Exercise 4.1 Foucault

PART FOUR: ETHICS AND LOOKING AT THE OTHER

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PROJECT GAZE AND CONTROL

Exercise 4.1

Read the article ‘On Foucault: Disciplinary Power and Photography’ by David Green (The Camera Work Essays, 2005, pp.119–31). Core resources: OnFoucault.pdf

Summarise the key points made by the author in your learning log (Open College of the Arts, 2014:83)

Reading On Foucault: Disciplinary Power and Photography by David Green

Green’s intention is to share with wider audiences French historian and philosopher Foucault’s ideas. I have to say I found this a challenge to read and interpret however after some persevering the key points that I can extract from his paper are:

On Power:

  • It is difficult to place Foucault’s work in academic disciplines because he didn’t acknowledge the boundaries of them.
  • His main ideas are in the history of ideas, especially the history of science.
  • There are two themes in his investigations, firstly forms of rationality with man positioned as the subject and object of knowledge: secondly the complex relations bonding power and knowledge which are implicit to rationality.
  • Power should be seen in in a positive form when it enables knowledge.

On Disciplinary Power:

  • His most read work was Discipline and Punishment (1975), where he describes a new form of power- “disciplinary society”; where punishment is seen as reform rather than retribution.
  • He talks of mechanisms of surveillance as a “technology “of disciplinary power , and the Panopticon (an architectural building which enabled surveillance without the observer being seen) in particular.
  • The carceral network of disciplinary institutions such as prisons and hospitals have supported the normalising of power.

On The Politics of the Body

  • Foucault asserts that man is surveyed so that his body can be used as an object of knowledge and that power is used to extract knowledge.
  • On this basis the body becomes political and economic commodity and is subject to medical and psychological examination and the mechanisms of surveillance.

On Photography and Power:

  • Photography has become one of the mechanisms of surveillance to observe and classify people to normalise disciplinary power.
  • The gaze of the camera on the body enables close scrutiny and what he terms the mapping of depravity.

Green concludes that although Foucault presents power as all pervasive and impossible to resist, we should develop alternative ways of working with photography.

References:

Green, D (2005) On Foucalt: disciplinary Power and Photography [Online] available at: https://www.oca-student.com/sites/default/files/OnFoucault.pdf (accessed 30.12.20)

Open College of the Arts (2014) Photography 2: Documentary-Fact and Fiction (Course Manual). Barnsley: Open College of the Arts.

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