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Created: March 30, 2003
Latest Update: March 30, 2003
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

Foucault: Power, Surveillance, Sovereignty

Site Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individual Authors, March 2003.
"Fair use" encouraged.

This essay is based on Foucault In Cyberspace: Surveillance, Sovereignty, and Hard-Wired Censors By James Boyle © 1997. Professor of Law, Washington College of Law, American University.

Professor Boyle begins his article with a reference to what Foucault says about power, sovereignty, and surveillance:

"[T]he problems to which the theory of sovereignty were addressed were in effect confined to the general mechanisms of power, to the way in which its forms of existence at the higher level of society influenced its exercise at the lowest levels.. In effect, the mode in which power was exercised could be defined in its essentials in terms of the relationship sovereign-subject. But ..we have the .. emergence or rather the invention of a new mechanism of power possessed of a highly specific procedural techniques.. which is also, I believe, absolutely incompatible with the relations of sovereignty...It is a type of power which is constantly exercised by means of surveillance rather than in a discontinuous manner by means of a system of levies or obligations distributed over time....It presupposes a tightly knit grid of material coercions rather than the physical existence of a sovereign... This non-sovereign power, which lies outside the form of sovereignty, is disciplinary power..."
From Michel Foucault, Two Lectures, in Michael Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, 78, 104 (Colin Gordon ed. & Colin Gordon et al. trans., 1980).

Let's take a look at some of the terms Foucault uses:

Merriam-Webster Dictionary Search:

1. What do we mean by sovereignty?

   Consider using the Merriam-Webster search box. Consider also this explanation offered on a Gandhi related reader's list:

   "In a very different context, Foucault contrasts "sovereignty" and "governmentality". Sovereignty for Foucault is a pre-modern political rationality. With the onset of modernity (Foucault's date, in this huge debate, is "Europe", 1650), came a transformation in power, in its effects, in its targets, in its expressivities. This transformation he calls "governmentality".
   From the Gandhi and Gujarat Reader List.