Foucault and the Theories of Power and Identity

Foucault believed that power is never in any one person’s hands, it does not show itself in any obvious manner but rather as something that works its way into our imaginations and serves to constrain how we act. For example in the setting of a workplace the power does not pass from the top down; instead it circulates through their organizational practices. Such practices act like a grid, provoking and inciting certain courses of action and denying others. Foucault considers this as no straightforward matter and believes that it rests on how far individuals interpret what is being laid down as “obvious” or “self evident”, institutional power works best when all parties accept it willingly. Foucault’s notion of power is a difficult notion to grasp principally because it is never entirely clear on who has the power in the first place, once the idea is removed that power must be vested in someone at the top of the ladder e.g. the company director, it becomes much more difficult to identify what power is or where and whom it lies with. Foucault believes that we are so used to thinking about power as an identifiable and overt force and that this view is simply not the case, because it is taken for granted that the above statement is true then it is much more complicated to comprehend power as a guiding force that does not show itself in an obvious manner.

According to Foucault we take it upon ourselves to regulate our own conduct, even though we are free to do and say as we please we choose to constrain our behaviour and the reason for us doing so it that we know what is expected of us, we do not need someone in a position of “authority” to do this for us, we all take responsibility for our own lives. It is in this sense that power works as an anonymous force, provoking free agents to act in ways that make it difficult for them to do otherwise. Foucault’s theory of power “revolves around indirect techniques of self-regulation which induce appropriate forms of behaviour.”1, we are free to govern ourselves. In the absence of an authority figure we will automatically restrain our behaviour, there is no “hand” of power that pushes us all into line, only an acknowledgement that we all work within a framework of choices, that are ultimately subjected to influence and direction, but that we ourselves have the final say in the way in which we operate. In that sense power acts as a positive force as oppose to a negative one; it enables people to control their own lives.

Although power is seen as an unrestricted issue it is still viewed by Foucault as a stabilising force that leaves little room for manoeuvre, the way in which this is done is by, for example, a workplace closing down possibilities, inciting or inducing a certain course of action as oppose to proliferating them, this is the way in which they keep a hold on peoples lives, ordering them in a particular direction. It is at this point, Foucault argues, where the workforce feels as if they are being monitored, that they “bring themselves into line and assume the role that has been indirectly carved out for them.”2 In other terms “power works on and through agents in ways which structurally limit what they otherwise might have done.”3 “This method of domination is that it is through people working on their own conduct that they bring themselves to order. At the level of the ongoing running of institutions on a day-to-day basis, individuals internalise what is expected of them because it seems the right and proper thing to do. If this sounds less than total domination, that is because at best it represents a modest form of domination.”4 Domination, for Foucault, characterizes the outcome of institutional power, and is a state of affairs brought about by indirect techniques and received truths, rather than by organized rule bound practices. Institutional power is not so much a hierarchical system with clearly defined lines of authority and delegation but a “scenario of power in which each side circles the other, vying for position in the hope of influencing the outcome.”5

Since Foucault other theorists have developed the notions of power and identity, the most notable being Judith Butler. Butler has written extensively on questions of identity politics, gender and sexuality. She is critical of traditional feminists for remaining within the confines of a male/female binary. The subject for Butler is never exactly male or female. In her essay Imitation and Gender Subordination, Butler quotes “identity categories tend to be instruments of regulatory regimes, whether as normalizing categories of oppressive structures or as the rallying points for a libratory contestation of that very oppression”. Throughout her essay Butler maintains that people cannot be placed in specific identity groups, for example, women should not be identified