Michael Foucault

Paper Summary:

This paper outlines how Foucault connects power and subjectivity and shows how his theoretical approach finds its basis in his questioning of the traditional understanding of power as a descending mechanism. The paper explains that he locates the subject as a fiction that is produced by power in order to continue its existence and that while doing so power indistinguishably operates with knowledge. The paper further says that 'the truth' is defined by knowledge and used by the institutions governing our lives in the society which need subjects to function, thus they create them. Institutions create 'individuals' who act and who are responsible for their actions so that they can manage the humans, and they control the society.

From the Paper:

"Foucault makes the connection between the ordinary citizen in the street and the prisoner, by pointing out the steps through which they are being analysed, normalised and hierarchised (Mansfield 2000, 61-62). First the subject has to be defined as a separate entity, a being which is unified and unique and a being who commits acts for which s/he is answerable. Then, this fictitious subjectivity of 'individual' is expected to be performed in a 'normal', 'acceptable' manner. Behaviours out of norm should be and are normalised (Foucault 1980, 107). They are put into categories and hierarchies according to the degrees of their abnormality."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Foucault, M., 1979, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison trans. A. Sheridan, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth. -1980, Power/Knowledge ed. C. Gordon, Pantheon Books, New York.
• Mansfield, N., 2000, Subjectivity: Theories of self from Freud to Haraway, Allen & Unwin, St Leonards, NSW.

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