Foucault: Power/Knowledge, disciplinary regimes, discourses

Michel Foucault links power in one of its manifestations to institutional classification systems e.g. those of schools, factories, hospitals, clinics, prisons, barracks etc. Hence the classifications produced of the members of those institutions constitute a form of power over them, a form of surveillance in fact. Hence discipline, or in his later terminology, discourse is the use of language, classification to control, normalise members of the organisation. It is a practise rather than a code, language in action.
The accumulated documentation built up on members is institutional knowledge e.g. ‘the good pupil’ is defined by their exam successes as such. Patients may be ill in terms of the list of diseases doctors have or how they are likely to use classification. A patient may have cancer but they may die from heart failure etc. As Foucault says in ‘The Means of Correct Training’ (excerpt from his Discipline and Punish) classification acts to normalise the individual (‘institutions operate a ‘normalising judgement’) and the more knowledge they have about them the more they are able to normalise them.
The disciplinary power of institutions works by comparing, differentiating, hierarchising (ranking), homogenising (grouping under one label- ‘they’re all C grade’ etc.), or excluding the uncooperative.
Power operates in space and is focussed on the body/conduct via panopticism. Discipline/discourse works by making individuals visible, operating forms of surveillance on them. The effect of observation is to render the conduct of the individual normal. The individual internalises the expectations of the observing system- teachers, officers, doctors, supervisors, police.
Hence the normalised individual can then operate without direct supervision, they’ve become self-disciplined, self regulating and the power of discipline/ discourse works through them. Foucault refers to this form of power as governmentality. The surveillance is still there in the background but not directly present. Peformance targets/reviews/customer feedback are a way in which indirect influence still produces an effect. See du Gay, ‘Making Up People at Work’ in du Gay ed. The Production of Culture
Power here is identified with discursive strategies and tactics/ techniques rather than indivduals e.g. education requires the examination to give it direction. This ‘slender technique’ (i.e. largely absent) dominates the whole of the child’s education.
Power flows rather than being possessed. It can be productive as well as repressive as it produces the subjects (members) of institutional discourses It is capillary in its network nature. Foucault therefore speaks of the ‘micro-physics of power’ It can move upwards as inmates etc. exert pressure on authorities by calling them to account (counter surveillance?). It is constitutive of authority and spoken via knowledge (‘x is suffering from…’). Some similarities with Bourdieu’s ‘symbolic power’ or Habermas’s speech acts which produce social and political effects

Contingency of power/knowledge. Discursive formations depend on the networks and configurations of power of their constituent institutions being united by a common focus such as the population question in the C19th. which brought together medecine, public health, social work, charity, religion etc. See Mort extract. The fact that power is not held centrally but only seen centrally as an effect from networks etc. means that the power structure is less predictable and permanent than if power is only concentrated in one place.

Subjectification: the process whereby an individual subjects themselves to the power of disciplinary regime/a discourse and as such becomes objectified (e.g. the model prisoner) by that discourse.