Exercise .. On Foucault: Disciplinary Power and Photography by David Green

Read the article 'On Foucault : Disciplinary Power and Photography by David Green.

http://www.oca-student.com/sites/default/files/OnFoucault.pdf

Which can be read here here ..


Michel Foucault is a French philosopher he explores the elements of control that stem from a correctional application of visibility, that of prisons, using the Panopticon.  The Panopticon was conceived by Jeremy Bentham in1786, it allowed the surveyor to see, control and gaze at a population of surveyed individuals without ever being seen himself.

Writings of the French historian have been widely reviewed in this country, although their reception has not always been favourable.  The consensus is that they merit careful consideration.
His writings are notoriously difficult, he refuses to acknowledge traditional boundaries.

Behind his investigations lie two themes : the development of certain forms of rationality which posit man as the subject and object of knowledge and the second, the complex relations bonding power and knowledge which are implicit to such forms of rationality.

Foucaults work can be best viewed as an attempt to understand how the human and social sciences became historically possible, to map out the conditions that enable their emergence and to indicate the consequences of their existence.

Power must be recognised in its positive forms when it enables the production of knowledge.  Conversely no power can be exercised without the extraction, distribution or retention of knowledge.

The important thing here is to believe the truth isn't outside the power, or lacking in power, contrary to the myth whose history would repay further study, truth isn't the reward for free spirits, the child protected solitude, not the privilege of those who have succeeded in liberating themselves.

Foucault is not necessarily concerned with the correctness or otherwise of the concepts, methods and content of the modern sciences but with the effect of power which is linked to the institution and functioning of an organised scientific disclosure within society.

Foucault most widely read work - Discipline and Punishment - (1975 ), returns to the analysis of a single disclosure / institution relation which had provided the structure of his earlier studies of Madness and Civilisation and the Birth of the Clinic.

The gradual replacement of types of punishment which are violent, replacing them gradually with a more subtle approach.
Amongst the 'technology' of disciplinary power are the mechanisms of surveillance for which Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon provided the ideal model.

The Panopticon was a construction with central tower, enclosed by a circular building whose cellular spaces are open on the inside and their occupants exposed to the unremitting gaze the tower affords.
I this field of uninterrupted visibility in which only the observer remains unseen, it becomes possible to compare individuals to each other and to impose a system of formal equality, thereby exercising a normalising judgement, it was possible to gauge differences between individuals. The Panopticon was the perfect manifestation of disciplinary power and the principles of its functioning.   By virtue of its methods of fixing, dividing, recording, it has been one of the simplest, crudest, and almost concrete, but perhaps most indispensable conditions for the development of the immense activity of examination but has objectified human behaviour.

A constant theme in his work was the analysis of discipline and those at which it has been directed.  These forms of tactics of power are not manifest as physical violence - indeed the body is touched as little as possible.  The function of power lies in its ability to extract knowledge.
Foucaults earlier historical studies cover the period of 18th & 19thC , a series of profound demographic, political, social and cultural changes consequent upon the rise of industrial capitalism.   He is careful to distance himself from a simple casual relation based upon the Marxist principle of economic determination.

Foucault suggests that its is not the exclusion of the criminal and the insane which served the interest of the bourgeoisie but the techniques and procedures themselves of such an exclusion.  It was the actual mechanism of disciplinary power, the apparatuses of surveillance, which become politically useful and lent themselves to economic profit.  In the case of the factory or workshop discipline may have been evoked as a moral incentive but the importance of discipline increasingly become one of maximising productivity and thereby the profitability of labour.

The physical division of space and segregation of individuals, the carefully controlled rhythm of activities and the imposition of rigid temporal sequences, became common features of both the prison and the workplace.
The mechanisms of discipline which Foucault describes at length in Discipline and Punishment, gave rise to a political anatomy of the body, a certain way of rendering the accumulation of the men docile and useful.  The techniques of disciplinary power enabled the improvement of the efficiency and profitability of labour.  In so far that discipline is power which engages and infiltrates the physical capabilities of individuals caught within its mechanisms we can speak of politics of the body.  But disciplinary power also engaged the body as a species body gave rise to a politics populatio, the focus of which was a series of regulatory controls effective at the level of the social.  As the problems caused by the rapid expansion of urban populations became more evident the need for political control and intervention became more necessary.

Foucaults 'History of Sexuality' is not a renunciation of pleasure nor a rejection of the flesh but an intensification of the body through concern for its health and vitality.  The body which became the focus of discipline not only as a means to render it more productive but also more morally and physically healthy.  The effect of this was to subject the body in an ever more derailed way to endless medical and psychological examination and to the mechanisms of surveillance.

The photographic image is regarded as a form of empirical truth, evidence of the real.  The camera has revealed a new kind of knowledge making it possible to measure and compare each individual to another.  Photography therefore was contingent to other methods used in the observation and classification of individuals, forming a part of the mechanisms of surveillance and the exercise of a normalising, disciplinary power.   Photographic records are kept along with writing, measurements, documentation.  The employment of photography in the fields of Anthropology, medicine, and criminology draws together a whole series of discursive operations, along with the axis of race, class, gender.  Subject to the gaze of the camera the body became an object of the closest scrutiny, its surface continually examined for the signs of its innate physical , mental and moral inferiority.

Historical perspectives are only necessary and defendable as a means of helping us to understand the present and allowing us to create the appropriate and effective means of working strategically within the relations of power and knowledge which currently endure.

The force and value of Foucaults ideas are owed to the fact that we continue to live in a society which is characterised by the forms of discipline and mechanisms of surveillance which he has identified.  A criticism of this is to say there is no implausible form of resistance, Foucaults response has been to insist that wherever there is power there is potential for resistance. But the forms of power are localised and specific so so should the forms of resistance.
This means there cannot be an overall strategy for an oppositional cultural politics of photography.  On the contrary it is necessary to develop alternative ways of working with photography, and to develop different photographic forms and devices suitable to the varied contexts in which the photograph is placed and used.