Notions Of Power And Identity example essay topic

Foucault believed that power is never in any one person's hands, it does not show itself in any obvious manner but rather as something that works its way into our imaginations and serves to constrain how we act. For example in the setting of a workplace the power does not pass from the top down; instead it circulates through their organizational practices. Such practices act like a grid, provoking and inciting certain courses of action and denying others. Foucault considers this as no straightforward matter and believes that it rests on how far individuals interpret what is being laid down as "obvious" or "self evident", institutional power works best when all parties accept it willingly. Foucault's notion of power is a difficult notion to grasp principally because it is never entirely clear on who has the power in the first place, once the idea is removed that power must be vested in someone at the top of the ladder e.g. the company director, it becomes much more difficult to identify what power is or where and whom it lies with. Foucault believes that we are so used to thinking about power as an identifiable and overt force and that this view is simply not the case, because it is taken for granted that the above statement is true then it is much more complicated to comprehend power as a guiding force that does not show itself in an obvious manner.

According to Foucault we take it upon ourselves to regulate our own conduct, even though we are free to do and say as we please we choose to constrain our behaviour and the reason for us doing so it that we know what is expected of us, we do not need someone in a position of "authority" to do this for us, we all take responsibility for our own lives. It is in this sense that power works as an anonymous force, provoking free agents to act in ways that make it difficult for them to do otherwise. Foucault's theory of power "revolves around indirect techniques of self-regulation which induce appropriate forms of behaviour". 1, we are free to govern ourselves. In the absence of an authority figure we will automatically restrain our behaviour, there is no "hand" of power that pushes us all into line, only an acknowledgement that we all work within a framework of choices, that are ultimately subjected to influence and direction, but that we ourselves have the final say in the way in which we operate. In that sense power acts as a positive force as oppose to a negative one; it enables people to control their own lives.

Although power is seen as an unrestricted issue it is still viewed by Foucault as a stabilizing force that leaves little room for manoeuvre, the way in which this is done is by, for example, a workplace closing down possibilities, inciting or inducing a certain course of action as oppose to proliferating them, this is the way in which they keep a hold on peoples lives, ordering them in a particular direction. It is at this point, Foucault argues, where the workforce feels as if they are being monitored, that they "bring themselves into line and assume the role that has been indirectly carved out for them". 2 In other terms "power works on and through agents in ways which structurally limit what they otherwise might have done". 3 "This method of domination is that it is through people working on their own conduct that they bring themselves to order. At the level of the ongoing running of institutions on a day-to-day basis, individuals interna lise what is expected of them because it seems the right and proper thing to do. If this sounds less than total domination, that is because at best it represents a modest form of domination".

4 Domination, for Foucault, characterizes the outcome of institutional power, and is a state of affairs brought about by indirect techniques and received truths, rather than by organized rule bound practices. Institutional power is not so much a hierarchical system with clearly defined lines of authority and delegation but a "scenario of power in which each side circles the other, vying for position in the hope of influencing the outcome". 5 Since Foucault other theorists have developed the notions of power and identity, the most notable being Judith Butler. Butler has written extensively on questions of identity politics, gender and sexuality.

She is critical of traditional feminists for remaining within the confines of a male / female binary. The subject for Butler is never exactly male or female. In her essay Imitation and Gender Subordination, Butler quotes "identity categories tend to be instruments of regulatory regimes, whether as normalizing categories of oppressive structures or as the rallying points for a libratory contestation of that very oppression". Throughout her essay Butler maintains that people cannot be placed in specific identity groups, for example, women should not be identified in terms of their sex and a gay man or a lesbian cannot be identified as such. Butler argues that as soon as this is applied to a person they immediately fall prey to the binary power structure that they wished to break apart from and that once a person falls into a label that lies outside of the power structures norms ostracism and rejection soon follow. "There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; identity is constituted by the "expressions" that are said to be its results".

6 Butler argues that a subject creates their identity through compulsory performance and that in doing this the notion of labelling oneself ceases to exist, this per formative nature is an unconscious act, and through constant repetition of this act comes the creation of a specific label / identity. "Personal identity within philosophical accounts almost always centres on the question of what internal feature of the person establishes the continuity or self-identity of the person through time". 7 Butler's theories have been widely criticised, once the traditional idea of labelling is rejected what is left? Once the power structure is de-centred, where does this leave the notion of identity? Within regulatory regimes, people trying to escape their label, often do so only to find themselves subjected to another one, only when labels are dropped and compulsory accepted would the power structure be displaced. Butler in her book Gender Trouble warns the reader to be wary when thinking about the subject of identity as a set of attributes within a person that creates or controls the person outwardly projected towards others.

It is believed by some that there is a true and fixed identity within everybody, Foucault rejected this view and explained identity as something we communicate to others during our interactions with them, a shifting and temporary construction. It is also possible to have more than one identity, and we can call upon any of these identities at a particular time, according to psychologist Kathy Woodward, she also points out that our identity would need to change depending on whom it is we were interacting with and the situation that we were in, "subtle and not so subtle variations of identity may well be called upon for each of these roles". 8 Butler describes modern notions of identity as "being made up of regulatory ideals"9, these regulatory ideals provide "idealized and reified norms which people are expected to live up to". 10 These types of regulatory ideals are sustained or undermined through performance.

Performa tivity is not a singular act, "it is always the reiteration of a norm or a set of norms, and to the extent that it acquires an act like status in the present, it conceals or dissimulates the conventions of which it is a repetition". 11 It is through this repeated action that that these norms are created and lived up to. This idea can also be related to discourse; Butler argues that performative acts are statements that also produce that which they say. Discourse promotes specific kinds of power relations, in other words to know is to participate in complicated webs of power.

Thus performative acts are a domain in which discourse acts as power.