Michel Foucault: The Structure of Power

When we read history we generally comprehend it through a linear equation of progress. In other words, we generally look at the past as something to not replicate and see our present as the best time in history to be alive. There is this notion that societies in the past were less humane, less educated, and overall less well off than we are today. In some cases, this may be true, especially from a technological standpoint, yet one French historian and philosopher asks us to deeply examine history and to not take for granted that what occurs today in society is any better than what occurred in the past.

Michel Foucault was born in France in 1926 and had a lifelong desire to understand the structure of power, its source, and its underlying influence in the manner in which we live our lives. Despite being a harsh critic of the upper class in France, ironically Foucault was born into an extremely wealthy family. His father was a famous surgeon and the young Michel went to some of the best schools in the country. Despite his parent’s wishes for him to become a doctor Foucault was deeply rebellious and had issues with self-harming and suicide. Part of the reason behind these problems was due to him having to suppress his homosexuality from a society that at the time wasn’t as accepting of other sexual preferences as it is today. It was perhaps due to this rebellious nature that set the precedent for Michel Foucault’s works that wanted to reexamine history and use the different concepts within these respective eras in history to better understand modern problems.

In order to better comprehend Foucault’s thinking it is best to first understand his ideas towards power and the effects it has on individuals. Power in this context can be seen as the means in which an entity or entities can regulate or limit the options of another. One simple example is if someone is robbing someone else for their personal belongings. In this example, the criminal is limiting the victim’s options of being able to keep their belongings via the use of threats or actual violence. This sort of power which relies on coercion, threat of violence, or the actual act of violence was labeled as “repressive power.” Despite being the most obvious form of power, Michel Foucault viewed this aspect of power to be a weaker version of power that affects our day to day lives.

Foucault saw that true power lied in the absence of repression, that power that required no threat but merely a systematic implementation to create habits was the most effective form of power. Institutions such as the education system, justice systems, and scientific institutions were examples of power that created a habitual way of acting towards one another. This power that created societal habits was far more powerful than that of repressive power because its structure was not easily identified and therefore was harder to overthrow and rebel against.

With this in mind one of the central ideas to Foucault’s work was to examine the manner in which different systems of power worked in the past and to see whether or not history really was a linear equation of progression. He wanted us to question how things are currently and to not take for granted that they are somehow just automatically better than how they were in the past.

One of the best examples of this was Foucault’s thoughts on how the justice system worked. Hundreds of years ago there were public executions, something that today would be seen as barbaric and inhumane. Foucault wanted us to remove our emotional and societal connection to this idea of public execution and compare it to how the justice system works from a structural viewpoint. His intention was for us to analyze the structure of power back then and compare it to the internalized structure of power we currently have.

For example, often times when a prisoner was executed publically there was a sort of sympathy for the prisoner and a disdain for the executioner. There were often riots and protest following the execution which often led to social changes. The power structure here was very repressive, the executioner was the bad guy and the prisoner was merely collateral damage of a flawed system that could be sometimes be inhumane even by the standards of the past.

Compare this to how the justice system is structured now and one sees that the current structures of power are less identifiable. Punishment is now done behind closed doors in prison. No longer could the structure of power be so easily identified thus creating more obstacles to stand in the way of social changes. Think of police brutality, institutional racism, etc. All of these are problems in our current system that have become difficult to identify and fix. In many cases there are those that deny the problem even exists thus showing us how severe power that doesn’t rely on repression is. It allows for populations to not even see the issues at hand. A judge may sentence a minority to more time in comparison to that of a white person. The social perception of immigrants and other marginalized groups can affect how they are treated in society and in the respective justice systems. All of these subtle but very real influences of power were what Foucault’s work wished to identify. He wanted us to look at the institutions we place so much trust in and realize the errors within them go beyond the basic ideas of simple repressive power.

Think about how much justification police brutality is given. Too often there are excuses for the murder of unarmed people due to the power society places on authority figures. Michel believed that institutions such as the police don’t derive their power simply because of the threat of violence, but also because societally speaking our perceptions have been morphed and we have been from a young age groomed to perceive different forms of power in ways that may not have our best interest in mind.

Michel Foucault’s main objective was for us to analyze the structures of power handed down to us from our parents, the government, and society at large. He urged us to question the power structures at hand and not to take for granted the sort of linear model of progression that history classes often give us when we are in school. He was well aware that history is essentially written by the winners, but Foucault wanted us to keep in mind that there are other ways of looking at history and the social structures within it could be reestablished for a more promising future. Despite dying in 1984 his ideas still influence social changes today. In his own words: “ I’m no prophet. My job is making windows where there were once walls”