# How Can We Think about Technology Today with Michel Foucault? **Date de l'événement :** 14/10/2026 * Publié le 14/10/2026 ### Date 14/10/2026 ## Chapô _Cet article est aussi disponible [en Français](https://conference.sciencespo.fr/content/2026-10-14/comment-penser-la-technologie-aujourd-hui-avec-michel-foucault_TxhGEM4IELbbpJDvJrm8)._  **One hundred years after Michel Foucault's birth, his work still offers particularly fruitful tools for thinking about the place of technical objects in power relations, from disciplinary apparatuses to contemporary digital environments. Charles Corval, PhD in political science and associate researcher at Sciences Po's CEVIPOF, revisits four major contributions of Foucauldian thought to the analysis of technologies: their inscription within apparatuses, their articulation with the different modes of exercising power, their tactical use, and the new forms of government accompanied by the renewal of technical objects. How can Foucault's thought help us understand the power relations produced today by artificial intelligence, connected objects, and surveillance apparatuses?** ## Corps du texte “Over the whole surface of contact between the body and the object it handles, power is introduced, fastening them to one another. It constitutes a body-weapon, body-tool, body-machine complex,” writes Michel Foucault in 1975, in the now classic work of the humanities and social sciences, _Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison_. A thinker as original as he is famous, at one time named the most cited thinker of the twentieth century, Foucault also offers a particularly interesting foothold for thinking about technology, as this strange formulation of complexes of power shows: “body-weapon, body-tool, body-machine.” The author of _The Order of Things_ thus displays an original concern with the articulation of technology, knowledge, and power. Let us, however, point out an apparent paradox from the outset: while the word _technology_ is omnipresent in Foucault’s texts, attention to the technical object always seems indirect and to play a secondary role in the analysis. The explanation lies in the fact that Foucault does not always clearly distinguish between the technical object, as a tool of production, of knowledge, of constraint, or of self-renewal, and techniques in the sense of the practices through which subjects do things and appropriate objects. It is therefore only recently that the German sociologist Thomas Lemke has brought back to light the crucial importance of the material technical object in Foucault’s work. In _The Government of Things: Foucault and the New Materialisms_, Lemke invites us to pay attention to the way technical objects take part in Foucauldian reasoning, and to draw from this new reflections on the contemporary world. By extending Lemke’s analyses, it then becomes possible to derive four crucial issues that Foucauldian philosophy helps to illuminate today for a thinking of technical objects and power relations. The technical object exists only within an apparatus ---------------------------------------------------- Like the rifle for the soldier, or the bars of his prison for the prisoner, technical objects appear materially as units of larger ensembles. A technical object never comes alone; far from the fantasies of robinsonades, it is always constituted within a society that articulates at once techniques of production, forms of knowledge, powers, and ways of relating to oneself. Even a man who found himself alone, lost on a distant island, would inherit elementary knowledge that would nourish his attempt to rebuild technical objects. The ensembles in which a technical object can find its place are named apparatuses (_dispositifs_) by Foucault. The uncertain etymology of the French word suggests the way one disposes things in order to achieve a specific goal. Foucault takes up this etymology but refines it on the basis of three elements. First, an apparatus is a heterogeneous network of materialities and discourses. Second, an apparatus functions on the basis of the relations between its components: for example, the link between a rifle and a discourse may be prescriptive, or the link between bars and a prisoner may be a spatial limitation. Finally, an apparatus seeks to respond to a problem that has appeared in discourses both as urgent and as demanding a solution. The panopticon imagined by the English philosopher Bentham in the eighteenth century is a famous example of an apparatus that Foucault brought back to light. It is a network of objects organized within a general architecture: enclosed spaces, separated from one another by walls, but made visible from a central position—the famous observation tower—whose opening and closing are controlled both physically and discursively by guards and agents. The panoptic apparatus thus appears as a way of disposing bodies, things, and knowledge: it is oriented not only toward observation and social experimentation, but also places the captives in the situation of knowing themselves to be observed. The panopticon offers the deployment of a certain disciplinary rationality oriented toward the transformation of behavior. _![](https://firebasestorage.googleapis.com/v0/b/memory-conference.firebasestorage.app/o/prod%2FBfyDFv5o0CJpQ8yzeNu0%2FprojectsMedias%2F1MNfhNiSacBs1RxaTY7u%2FwysiwygMedias%2Feb83e715-d0ed-4525-a1c7-10a7703b4d21.jpg?alt=media&token=25f4b135-0bb1-4ab0-a91b-6b4c954265a0)_ _Plan of the Panopticon by Jeremy Bentham. Wikimedia Commons._ It is hardly difficult to see the full fruitfulness of this notion of apparatus for thinking about digital environments today. The introduction of cameras, motion sensors, or connected light bulbs, for example, transforms the ways in which institutions can account for subjects and make them undergo social experiments or expose them to punishment. More broadly, these objects impose a gaze within spaces, and thus an experience of knowing oneself to be watched. Technical apparatuses respond to modes of exercising power ---------------------------------------------------------- One would, however, have great difficulty transposing the logic of the panopticon fully into our contemporary spaces. The institutional gaze remains present, but its disciplinary force has been contested and has transformed since the era of military manuals and of the uncontrolled experiments of some cynical scientist on prisoners or the sick. This transformation can be understood by returning to the three modes of exercising power that can be identified in the recomposition and transformation of apparatuses over the course of history. The first mode of exercising power refers to sovereignty. Schematically, it is the logic of public punishment, meant to serve as a spectacular example to deter and terrify those who might seek to overstep the law. Sovereignty is a mode of exercising power that punishes all those who disobey and thereby seeks to restore the contested power of the sovereign. The second mode of exercising power is that of discipline, of which we have seen a few examples above. Discipline seeks to requalify disobedience as a problem of behavioral deviation from a norm that has supposedly been poorly internalized. Foucault speaks of normation as what is at stake: the aim is to anchor the norm in the body itself so that it does not overstep an expectation or a rule. The exercise of power through discipline therefore takes place above all through mechanisms of submission to exercises and experiments—education, medicalization, military habit, and so on. Finally, Foucault develops a third mode of exercising power, which rests on the notion of security. In this conception of power, the main stake is no longer so much the production of juridical knowledge to organize deterrent penalties, nor of knowledge of bodies and psychologies to bring subjectivities to conform to a norm, as the organization of a population on the basis of tendencies that seem natural to it. Security indeed rests on the identification of thresholds of tolerance and, on the contrary, on episodes of crisis, in order to think about society on the basis of the effects of the group taken as a whole. Theft, for example, then no longer appears as disobedience to an order, or as abnormal behavior, but rather as a statistical behavior that can be explained by certain other data, and whose acceptability depends on its frequency relative to an average. Security thus values above all the probabilistic approach to events and calls in response for environmental interventions so as to reduce the occurrence of certain behaviors or to encourage others. The subject is no longer subjected to normation in isolation, but lives in environments that orient its behavior. The whole stake of security is thus to observe behaviors left to themselves and then to try to steer them toward acceptable dynamics at the lowest cost. It is this last mode of exercising power that still largely nourishes, today, the rationality of most public policies: the organization of statistics and thresholds of tolerance with respect to deviations from norms. Technical objects for collecting and processing data play a crucial role in this conception of security: one must count the population, represent it, identify relations, and estimate the probability that certain behaviors will spread. But the same logic can also extend into techniques of production: companies put in place a whole set of measures to monitor the danger thresholds for their activities and the normal and acceptable operating thresholds. Modes of exercising power invite a tactical approach to technology ------------------------------------------------------------------ These modes of exercising power that manifest themselves in apparatuses should in no way be conceived as exclusive or as unilaterally historical. Foucault, notably in his course at the Collège de France, _Security, Territory, Population_, insists on the accumulation of sovereignty, discipline, and security in history. They therefore form “complex edifices” in which “the dominant characteristic” may shift depending on context. This point is crucial for grasping the Foucauldian gesture in its relation to technology. Far from falling into the easy assumptions of a technological determinism according to which technical objects would unilaterally determine behaviors, Foucault makes them a dimension of local apparatuses subject to perpetual struggles and transformations. From one material apparatus to another, discontinuities can be multiple: thus one understands that, in moving from one city to another within the same country, what is at stake in apparatuses can vary considerably. In this way, it becomes possible to describe contemporary technological issues differently. It is thus not a matter of taking a position “for” or “against” artificial intelligence, connected objects, or this or that major infrastructure project, but rather of grasping what the integration of this new object does to the apparatus and to power relations. This approach is therefore tactical: when technical objects can locally reverse power relations, they are resources to be invested in support of resistance and counter-conducts. Text-generation software can then serve to reverse the balance of power with an employer, by being used to assert a right; it can also offer certain civil servants a means of prioritizing the most vulnerable members of the public, by circumventing bureaucracy, in order to give time to those who sorely need it. Conversely, technical objects can also reinforce, and in fact often do reinforce, the asymmetrical relations that form within an apparatus. The most telling example is probably the disciplinary use of artificial intelligence as deployed in a company such as Amazon. The apparatus sees the appearance of connected objects monitoring employees’ work in order to transcribe it in the form of a score that decides promotions, reprimands, and even potential dismissals. The subject thus finds itself brought back to an experience analogous to that of the panopticon, with the major difference that it is observed by a machine whose lines of code are opaque and whose compassion is nonexistent. In Foucault, resistance to power itself belongs to the exercise of power: it constitutes one of its own dynamics. In the case of discipline, sabotaging technical objects responsible for exerting pressure on bodies, or feigning conformity to the norm, are two examples of this. In the face of technologies that deepen power asymmetries and shield multiple employers, intelligence agencies, or military organizations from scrutiny of their responsibility, it is urgent to reinvest these mechanisms of resistance. Resistance and emancipation require a dynamic understanding of the modes of exercising power through technology --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- However, such a thinking of resistance to power asymmetries cannot be undertaken without a broader reflection on what escapes the models previously established by Foucault. The philosophical perspective then constitutes an identification of potential discourses and materialities that could open onto a new exercise of power and thus give subjectivities resources to resist. Following the geographer Louise Amoore, one may for example ask what becomes of a power founded on security when the rationality that presides over it is no longer satisfied with probabilistic approaches. Indeed, since the attacks of September 11, 2001, and more generally, in the face of the generalization of technological risks that are admittedly of low probability but have potentially catastrophic consequences, the discourses rationalizing action have no longer sought only to discern the probable, but to sketch out the dangerousness of improbable events. Within such a rationality of government, the ambition is then no longer simply to determine the normality of a population, but to subject it to scenarios and simulations in order to derive from them apparatuses for managing the improbable. These apparatuses then also offer justifications for supposedly exceptional measures that can nonetheless establish themselves over time, such as the Vigipirate plan, France’s counter-terrorism alert system, which was kept at a high alert level for more than eight consecutive years. They also justify mass surveillance, in which intelligence services allow themselves to collect data massively and only afterwards sort between the profiles for which suspicions prove well founded and those that hardly deserved to be placed under surveillance. In these contemporary apparatuses, artificial intelligence tools, connected objects, and the organizations responsible for data processing thus compose a new horizon for the mode of exercising power. In the contemporary world, it is increasingly a matter of being able to simulate reality in order to control its scenarios and make decisions before events even occur. The definition of this new rationality of power is still at the heart of contemporary research that seeks to extend the Foucauldian gesture in order to sketch the most relevant interpretations of power, but also tactics of resistance. Such an ambition is probably the finest legacy of Michel Foucault’s work on technology, today, one hundred years after his birth, and at a time when the world sees apparatuses of power transforming at a pace that seems ever more frenetic. ### Thématique `#Numérique` **Licence :** `#CC-BY-ND (Attribution, Pas de modification)` **Langue :** `#Anglais` --- ### Navigation pour IA - [Index de tous les contenus](https://conference.sciencespo.fr/llms.txt) - [Plan du site (Sitemap)](https://conference.sciencespo.fr/sitemap.xml) - [Retour à l'accueil](https://conference.sciencespo.fr/)