Foucault's Panopticon Summary

“For me, power is that which must be explained.”
-M. Foucault

The problem of power was of great importance in Michel Foucault 's philosophical work. His studies on the “analysis of power” proposes a new perspective of power which is far from other theories of power. But the word power is apt to lead number of misunderstandings---misunderstandings with respect to its nature, its form and its unity. In this chapter the researcher will try to discuss the nature and definition of power, its form, and its concrete illustration: the ‘Panopticon’, and on the last part of this chapter the researcher will give a synthesis of the things that he will discuss.

I. Power Defined
When one speaks of power people immediately think of a political structure

This means that these relations go right down into the depths of society, that they are not localized in the relations between the state and its citizens or on the frontier between classes and that they do not merely reproduce, at the level of individuals, bodies, gestures and behaviour, the general form of the law or government”,
“Between every point of a social body, between a man and a woman, between the members of a family, between a master and his pupil, between everyone who knows and everyone who does not, there exist relations of power.”

Hence, for Foucault the relationality of power, meaning that power is always a case of power relations between people, as opposed to a quantum possessed by people.
B. Power as Productive
Foucault is concerned less with the oppressive aspect of power, but more with the resistance of those the power is exerted upon. Foucault thinks that it is wrong to consider power as something that the institutions possess and use oppressively against individuals and groups, so he tries to move the analysis one step beyond viewing power as the plain oppression of the powerless by the powerful, aiming to examine how it operates in day to day interactions between people and