![]() ![]() In the panopticon, prison cells are located around a single watchtower, in such a way that prisoners always act as if they are being watched because they never know whether or not they are being observed. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault used Bentham’s panopticon to explain how modern power is both totalizing and individualizing. Foucault therefore argued that ‘the ancient right to take life or let live, was replaced by a power to foster life or disallow it to the, point of death’. On the level of the population, bio-power would have subjugated bodies and controlled populations through medical, pedagogical and demographical interventions such as birth control and migration policies. On the individual level, disciplinary power would have produced discourse, desires, objects of knowledge and rituals of truth. This modern form of power would be exercised on two different levels which are strongly tied together. While ‘traditional power’ till the end of the 16 th century relied on repressive laws, centralised penalties, and the power of the sovereign over life and death, modern power would, according to Foucault, rather take form in social regulation and self-control. Foucault, therefore, argued that in our current society, power is not only repressive, imposed and ‘coming from above’, but also productive, enabling, and ‘coming from below’. The confessional culture that science and religion had promoted would not have liberated, but only further controlled sexuality by instigating a disciplining discourse in which sexuality had become an internal essence and ‘obligatory act of speech’. Foucault argued that this hypothesis would be based on false assumptions. Foucault approached this increased scientific interest in the liberation of our sexuality with suspicion, and criticized it as the ‘repressive hypothesis’.Īccording to the repressive hypothesis, sexuality would have been relatively free in the 18 th century, heavily repressed in the Victorian age, and now again liberated through science and confessions. Freud had, amongst others, claimed that all psychological difficulties were ultimately rooted in sexual repression, and Freudo-Marxists, such as Reich and Marcuse, had later publicly plead for its liberation. ![]() By examining how sexualities became discursively constructed over time, Foucault criticized the dominant idea within human sciences, and psychoanalysis in particular, that sexuality was a ‘master key’ that determined all psychological phenomena. Foucault’s primary aim was not to analyse how sexual practices had changed throughout history, but rather to examine how sexuality had transformed from a ‘particular activity that we may engage in’ to an object of knowledge, accompanied by a complete field of science, that tells us something about ‘who we are’. In The History of Sexuality: the Will to Knowledge (1978), Foucault delivered a genealogy of how we came to think about sex. Furthermore, I claim that Butler overcame these shortcomings, by providing concrete opportunities for resistance through discursive deviation and performative protest. In this essay, I argue that Foucault’s reconceptualization of power provided important insights, but insufficient opportunities to resist the modern forms of power he adequately addressed. Foucault dismissed political action based on essentialist notions of social identity, but did he offer any alternative principles on which resistance could be based? Foucault famously claimed that ‘where there is power, there is resistance’, but simultaneously argued that power could not be escaped, as power would always be ‘already present, constituting that very thing which one attempts to counter it with’. ![]() However, his ambivalent stance on agency and resistance, left scholars to wonder whether his ideas were actually useful for political action. How Judith Butler Overcame Foucault’s Shortcomings While Foucault’s legacy reminds us that identity politics can be problematic, Butler shows how domination can be escaped through other means. This is particularly relevant in a time when identity-based resistance, such as #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter, is becoming increasingly // August 25th, 2018 //īy reconceptualising power from a solely repressive, to a rather productive and disciplining force, Foucault changed the way we came to think about power. ![]()
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