “infra-law” (222) • System of omnipresent but uncertain surveillance • “systems of micro-power that are essentially non-egalitarian and asymmetrical” • Example: female sexual morality, health, violence, surveillance • Treated as very foundation of society, without which it will collapse • “a series of mechanisms for unbalancing power relations definitively and everywhere; hence the persistence in regarding them as the humble, but concrete form of every morality, whereas they are a set of physico-political techniques.” (223) • “The formation of knowledge and the increase of power regularly reinforce one another in a circular process” (224) • Names and power • How could this system of power be resisted?