Saturday 6 December 2014

Foucault on power

Later in his life, Foucault explained that his work was less about analysing power as a phenomenon than about trying to characterise the different ways in which contemporary society has expressed the use of power to "objectivise subjects." These have taken three broad forms: one involving scientific authority to classify and 'order' knowledge about human populations. A second, and related form, as been to categorise and 'normalise' human subjects (by identifying madness, illness, physical features, and so on). The third relates to the manner in which the impulse to fashion sexual identities and train one's own body to engage in routines and practices ends up reproducing certain patterns within a given society
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Foucault#Thought