Page 185 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

DICTIONARY OF CULTURAL STUDIES

studies the notion of ideology has been deployed to refer to ideas that justify the power
of ascendant groups, though it can be used to suggest the justifying ideas of all social
groups. The related concept of hegemony can be understood in terms of the strategies
162 by which the ideologies or world-views of powerful social groups are maintained. Here
culture is understood as a terrain of conflict and struggle over meanings and thus the
concept of hegemony necessarily ‘contains’ or connotes issues of power.
In this context, power is being conceptualized as a force by which individuals or
groups are able to achieve their aims or interests over and against the will of others.
Power here is constraining (power over) in the context of a zero sum model (you
have it or you do not) and organized into binary power blocs. Thus the idea of
hegemony commonly infers the exercise of constraint by the powerful over the
subordinate and connotes an undesirable ‘imposition’ disguised as widespread
consent. However, where cultural studies has been influenced by poststructuralism
it has, after Foucault, stressed that power is also productive and enabling (power to),
circulating through all levels of society and within all social relationships. Foucault
likens the circulation of power through human societies to a capillary system and
argues that it is vital to the generation of subjectivity. Further, Foucault regards all
knowledge as implicated with power in a mutually constituting relationship by
which knowledge is indissociable from regimes of power and discipline.
Thus far the idea of power has been explored in relation to questions of
representation. However, some critics have argued that a concentration on
signification and texts as the repository of power ignores the institutional
dimensions of cultural authority. That is, culture is caught up in, and functions as
a part of, cultural technologies that organize and shape social life and human
conduct. Culture is not just a matter of representations and consciousness but of
institutional practices, administrative routines and spatial arrangements that are
manifestations of power.
Foucault has been a prominent theorist of the ‘disciplinary’ character of modern
institutions, practices and discourses where discipline involves the organization of
the subject in space through dividing practices, training and standardization.
Discipline produces subjects by categorizing and naming them in a hierarchical
order through a rationality of efficiency, productivity and normalization.
Disciplinary technologies are said to have arisen in a variety of sites, including
schools, prisons, hospitals and asylums, producing what Foucault called ‘docile
bodies’ that could be subjected, used, transformed and improved.
The metaphor of disciplinary power commonly associated with Foucault is the
Panopticon, a prison design consisting of a courtyard with a tower in the centre
capable of overlooking the surrounding buildings and cells. The inmates of the cells
are visible to the observer in the tower but the onlooker is unable to be seen by the
prisoners. The idea of the Panopticon is a metaphor (it is doubtful that the design
was materialized) for a continuous, anonymous and all-pervading power and
surveillance operating at all levels of social organization.
Links Cultural politics, governmentality, hegemony, ideology, politics, poststructuralism,
power/knowledge