As a philosophical historian and an observer of human relations, his

work focused on the dominant genealogical and archaeological

knowledge systems and practices, tracking them through different
historical eras, including the social contexts that were in place that
permitted change - the nature of power in society. He wrote that power
"reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and
inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning
processes and everyday lives."

Along with other social theorists, Foucault believed that knowledge is

always a form of power, but he took it a step further and told us that
knowledge can be gained from power, producing it, not preventing it.
Through observation, new knowledge is produced. In his view,
knowledge is forever connected to power, and often wrote them in this
way: power/knowledge. Foucault's theory states that knowledge is
always a form of power:

Power has historically been viewed from a position of dominance and

authority. Using this lens leads one to a destiny wherein one individual
or society has power over another. The power over approach is a
hierarchical view, one that leads to someone else being oppressed, and
one wherein the prevailing hegemony continues. If a different lens is
used, wherein power does not reside within a position, but rather,
within a person and within a relationship bounded by knowledge, a new
destiny of power to and power of is created. These two approaches to
power are examined and clinical power is offered as a lens that
culminates in the understanding of power as a right and as truth
imbedded with awareness and relationships.

His conceptualization of power also acts a critique of the dominant

political theories that revolve around the idea of power as a monolithic
repressive entity exercised by a particular oppressive individual, system
or class. Foucault’s writings on power are also very closely associated
with his investigations into the historical production of truth and
knowledge and his conception of discourse.

“What we need is a political philosophy that isn’t erected around the

problem of sovereignty, nor therefore around the problems of law and
prohibition. We need to cut off the king’s head: in political theory that
has still to be done.” Hobbes Leviathan and the social contract tradition
more generally had posed the scope and the legitimacy of the power of
the sovereign as the original and fundamental question of politics. But
Foucault argued that both the underlying conception of power as
sovereign power and the questions of law and right with which it
engaged have a historical location in the formation of European
monarchy. Foucault concept of power hence theorizes for it to be
differentiated historically –

Foucault argues that it would be a mistake to use this conception of

sovereign power that arose with the consolidation of European
monarchies to account for the politics and relations of power within a
modern state apparatus. The state he argues despite the vast and
intricate network and reaches of its apparatuses is “far from being able
to occupy the whole field of actual power relations and further because
the state can only operate on the basis of other, already existing power
relations.” For instance, the marginalization and exploitation of Dalits
in India is not just a result of neglect and subjugation by the modern
Indian state, but a product of a complex network of power relations
under a history of oppression through the caste system and various
institutions of religion, commerce and social interaction that long
predates even the colonial Indian state under the British.

Articulation of sovereign power as equivalent to the state is hence

problematic as power is conceived and exercised in terms of
sovereignty in multiple and indefinite social locations, wherever power
is deployed to restrain or punish. To quote Foucault, “Whether one
attributes to it the form of the prince who formulates rights, or the
father who forbids, or the censor who enforces silence…..in any case
one schematizes power in a juridical form and one defines its effects as
obedience.” To limit consideration of power to the form of a sovereign
and a subject, with the state as the equivalent of the sovereign power,
thus seriously underestimates the diverse and even polymorphous
character of the relations of power extant in our society and leaves
unexplained the mechanisms required to connect and consolidate these
relations.
Political theories of sovereignty thus fails to recognize the many ways
in which power nominally deployed through the state apparatus (or, for
Marxists, through the class ownership of capital) is more complexly
mediated.

The most significant nature of Foucault’s thesis is his stress on the

productive nature of power’s modern exercise. His main aim was to
turn a negative conception upside down and attribute the production of
concepts, ideas and structures of institutions to the circulation and
exercise of power in its modern forms. He forcefully expresses this
point in “We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of
power in negative terms, it ‘excludes’, it ‘represses’………… in fact
power produces, it produces reality, it produces domains of objects
and rituals of truth.” Foucault claims that although many of the
political forms and practices of sovereign power remained in place,
they were gradually taken over and ultimately sustained on the basis of
power relations that functioned at a different location and scale.
Increasingly, the sovereign apparatus (such as courts, prisons, the
army) became both dependent upon and ‘productive’ of disciplinary
and regulatory power. These power relations were disseminated
through more extensive social networks, and did not transmit power in
only one direction. They did not simply impose sanctions that might be
amenable to a binary classification as legitimate or not. They were
instrumental to the production or enhancement of various “goods,”
such as knowledge, health, wealth, or social cohesion. Foucault thus
sees the “new economy of power” as productive, which produces
discourse operating through and leading to the production of various
episteme and systems of knowledge: “Power traverses and produces
things; it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, and produces discourse.”

According to Foucault, disciplinary power is one of the great inventions

of bourgeoisie society and is one of the primary means through which
this type of social cohesion is maintained. Disciplinary power produces
‘practiced’ bodies, it ‘increases’ the forces of the body (in terms of
economic utility) and diminishes these same forces (in political terms
to obedience), appropriating ‘time and labour’ of human beings rather
than ‘wealth and commodities’. Capitalism would not have been
possible without the controlled ‘insertion’ of bodies into production
processes. In his interview, Foucault thus argues, “In the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, a form of power comes into being that begins
to exercise itself through social production and social service…..and in
consequence a real and effective ‘incorporation’ of power was
necessary” Thus, there was an appropriation of an individual’s body
and modes of everyday existence through disciplining mechanisms like
schooling etc. There was then a simultaneous need for the
administration, control and direction of people as a population into a
system that promotes accumulation of capital. This thereby produced
problems of demography, public health, education, housing, longevity
and fertility towards efficient utilization of resources for maximum
profit.

However, these processes of normalization associated with disciplinary

power do not necessarily produce conformity or monotonous regularity
of identities. Foucault argues it is these relations of disciplinary power
and techniques of normalization that produces the modern
‘individualized’ subject. One of the prime effects of disciplinary power
was to produce, precisely ‘individuality’ – “procedures which allowed
power to circulate in a manner at once continuous, uninterrupted,
adapted and “individualized” throughout the entire social
body.”(Foucault) Differences, peculiarities, deviance and eccentricities
are even more highlighted in a system of controls concerned to seek
them out. The intention may have been to produce regularity, but the
effect is quite the opposite: a multiplicity of disparate and varied
identities. Individuality is a modern phenomenon. Foucault thus argues
that power in its modern context is not to be seen as a repressive force
that crushes individuality, but in fact “it is one of the prime effects of
power that certain bodies, certain gestures, certain discourses come to
be identified and constituted as individuals.”

It is in this context that we can understand Foucault’s assertion that

“power is everywhere not because it embraces everything, but because
it comes from everywhere”.

Power is not possessed by a dominant agent, nor located in that agent’s

relations to those dominated, but is instead distributed throughout
complex social networks. The actions of the peripheral agents in these
networks are often what establish or enforce the connections between
what a dominant agent does and the fulfillment or frustration of a
subordinate agent’s desires. Certainly this is then true of a power
exercised discreetly through surveillance and documentation. Foucault
goes on to emphasize the heterogeneity of the alignments that dispose
power. They include not just agents but also the instruments of power
(buildings, documents, tools, etc.) and the practices-and rituals through
which it is deployed. This sense of power as dispersed emphasizes the
importance of what Foucault called the “swarming” of the disciplinary
mechanisms; those mechanisms were thereby transformed from a local
exercise of force within the confines of a particular institution into far-
reaching relationships of power. Power can thus never be simply
present, as one action forcibly constraining or modifying another. Its
constitution as a power relation depends upon its reenactment or
reproduction over time as a sustained power relationship.

Within Foucault’s theorization of power, is also the enabling concept of

the positive production of resistance. Resistance cannot be external to
power, because power is not a system of domination with an inside or
an outside. Here, once again, Wartenburg’s conception of power as
mediated by dynamic social alignments can help us understand
Foucault. Power is exercised through an agent’s actions only to the
extent that other agents’ actions remain appropriately aligned with
them. The actions of dominant agents are therefore constrained by the
need to sustain that alignment in the future; but, simultaneously,
subordinate agents may seek ways of challenging or evading that
alignment. Foucault’s conception of power relations in terms of war
elevates this sense that resistance to specific alignments of power is
always possible to a conception of power as itself the outcome of
ongoing struggles to sustain or undermine networks of domination
Power is not something possessed or wielded by powerful agents,
because it is co-constituted by those who support and resist it. It is not a
system of domination that imposes its rules upon all those it governs,
because any such rule is always at issue in ongoing struggles.
Thus, to conclude, in Foucault’s conceptualization of the dynamics of
power — power is dispersed across complicated and heterogeneous
social networks marked by ongoing struggle. Power is not something
present at specific locations within those networks, but is instead
always at contention in ongoing attempts to (re)produce effective social
alignments.

Right should be viewed, I believe, not in terms of a legitimacy to be established, but in

terms of the methods of subjugation that it instigates. [544.2]

Given that Foucault�s project was to �substitute the problem of domination and
subjugation for that of sovereignty and obedience�, he had to observe the following

Methodological Precautions:

1. The analysis should not be concerned with power in its central location (e.g., the
sovereign) but with �power in its extremities� [545.1] where it has actual effect on
lives.
Example: punishment can be justified in the abstract, but in the particular it
inevitably becomes torture and imprisonment.

2. Don�t look at the intentions of those who set out to have power, look at the
institutional effects on people once a system of power is instituted.�
Or: Hobbes got it backwards: he tried to justify sovereign power from the coming-
together of the wills of individuals (i.e., the social contract).� Instead, we should
look the other way and see the effects on individuals of having a system of
sovereignty.

3. Don�t look at power as �homogenous� or of one person/institution�s authority

over all others.� Rather, power is �something which circulates� [545.2]...
�individuals are the vehicles of power, not its points of application� [546.1] � that
is, they transfer power around rather than just experience its effects.
4. However, don�t assume that because it �circulates� that power is evenly
distributed.� What happens is that low-level implements of power (discipline in
schools and prisons, for example) are then co-opted by the higher-ups.
Examples [546.2]: Madness and infantile sexuality.
Society (or the bourgeoisie) is not concerned with those matters, but appear to care
about them because the lower-downs have come up with �techniques and
procedures� that form �mechanisms of exclusion� [547.1] which are useful in a
more general form of domination.� They are �politically useful�.� �The
bourgeois is interested in power, not in madness, in the system of control of infantile
sexuality� [547.2]

5. We shouldn�t think that the mechanisms of power are the products of ideology.�
�It is both much more and much less than ideology�

Along with other social theorists, Foucault believed that knowledge is always a form of
power, but he took it a step further and told us that knowledge can be gained from power,
producing it, not preventing it. Through observation, new knowledge is produced. In his
view, knowledge is forever connected to power, and often wrote them in this way:
power/knowledge. Foucault's theory states that knowledge is always a form of power:

Power has historically been viewed from a position of dominance and authority. Using
this lens leads one to a destiny wherein one individual or society has power over another.
The power over approach is a hierarchical view, one that leads to someone else being
oppressed, and one wherein the prevailing hegemony continues. If a different lens is
used, wherein power does not reside within a position, but rather, within a person and
within a relationship bounded by knowledge, a new destiny of power to and power of is
created. These two approaches to power are examined and clinical power is offered as a
lens that culminates in the understanding of power as a right and as truth imbedded with
awareness and relationships.
Michel Foucault has been instrumental in formulating a radically dynamic theorization of
power which attributes to it the positive dimension of producing discursive formations
and systems of knowledge through various complex multilayered and polymorphous
networks, mechanisms and relations of power. His conceptualization of power also acts a
critique of the dominant political theories that revolve around the idea of power as a
monolithic repressive entity exercised by a particular oppressive individual, system or
class. Foucault’s writings on power are also very closely associated with his
investigations into the historical production of truth and knowledge and his conception of
discourse.

Hobbes Leviathan and the social contract tradition more generally had posed the scope
and the legitimacy of the power of the sovereign as the original and fundamental question
of politics. But Foucault argued that both the underlying conception of power as
sovereign power and the questions of law and right with which it engaged have a
historical location in the formation of European monarchy.

Foucault argues that it would be a mistake to use this conception of sovereign power that
arose with the consolidation of European monarchies to account for the politics and
relations of power within a modern state apparatus. The state he argues despite the vast
and intricate network and reaches of its apparatuses is “far from being able to occupy the
whole field of actual power relations and further because the state can only operate on
the basis of other, already existing power relations.” For instance, the marginalization
and exploitation of Dalits in India is not just a result of neglect and subjugation by the
modern Indian state, but a product of a complex network of power relations under a
history of oppression through the caste system and various institutions of religion,
commerce and social interaction that long predates even the colonial Indian state under
the British.

Articulation of sovereign power as equivalent to the state is hence problematic as power

is conceived and exercised in terms of sovereignty in multiple and indefinite social
locations, wherever power is deployed to restrain or punish. To quote Foucault,
“Whether one attributes to it the form of the prince who formulates rights, or the father
who forbids, or the censor who enforces silence…..in any case one schematizes power in
a juridical form and one defines its effects as obedience.” To limit consideration of
power to the form of a sovereign and a subject, with the state as the equivalent of the
sovereign power, thus seriously underestimates the diverse and even polymorphous
character of the relations of power extant in our society and leaves unexplained the
mechanisms required to connect and consolidate these relations.

Also although sovereignty was conceived as a standpoint of judgment above all particular
conflicts, no sovereign power could actually realize this conception in practice. This
separation of the principle of sovereignty from its embodiment in any actual sovereign is
crucial to understanding Foucault’s position. Sovereignty in this sense has been removed
from any real political location, and is instead a theoretical construction with respect to
which political practice is to be assessed. Political theories of sovereignty thus fails to
recognize the many ways in which power nominally deployed through the state apparatus
(or, for Marxists, through the class ownership of capital) is more complexly mediated.

The most significant nature of Foucault’s thesis is his stress on the productive nature of
power’s modern exercise. His main aim was to turn a negative conception upside down
and attribute the production of concepts, ideas and structures of institutions to the
circulation and exercise of power in its modern forms. He forcefully expresses this point
in “We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms, it
‘excludes’, it ‘represses’………… in fact power produces, it produces reality, it produces
domains of objects and rituals of truth.” Foucault claims that although many of the
political forms and practices of sovereign power remained in place, they were gradually
taken over and ultimately sustained on the basis of power relations that functioned at a
different location and scale. Increasingly, the sovereign apparatus (such as courts,
prisons, the army) became both dependent upon and ‘productive’ of disciplinary and
regulatory power.

These power relations were disseminated through more extensive social networks, and
did not transmit power in only one direction. They did not simply impose sanctions that
might be amenable to a binary classification as legitimate or not. They were instrumental
to the production or enhancement of various “goods,” such as knowledge, health, wealth,
or social cohesion. Foucault thus sees the “new economy of power” as productive, which
produces

discourse operating through and leading to the production of various episteme and
systems of knowledge: “Power traverses and produces things; it induces pleasure, forms
knowledge, and produces discourse.”

According to Foucault, disciplinary power is one of the great inventions of bourgeoisie

society and is one of the primary means through which this type of social cohesion is
maintained. Disciplinary power produces ‘practiced’ bodies, it ‘increases’ the forces of
the body (in terms of economic utility) and diminishes these same forces (in political
terms to obedience), appropriating ‘time and labour’ of human beings rather than ‘wealth
and commodities’.

In his interview, Foucault thus argues, “In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a
form of power comes into being that begins to exercise itself through social production
and social service…..and in consequence a real and effective ‘incorporation’ of power
was necessary” Thus, there was an appropriation of an individual’s body and modes of
everyday existence through disciplining mechanisms like schooling etc. There was then a
simultaneous need for the administration, control and direction of people as a population
into a system that promotes accumulation of capital. This thereby produced problems of
demography, public health, education, housing, longevity and fertility towards efficient
utilization of resources for maximum profit.

However, these processes of normalization associated with disciplinary power do not

necessarily produce conformity or monotonous regularity of identities. Foucault argues it
is these relations of disciplinary power and techniques of normalization that produces the
modern ‘individualized’ subject. One of the prime effects of disciplinary power was to
produce, precisely ‘individuality’ – “procedures which allowed power to circulate in a
manner at once continuous, uninterrupted, adapted and “individualized” throughout the
entire social body.”(Foucault) Differences, peculiarities, deviance and eccentricities are
even more highlighted in a system of controls concerned to seek them out. The intention
may have been to produce regularity, but the effect is quite the opposite: a multiplicity of
disparate and varied identities. Individuality is a modern phenomenon. Foucault thus
argues that power in its modern context is not to be seen as a repressive force that crushes
individuality, but in fact “it is one of the prime effects of power that certain bodies,
certain gestures, certain discourses come to be identified and constituted as individuals.”
Power is not possessed by a dominant agent, nor located in that agent’s relations to those
dominated, but is instead distributed throughout complex social networks. The actions of
the peripheral agents in these networks are often what establish or enforce the
connections between what a dominant agent does and the fulfillment or frustration of a
subordinate agent’s desires. Certainly this is then true of a power exercised discreetly
through surveillance and documentation

Two competing, and yet complementary �limits�:

1. right of sovereignty
2. mechanism of discipline

People like Rousseau tried to come up with democratic forms of sovereignty, that were
pure and that allowed people to be ultimately free.� But Foucault is arguing that the
�right� of sovereignty is just a holdover from the divine right of kings, and besides,
requires the messy and brutal mechanisms of discipline that it is often used (in the form
of the idea of human rights) to criticize.

The �new form of power� invented in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was
this power-through-highly-specific-procedural-techniques (prisons, schools, asylums,
etc.).
I believe that in our own times power is exercised simultaneously though this right and
these techniques and that these techniques and these discourses [e.g., theories of
education], to which the disciplines give rise invade the idea of right so that the
procedures of normalisation come to be ever more constantly engaged in the colonisation
of those of law. [

Two competing, and yet complementary �limits�:

3. right of sovereignty
4. mechanism of discipline

People like Rousseau tried to come up with democratic forms of sovereignty, that were
pure and that allowed people to be ultimately free.� But Foucault is arguing that the
�right� of sovereignty is just a holdover from the divine right of kings, and besides,
requires the messy and brutal mechanisms of discipline that it is often used (in the form
of the idea of human rights) to criticize.

The �new form of power� invented in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was
this power-through-highly-specific-procedural-techniques (prisons, schools, asylums,
etc.).

I believe that in our own times power is exercised simultaneously though this right and
these techniques and that these techniques and these discourses [e.g., theories of
education], to which the disciplines give rise invade the idea of right so that the
procedures of normalisation come to be ever more constantly engaged in the colonisation
of those of law. [
That is, medicine becomes the means of bringing right and discipline together �
medicalizing certain behaviours as insane or �anti-social�, for example, so people can
be brutally repressed without it being a violation of right (think One Flew Over the
Cuckoo�s Nest).