Michel Foucault: Power, Subjectivity, and Disciplinary Practices

Posted on Mar 25, 2025 in Social sciences

Michel Foucault (1926-1984)

The goal of my work … has not been to analyze the phenomena of power, nor to elaborate the foundations of such an analysis. My objective, instead, has been to create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects.

  • Roles: Historian, Philosopher, Archivist, Theorist
  • Writes about: Sexuality, health, confinement, punishment, hospitals, asylums

Foucault’s Philosophical Foundations

  • Foucault’s thinking is based on two main streams of philosophy:
  • Existentialism: How do individuals experience their existence?
  • Phenomenology: An investigation of the way that things appear.

Genealogy

Genealogy is “a ‘history of the present’ (DP 30-31). This is so in two senses. First, the subject matter of the history is the origins of present rules, practices, or institutions that claim an authority over us. Second, the primary intent is not to understand the past in its own terms or for its own sake, but to understand and evaluate the present, particularly with a view to discrediting unjustified claims of authority.”

  • Moralization helps make us who we are.
  • Sometimes this is described as the process of self-formation.
  • Foucault aimed to understand divisions between:
    • Sick / Well
    • Sane / Insane
    • Good / Bad
    • Moral / Immoral

Governmentality

Foucault’s work: “the government of others and the government of one’s self.”

Governmentality = the relationship between two poles of governance: “the forms of rule by which various authorities govern populations, and the technologies of the self through which individuals work on themselves to shape their own subjectivity.”

  • Aims to “anatomize contemporary practices, revealing the ways in which their modes of exercising power depend upon specific ways of thinking (rationalities) and specific ways of acting (technologies), as well as upon specific ways of ‘subjectifying’ individuals and governing populations. It also problematizes these practices by subjecting them to a ‘genealogical’ analysis – a tracing of their historical lineages that aims to undermine their ‘naturalness’ and open up a space for alternative possibilities.”

The Active Subject

“The entity through which, and by means of which, power is exercised. In this conception, governmental power is not ‘objectifying’ but ‘subjectifying.’ It constructs individuals who are capable of choice and action, shapes them as active subjects, and seeks to align their choices with the objectives of governing authorities. This kind of power does not seize hold of the individual’s body in a disciplinary grip or regiment individuals into conformity. Instead, it holds out technologies of the self, to be adopted by willing individuals who take an active part in their own ‘subjectification’.”

  • “Government is not, then, the suppression of individual subjectivity, but rather the cultivation of that subjectivity in specific forms, aligned to specific governmental aims.”
  • Foucault was interested in: “How do practices of governing others link up with the practices by which individuals govern themselves?”

Punishment and Control

  1. “Punishment is no longer a public display, a spectacular demonstration to all of the sovereign’s irresistible force majeure, but rather a discrete, almost embarrassed application of constraints needed to preserve public order.
  2. What is punished is no longer the crime but the criminal, the concern of the law being not so much what criminals have done as what (environment, heredity, parental actions) has led them to do it.
  3. Those who determine the precise nature and duration of the punishment are no longer the judges who impose penalties in conformity with the law, but the ‘experts’ (psychiatrists, social workers, parole boards) who decide how to implement judicial sentences.
  4. The avowed purpose of punishment is no longer retribution (either to deter others or for the sake of pure justice) but the reform and rehabilitation of the criminal.”

Arguments

  • Switch from physical punishment to more intrusive psychological control.
    • Demands an inner transformation, a conversion to a new way of life.
    • Disciplinary techniques in prisons were applied in other sites of control (schools, hospitals, factories, etc.).

Foucault’s Theory of Disciplinary Power

  1. Internalization of rules and regulations.
  2. Rehabilitation rather than cruel and unusual punishment.
    • “The judges of normality are present everywhere. We are in the society of the teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator-judge, the ‘social-worker’-judge; it is on them that the universal reign of the normative is based; and each individual, wherever he [sic] may find himself, subjects to it his body, his gestures, his behaviour, his aptitudes, his achievements.”
  3. Surveillance into ever more private aspects of our lives through technology.
  4. Information society.
  5. Bureaucracy: information retrieval and storage.
  6. Efficiency.
  7. Specialization: experts for everything.