Michel Foucault

Dr. Najia Asrar Zaidi

 Introduction
 Born in France 1926
 Series of Positions at French Universities
 Inspired by Nietzsche” Ultimately, man finds
in things nothing but what he himself has
imported into them”.
 Professor of the History of System of Thought
 Taught at the University of California,
Berkey,USA
 Victim of AIDS died in Paris 1984
 Foucault
 History of Madness in the Classical Age
(1969)
 Criticizes moral hypocrisy of modern
Psychiatry
 19th Century medical treatment as an
enlightened liberation of the mad from the
ignorance and brutality of preceding ages
 Foucault
 New idea that mad were merely sick; that the
alleged scientific neutrality treatment of
Modern medical treatment of insanity are
infact, covers for controlling challenges to a
conventional bourgeois morality.
 Foucault
 Discipline and Punish (1975)
 Study of the development of the gentler
modern way of improsning criminals rather
torturing or killing them

 Such reforms become a vehicle of more

effective control “ to punish less perhaps, but
certainly to punish better”.
 Foucault
 New mode of punishment becomes the model
for control of an entire society with factories,
hospitals, and schools modeled on the modern
prison.
 Central controlling agencies use techniques
and institutes to create modern system of
disciplinary power.
 For Foucault
 Three primary techniques of control
 A. Hierarchical Observation: Control over
people can be achieved merely by observing
them. Example: Tiered row of seats in a
stadium makes it easy for spectators to see but
also for guards or cameras to see the audience.
 Foucault
 Discipline through imposing precise norms is
normalization.
 Example: National standards for educational
programs, for medical practice, for industrial
processes and products

 Live by Society’s standards or norms

 Foucault
 Examination: Students in school or patients in
hospitals, is a method of control that combines
hierarchical with normalizing judgement. It is a
prime example which Foucault calls
Power/Knowledge nexus “the deployment of
force and the establishment of truth.”
 Foucault
 It both elicits the truth about those who
undergo the examination(what they know or
what is the state of their health) and controls
their behavior.
 For the study of human-beings the goals of
power and the goals of knowledge cannot be
separated; in knowing we control; and in
controlling we know;
 Foucault
 A distinctive feature of modern power is its concern
with what people have not done i.e person’s failure
to reach requires standards.
 The ruling elite or the prevailing ideologues s of
knowledge first decide what they want and then fit
the facts to their aim.
 This Leads to have control over the people and also
negates objective knowledge. Example GMO-
Mulitnational Companies- Detention Center-
Pharmaceutical company- Suicides by Students