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Ø Prepared by : KAVITABA P. GOHIL

Ø Roll No : 19

Ø Paper – 8 : CULTURAL STUDIES

Ø TOPIC: POWER/KNOWLEDGE: Selected Interviews and Other Writings [1972-1977] by Michel Foucault

Ø M.A (English) : Sem -2

Ø Enrollment No: 2069108420180018

Ø Batch : 2017-19

Ø Email : kavitabaprahaladsinhjigohil@gmail.com

Ø Submitted to : Smt .S. B Gardi, Department of English, MKBU.

POWER/KNOWLEDGE: Selected Interviews and Other Writings [1972-1977] by Michel Foucault

Ø Preface:

Foucault was interested in the way power and structures depended upon structure of knowledge and how, once they acquire knowledge, create subjects to be controlled. Foucault’s methodology seeks to understand how some sections of the population have been classified as criminals or insane. That is, he is interested in understanding processes of classification that helped exclude some people from society. Foucault argues that certain authorities who possess power in society produce knowledge about those who lack power. Such a system of knowledge is called “discourse”. The arts, religion, science and the law are discourse that ‘produce’ particular subjects.

Ø Illustrations from some of his important interviews:

Interviewer: Network of forms of control (quadrillage) is set in place. Is the liberation possible without the quadrillage? (Foucault)

Foucault: As always with relations of power, one is faced with complex phenomena which don't obey the Hegelian form of the dialectic. Mastery and awareness of one's own body can be acquired only through the effect of an investment of power in the body: gymnastics, exercises, muscle-building, nudism, glorification of the body beautiful. All of this belongs to the pathway leading to the desire of one's own body, by way of the insistent, persistent, meticulous work of power on the bodies of children or soldiers, the healthy bodies. But once power produces this effect, there inevitably emerge the responding claims and affirmations, those of one's own body against power, of health against the economic system, of pleasure against the moral norms of sexuality, marriage, and decency. Suddenly, what had made power strong becomes used to attack it. Power, after investing itself in the body, finds itself exposed to a counterattack in that same body. Do you recall the panic of the institutions of the social body, the doctors and politicians, at the idea of non-legalised cohabitation (l'union fibre) or free abortion? But the impression that power weakens and vacillates here is in fact mistaken; power can retreat here, re-organise its forces, invest itself elsewhere . . . and so the battle continues. (Foucault)

Interviewer: Your study is concentrated on all those micro-powers that are exercised at the level of daily life. Aren't you neglecting the State apparatus here? (Foucault)

Foucault: It's true that since the late nineteenth century Marxist and 'Marxised' revolutionary movements have given special importance to the State apparatus as the stake of their struggle. What were the ultimate consequences of this? In order to be able to fight a State which is more than just a government, the revolutionary movement must possess equivalent politico-military forces and hence must constitute itself as a party, organised internally in the same way as a State apparatus with the same mechanisms of hierarchies and organisation of powers. This consequence is heavy with significance. Secondly, there is the question, much discussed within Marxism itself, of the capture of the State apparatus: should this be considered as a straightforward take-over, accompanied by appropriate modifications, or should it be the opportunity for the destruction of that apparatus? You know how the issue was finally settled. The State apparatus must be undermined, but not completely undermined, since the class struggle will not be brought to an immediate end with the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Hence the State apparatus must be kept sufficiently intact for it to be employed against the class enemy. So we reach a second consequence: during the period of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the State apparatus must to some extent at least be maintained. Finally then, as a third consequence, in order to operate these State apparatuses which have been taken over but not destroyed, it will be necessary to have recourse to technicians and specialists. And in order to do this one has to call upon the old class which is acquainted with the apparatus, namely the bourgeoisie. This clearly is what happened in the USSR. I don't claim at all that the State apparatus is unimportant, but it seems to me that among all the conditions for avoiding a repetition of the Soviet experience and preventing the revolutionary process from running into the ground, one of the first things that has to be understood is that power isn't localised in the State apparatus and that nothing in society will be changed if the mechanisms of power that function outside, below and alongside the State apparatuses, on a much more minute and everyday level, are not also changed. (Foucault)

· His Lecture

Lecture on: 7 January 1976

I have sketched a genealogical history of the origins of a theory and knowledge of anomaly and of the various techniques that relate to it. I would say, then, that what has emerged in the Course of the last ten or fifteen years is a sense of the increasing vulnerability to criticism of things, institutions, practices, and discourses. (Foucault)

In Archaeology of Knowledge Foucault discusses the concept of discourse. In his view, “the great theme of the history of ideas is the genesis of idea, their continuity over time, as well as tantalizations such as the spirit of an age. He looks at the ideas of a period both in their continuity and discontinuity. He prefers detailed analyses of statements of ideas to global generalizations about totalities. He rejects totalizing of ideas quite like his later postmodernists,” In this context, Foucault articulates four principles that distinguish the archaeology of knowledge from the history of ideas. (Foucault, POWER AND KNOWLEDGE: MICHEL FOUCAULT)

· A concept-map of designations of deviance and their remedies in history as produced by specific ‘authorities’.

CATEGORY	DISCOURSE	AUTHORITY	CORRECTIVE
Immorality	Religion	Priest	Penitence
Vagrancy	Economics	Economist/ Social commentator	Forced employment
Criminal	law	Police/Jury/Judge	Imprisonment
Insane	Psychiatry	Psychiatrist/Psychoanalyst	Asylum
Sick	Medicine	Physician	Hospital

The last column, ‘corrective’ marks the actual enforcement of power or process/act, where the ‘authorities’ ensure that the deviance is rectified according to what they think is right-

Discourse and knowledge produce certain categories of ‘subjects’ who are then treated in particular ways: the immoral are ‘remedied’ by priests, criminals are jailed by the law, the sick are treated by doctors, and the insane shut away in asylums by psychiatrists. What happens, therefore, is that the production of knowledge about those who lack power leads to very effective practice of power on the part of the authorities. Knowledge and classification system such as medicine, the law, or religion are therefore modes of social control. (nayar)

Foucault indeed focuses on the concept of power. He remarked that he produced the analysis of power relations rather than the genealogies. Foucault began talking about power as soon as he began to do genealogy in The Order of Discourse. In Discipline and Punish he develops a notion of “power-knowledge”. It recombines the analysis of the epistemic with analysis of the political. Knowledge for Foucault is unfathomable apart from power, although Foucault continues to insist on the relative autonomy of discourse. (Foucault, POWER AND KNOWLEDGE: MICHEL FOUCAULT)

Power and knowledge identify and classify individual subject as mad or ill. The task is to analyse the working of power and knowledge within a social set-up. These can be at the level of the family unit or at the level of the nation-state. There is, therefore, no such thing as neutral or objective knowledge because knowledge is always used to serve the interests of the dominant groups.

After Foucault we know that discourses produce particular subjects, who are subject to control. People who lack the power to determine their lives and future are said to lack agency. They are called ‘subalterns’. Every social formation has its own subalterns. The dominant groups in social structures that construct subalterns also use particular modes to ensure that the subaltern remains powerless. One such means of keeping the power relation in favour of the dominant category is ideology. Ideology is system of beliefs and ideas that permeates social formations. Ideology justifies oppression and social inequalities by suggesting that the lower classes have always been inferior and persuades them of the validity of this belief. That is, ideology circulates as a system of representation and images that ‘naturalizes’ oppression and creates the illusion that oppression is natural. (nayar)

Bibliography

Foucault, Michel. "POWER AND KNOWLEDGE: MICHEL FOUCAULT." Shodhganga. 4 April 2018 <http://shodhganga.inflibnet.ac.in/bitstream/10603/97461/8/08_chapter%2003.pdf>.

Foucault, Michel. "Power/Knowledge Selected Interviews and Other Writings-1972_1977." Gordon, Colin. New york: Pantheon Books, June-1975. 56-62.

nayar, Pramod k. An introduction to cultural studies. Viva Books, 2008.