Discipline of Control

Power and Knowledge: The Modern Social Management

“ The individual is no doubt the fictitious atom of an ‘ideological’ representation of society; but he is also a reality fabricated by the specific technology of power that I have called ‘discipline’.” (Foucault, pg.204) The reason I chose Foucault, as my approach to best explain the study of power, is because Foucault argues that modern society relies on structures of dominance, control, and surveillance. Power is diffused throughout society and it’s diffused through institutions of social control. Institutions such as, schools, prisons, banks, hospitals and the military each have ‘experts’ who describe the people who fall under their surveillance under their control. These experts who assume all knowledge place you into categories. And so the knowledge of the teacher, the doctor, and the supervisor is always linked to power. Knowledge is therefore, a method of social management that shapes the way modern society works.
If we can look through this Foucauldian scope of power and knowledge, we can see how private enterprise market economies and the government or state relate to one another. “Discipline ‘makes’ individuals; it is the specific technique of a power that regards individuals both as objects and as instruments of its exercise” (Foucault, pg.192). In a similar manner, the capitalist market economy treats its workers as instruments of its exercise. “Labour’s realization is its objectification. In the conditions dealt with by political economy this realization of labour appears as a loss of reality for the workers; objectification as loss of the object and object-bondage; appropriation as estrangement, as alienation” (Marx, Pgs. 44-45). Mark argues that labour under capitalism is death or mortifying and that it goes against the nature of man. “Man lives on nature-means that nature is his body, with which he must remain in continuous intercourse if he is not to die” (Marx, pg. 75).
Foucault would compare Marx’s ‘alienation of the worker’ with that of the hierarchical observation on the individual. Foucault talks about an, “architecture that would operate to transform individuals: to act on those it shelters, to provide a hold on their conduct, to carry the effects of power right to them, to make it possible to know them, to alter them” (Foucault, pg.193). Disciplinary institutions create a machine of control under surveillance whose only function is to produce the most profit. Surveillance could therefore be seen as an important deciding economic operative serving both as an internal mass-producing machine and as a specific medium in the disciplinary power. The clerks, in Foucault’s vision, supervise the workers and it is very necessary to treat the worker with strict and harsh guidelines in order for the enterprise to survive and avoid the loss of capital. According to Marx, “The work of directing, superintending and adjusting becomes one of the functions of capital, from the moment that the labour under the control of capital, becomes cooperative. Once a function of capital, it requires special characteristics” (Marx, Capital, vol. I. 313).
We are all being watched. We are all under surveillance. We are categorized. This is how we come to understand ourselves. Unlike the ‘alienated worker’ that Marx describes, the individual in Foucault’s modernity internalizes these categories into the way we describe ourselves. We discipline ourselves with the language our culture what the experts give us. So our supervisor tells us we are a certain kind of worker, that’s how we understand ourselves. We internalize the norm that the experts assign to us. Normalization creates an individual whose sense of self depends on the continual comparison with an anonymous other compared quantitatively with others. So power, for Foucault does not come from a specific economic class or specific government officials as Marx would say. Instead, for Foucault power is diffused, it is internalized. Power doesn’t only weigh on us as a force that says, no! It induces pleasure, it brings reward, it forms knowledge, and it produces discourse and reality. It is something that enters into us and we become a part of the power system.
Within the framework of normalization there are endless comparative incentives. For instance, if a worker wants to become part of the, ‘grade A workers’ the expert will offer him rewards instead of punishments in order to get everyone more productive. The worker is therefore, compared with everyone else and if he excels he will be rewarded. The opposite is true to those who don’t conform. “The teacher ‘must avoid. As far as possible, the use of punishment; on the contrary, he must endeavour to make rewards more frequent than penalties, the lazy being more encouraged by the desire to be rewarded in the same way as the diligent than by the fear of punishment…(Foucault, pg.197). Similarly, in the private market economy, the price system acts like a an effective transmitter of incentives, comparing prices and information in order for the seller or buyer to either sell and produce at a higher price and yield higher profits or to shift the margin to the opposite and lose profit. According to Rose and Milton Friedman, “One of the beauties of a free price system is that the prices that bring the information also provide both an incentive to react to the information and the means to do so” (Freidman, pg. 34). In this context, the price system itself acts as a normalizing judgment within a free market economy.
Foucault’s alternative to modernity was going beyond Marxism to something new. That newness was found in the connection of power and knowledge. “The superimposition of the power relations and knowledge relations assumes in the examination all its visible brilliance” (Foucault, pg.199). Foucault’s examination was the result of combining the techniques of an observing hierarchy and those of a normalizing judgment. Unlike the Pluralist approach to power which describe power as when A prevents B from what B wants to do, Foucault’s model is much more superior in describing power relations in terms of social management, of how the modern society works. Foucault’s model of disciplinary power is exercised through its invisibility; “at the same time it imposes on those whom it subjects a principle of compulsory visibility. In discipline, it is the subjects who have to be seen. Their visibility assures the hold of the power that is exercised over them” (Foucault, pg. 200).
Hannah Arendt makes another claim at power when she states that, “Power corresponds to the human ability not just to act but to act in concert. Power is never property of the individual; it belongs to a group and remains in existence only so long as the group keeps together” (Arendt, pg.209). The problem with this view is it place the individual out of the picture and denies him any power unless he is part of some group or organization. “ The moment the group, from which the power originated to begin with, disappears, ‘his power’ also vanishes” (Arendt, pg.209). Furthermore, Arendt claims that power disappears because the power of mutual recognition goes to violence. Her claims are true to some extent although she fails to realize the importance of knowledge as a means of empowerment for the individual within the context of power. She also fails to establish the fact that it is the individual who is a product to the production of power. “The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production” (Foucault, pg.204).
In order to study the concept of power and understand it one must concentrate their intentions on the individual. I believe, Foucault, took it a step further by looking outside of the tradition, by challenging values, exploring transgressions, going beyond limits and attempting to get out of the system. He provided a model for spontaneous acts of rebellion or resistance to the modern system of power and knowledge. Foucault also suggests that the constraints of culture are everywhere:
Finally, the examination is at the center of the procedures that constitute the individual as effect and object of power, as effect and object of knowledge. It is the examination which, by combining hierarchical surveillance and normalizing judgment, assures the great disciplinary functions of distributions and classification, maximum extraction of forces and time, continuous genetic accumulation, optimum combination of aptitudes and, thereby, the fabrication of cellular, organic, genetic and combinatory individuality. (Foucault, pg.204)
Foucault’s discipline of power helps to explain the purpose of the relation between
private enterprise market economy and the government and the state because his view of
power deals with the individual. It produces an amazing example of how knowledge and
power is shaped to us by those that control everything from big corporations to prisons.
It is a great description of the reality that power produced. It is the modern social
management between power and knowledge between discipline and control.

Can we call our societies in any way demorcratic?

From the Chomsky-Foucault debate: On Human Nature. “Do you believe, Mr. Foucault, that we can call our societies in any way democratic, after listening to this statement from Chomsky?”

Foucault: No, I don’t have the least belief that one could consider our society democratic. [Laughs.] If one understands by democracy the effective exercise of power by a population, which is neither divided nor hierarchically ordered in classes, it is quite clear that we are very far from democracy. It is only too clear that we are living under a regime of a dictatorship of class, of a power of class which imposes itself by violence, even when the instruments of this violence are institutional and constitutional; and to that degree, there isn’t any question of democracy for us.
Well. When you ask me why I was interested in politics, I refused to answer because it seemed evident to me, but perhaps your question was, how am I interested in it?
And had you asked me that question, and in a certain sense I could say you have, I would say to you that I am much less advanced in my way; I go much less far than Mr. Chomsky. That is to say that I admit to not being able to define, nor for even stronger reasons to propose, an ideal social model for the functioning of our scientific or technological society.
On the other hand, one of the tasks that seems immediate and urgent to me, over and above anything else, is this: that we should indicate and show up, even where they are hidden, all the relationships of political power which actually control the social body and oppress or repress it.
What I want to say is this: it is the custom, at least in European society, to consider that power is localized in the hands of the government and that it is exercised through a certain number of particular institutions, such as the administration, the police, the army, and the apparatus of the state. One knows that certain number of decisions, in the name of the nation or of the state, to have them applied and to punish those who don’t obey. But I believe that political power also exercises itself through the mediation of certain number of institutions, which look as if they have nothing in common with the political power, and as if they are independent of it, while they are not.
One knows this in relation to the family; and one knows that the university, and in a general way, all teaching systems, which appear simply to disseminate knowledge, are made to maintain a certain social class in power; and to exclude the instruments of power of another social class. Institutions of knowledge, of foresight and care, such as medicine, also help to support the political power. It’s also obvious, even to the point of scandal, in certain cases related to psychiatry.
It seems to me that the real political task in a society such as ours is to criticize the workings of institutions, which appear to be neutral and independent; to criticize and attack them in such a manner that the political violence which has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight against them.
This critique and this fight seem essential to me for different reasons: first, because political power goes much deeper than one suspects; there are centers and invisible, little –known points of support; its true resistance, its true solidity is perhaps where one doesn’t expect it. Probably it’s insufficient to say that behind the governments, behind the apparatus of the state, there is the dominant class; one must locate the point of activity, the places and forms in which its domination is exercised. And because this domination is not simply the expression in political terms of economic exploitation, it is its instrument and, to a large extent the condition which makes it possible; the suppression of the one is achieved through the exhaustive discernment of the other. Well, if one fails to recognize these points of support of class power, one risks allowing them to continue to exist; and to see this class power reconstitute itself even after an apparent revolutionary process.

See it here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSgReGKmCwQ

The Word 'Parrhesia'

The following is an exerpt from tape recordings made of six lectures delivered, in English, by Michel Foucault at the University of California at Berkeley. The lectures were given as part of Foucault's seminar, entitled "Discourse and Truth," devoted to the study of the Greek notion of 'parrhesia' or "frankness in speaking the truth."
(Note: if you want more information about this or about Foucault visit: www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Foucault )

The meaning of the word: 'Parrhesia' is ordinarily translated into English by "free speech" (in French by 'franc-parler', and in German by 'Freimuthigkeit'). 'Parrhesiastes' is the one who uses 'parrhesia', i.e., the one who speaks the truth.

Frankness: The one who uses 'parrhesia', the 'parrhesiastes', is someone who says everything she has in mind: she does not hide anything, but opens her heart and mind completely to other people through her discourse. In 'parrhesia' the speaker is supposed to give a complete and exact account of what she has in mind so that the audience is able to comprehend exactly what the speaker thinks. The word 'parrhesia', then, refers to a type of relationship between the speaker and what she says. For in 'parrhesia', the speaker makes it manifestly clear and obvious that what she says is her own opinion. And she does this by avoiding any kind of rhetorical form, which would veil what she thinks. Instead, the 'parrhesiastes' uses the most direct words and forms of expression she can find. Whereas rhetoric provides the speaker with technical devices to help her prevail upon the minds of her audience (regardless of the rhetorician's own opinion concerning what she says), in 'parrhesia', the 'parrhesiastes' acts on other people's minds by showing them as directly as possible what she actually believes.

Truth: There are two types of 'parrhesia', which we must distinguish. First, there is a pejorative sense of the word not very far from "chattering," and which consists in saying any- or everything one has in mind without qualification. This pejorative meaning is found more frequently in Christian literature where such "bad" 'parrhesia' is opposed to silence as a discipline or as the requisite condition for the contemplation of God. Most of the time, however, 'parrhesia' does not have this pejorative meaning in the classical texts, but rather a positive one. "Parrhesiazesthai', means "to tell the truth." But does the 'parrhesiastes' say what he thinks is true, or does he say what is really true? To my mind, the 'parrhesiates' says what is true because he knows that it is true; and he knows that it is true because it really is true. The 'parrhesiastes' is not only sincere and says what is his opinion, but his opinion is also the truth. The second characteristic of 'parrhesia', then, is that there is always an exact coincidence between belief and truth.

Evolution Of The Word: Rhetoric, Politics, Philosophy

Rhetoric: The relationship of 'parrhesia' to rhetoric-a relationship, which is problematic even in Euripides. In the Socratic-Platonic tradition. 'Parrhesia' and rhetoric stand in strong opposition; and this opposition appears very clearly in the 'Gorgias' for example, where the word 'parrhesia' occurs. The continuous long speech is a rhetorical or sophistical device, whereas the dialogue is a major technique for the playing the parrhesiastic game. The opposition of 'parrhesia' and rhetoric also runs through the 'Phaedrus'-where, as you know, the main problem is not about the nature of the opposition between speech and writing, but concerns the difference between the 'logos' which speaks the truth and the 'logos' which is not capable of such truth-telling. This opposition between 'parrhesia' and rhetoric, which is so clear-cut in the Fourth Century B.C. throughout Plato's writings, will last for centuries in the philosophical tradition. In Seneca, for example, one finds the idea that personal conversations are the best vehicle for frank speaking and truth-telling insofar as one can dispense, in such conversations. And even during the Second Century A.D. the cultural opposition between rhetoric and philosophy is still very clear and important. However, one can also find some signs of the incorporation of 'parrhesia' within the field of rhetoric in the work of rhetoricians at the beginning of the Empire. In Quintillian's 'Institutio Oratoria' for example (Book IX, Chapter II), Quintillian explains that some rhetorical figures are specifically adapted for intensifying the emotions of the audience; and such technical figures he calls by the name 'exclamatio' (exclamation). Related to these exclamations is a kind of natural exclamation, which, Quintillian notes, is not "simulated or artfully designed." This type of natural exclamation he calls "free speech" ['libera oratione'] which, he tells us, was called "license" ['licentia'] by Cornificius, and 'parrhesia' by the Greeks. 'Parrhesia' is thus a sort of "figure" among rhetorical figures, but with this characteristic" that it is without any figure since it is completely natural. 'Parrhesia' is the zero degree of those rhetorical figures, which intensify the emotions of the audience.