Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977 (Foucault, 1980)

Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977 (Foucault, 1980)

Michel Foucault has become famous for a series of books that have permanently altered our understanding of many institutions of Western society. He analyzed mental institutions in the remarkable Madness and Civilization; hospitals in The Birth of the Clinic; prisons in Discipline and Punish; and schools and families in The History of Sexuality. But the general reader as well as the specialist is apt to miss the consistent purposes that lay behind these difficult individual studies, thus losing sight of the broad social vision and political aims that unified them.

Now, in this superb set of essays and interviews, Foucault has provided a much-needed guide to Foucault. These pieces, ranging over the entire spectrum of his concerns, enabled Foucault, in his most intimate and accessible voice, to interpret the conclusions of his research in each area and to demonstrate the contribution of each to the magnificent -- and terrifying -- portrait of society that he was patiently compiling.

For, as Foucault shows, what he was always describing was the nature of power in society; not the conventional treatment of power that concentrates on powerful individuals and repressive institutions, but the much more pervasive and insidious mechanisms by which 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"

Foucault's investigations of prisons, schools, barracks, hospitals, factories, cities, lodgings, families, and other organized forms of social life are each a segment of one of the most astonishing intellectual enterprises of all time -- and, as this book proves, one which possesses profound implications for understanding the social control of our bodies and our minds.

p.50 The problem is: how do things happen?

p.51 Mechanisms of power in general have never been much studied by history. History has studied those who held power - anecdotal histories of kings and generals... What has been studied even less is the relation between power and knowledge, the articulation of each on the other.

p.52 The exercise of power perpetually creates knowledge and, conversely, knowledge constantly induces effects of power... It is not possible for power to be exercised without knowledge, it is impossible for knowledge not to engender [JLJ - produce] power.

p.59 If... power is strong this is because, as we are beginning to realise, it produces effects at the level of desire - and also at the level of knowledge. Far from preventing knowledge, power produces it.

p.90 if power is properly speaking the way in which relations of forces are deployed and given concrete expression... should we not analyse it primarily in terms of struggle, conflict and war? ...power is war, a war continued by other means.

p.101 We need to see how these mechanisms of power, at a given moment, in a precise conjuncture and by means of a certain number of transformations, have begun to become economically advantageous and politically useful.

p.119 What makes power... accepted, is simply the fact that it doesn't only weigh on us as a force that says no, but that it traverses and produces things, it... forms knowledge... It needs to be considered as a productive network which runs through the whole social body

p.156 power... is... a machine in which everyone is caught, those who exercise power just as much as those over whom it is exercised... it becomes a machinery that no one owns.

p.189 Every relation of force implies at each moment a relation of power (which is in a sense its momentary expression) and every power relation makes a reference, as its effect but also as its condition of possibility, to a political field of which it forms a part.

p.194 The apparatus* itself is the system of relations that can be established between these elements... what I am trying to identify in this apparatus is precisely the nature of the connection that can exist between these heterogeneous elements.

p.196 With the notion of the apparatus... I said that the apparatus is essentially of a strategic nature, which means assuming that it is a matter of a certain manipulation of relations of forces, either developing them in a particular direction, blocking them, stabilising them, utilising them, etc. The apparatus is thus always inscribed in a play of power, but it is always linked to certain coordinates of knowledge which issue from it but, to an equal degree, condition it. This is what the apparatus consists in: strategies of relations of forces supporting, and supported by, types of knowledge.

p.197 In trying to identify an apparatus, I look for the elements which participate in a rationality, a given form of co-ordination

p.198 In reality power means relations, a more-or-less organised, hierarchical, co-ordinated cluster of relations.

p.199 if power is in reality an open, more-or-less co-ordinated... cluster of relations, then the only problem is to provide oneself with a grid of analysis which makes possible an analytic of relations of power.

p.199-200 there are always movements... whereby strategies which co-ordinate relations of power produce new effects and advance into hitherto unaffected domains.

p.206 When I speak of strategy, I am taking the term seriously: in order for a certain relation of forces not only to maintain itself, but to accentuate, stabilise and broaden itself, a certain kind of manoeuvre is necessary.

p.207-208 if one considers that power has to be analysed in terms of relations of power, then it seems to me that one has a much better chance than in other theoretical procedures of grasping the relation that exists between power and struggles

*Foucault generally uses this term to indicate the various institutional, physical and administrative mechanisms and knowledge structures, which enhance and maintain the exercise of power within the social body. The original French term dispositif is rendered variously as 'dispositif', 'apparatus' and 'deployment' in English translations of Foucault's work [from http://www.michel-foucault.com/concepts/index.html]