Page 144 - Cultural Theory

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••• Foucault: Interpretive Analysis and the Social •••

and the methods used. Rather than analyzing power relations from the point of
view of its internal rationality, it consists of analyzing power relations through
the antagonism of strategies.
(1982: 211)

Power is exercised on free subjects and guides, but does not necessarily determine,
conduct.
In this formulation the individual is not the traditional subject caught in a war
between domination and liberation. Rather, the individual is the personal space
where both active and passive aspects of human agency and identity surface in the
context of material practices. The production of identity is implicated in the pro-
duction of power which is both positive and negative. Identity may be imposed
through the surveillance of a subject population. This surveillance produces both dis-
cipline (that is, conformity to the norm), and the disciplines (regulated fields of
knowledge and expertise). Disciplinary surveillance involves first individualizing
each member of the population to facilitate the collation of observations across the
population.
From these observations, statistical norms are produced relating to a multitude of
characteristics. These norms are then applied back to the subjected individuals who
are categorized, evaluated and acted upon according to their relation to the produced
norm. Foucault’s work focused on the ‘history of the present’ and ‘power/knowledge’
synthesis and how the subject was formed (Foucault, 1977; 1978). Here Foucault’s
work is on the ‘microphysics of power’ and the interplay of power relations, dividing
practices and tactics in particular contexts (Foucault, 1977): the ‘doctor’ and ‘patient’;
‘prison officer’ and ‘prisoner’; ‘teacher’ and ‘student’ and ‘social worker’ and ‘older
consumer’ (Biggs and Powell, 2001).

The population

Foucault outlines how the modern state enhanced its power by intervening in the very
life of the ‘bio-politics of the population’ (1980: 139). Biopolitics leads to his perspec-
tive of politics or ‘governmentality’ (1991a: 90). In this process, power has two poles.
First, a pole of transformation and, second, the human body as an object of control and
manipulation. The first revolves around the notion of ‘scientific categorization’, for
example, ‘species’ and ‘population’. It is these categories that become objects of sys-
tematic and sustained political intervention. The other pole is not ‘human species’ but
the human body: not in its biological sense, but as an object of control and manipula-
tion. Collectively, Foucault calls these procedures ‘technologies’ which centre around
the ‘objectification’ of the body. The overall aim is to forge: ‘a docile body that may be
subjected, used, transformed and improved’ (1977: 198).
As modernity unfolded, Western administrators rationalized their management
of social problems with technically efficient means of population control:
statistics, police, health regulations and centralized welfare. Such means constituted

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