Michel Foucault gives us a new way of thinking about power. A way which allows us to find power in a place where we would have never expected to find it before, including in the university and in the scientific knowledge itself. To understand Foucault thinking, we should bear in mind the distinction between the two kinds of power. Repressive power and normalizing power. To think of power in terms of repression is the traditional way of thinking. Against that Foucault suggests that most power indeed the most important kind of power in our modern society does not repressive at all. It works in a far subtler less visible way this power is what Foucault calls normalizing power. 

When we think of someone who is exercising power some of the images that may come up in our minds are these a judge ordering a criminal to be locked up 10 years, a country using its superior military to conquer another country, an angry boss telling his employee to do as he has told or get fired and so on. 

When we think of the power we tend to think of violence, whether physical or mental. This is the idea of power as repression. You want to do one thing but someone else uses their power to forces you to do their bidding instead. Such power is undeniably effective but there is also a sense in which in each of these cases the need to apply power implies a failure. The state only has to lock up criminals if its laws have been broken, the bigger country only needs to go to the trouble of invading the smaller country if it has failed in other ways to make the smaller country do what it wants. And a boss who has threatened his employees is not really in control. A boss who is really in control is obeyed without the need for threats. Repressive power without no doubt the most visible form of power is also is a kind of second-rate. Our lives are shaped by repressive power or by the threat of repressive power only on rare occasions. For instance, only a few of us go to jail for stealing. And what's more, it's not the case that the rest of us are motivated not to steal because we are afraid of going to jail. Because of the threat of jail, we don’t walk through the supermarket with the desire to steal things held in check only by our fear of the police. No, we don't even think about stealing. If we think about it we don't consider it seriously. 

That is where Foucault's idea of normalizing power comes in. Repressive power forces us to do what we don't want to do. Normalizing power, on the other hand, makes us want to do what we have to do anyway. It turns us into people who automatically by their own will do what society wishes them to do. 

Normalizing power is a power that determines what we see as normal. It constructs our view of the world and ourselves. In that, it shapes our beliefs our desires and our decisions while at the same time giving us the idea that these are our own beliefs, desires and decisions that nobody has forced them upon us. In the sense, that’s true even though our lives have been shaped in countless ways by the normalizing power of society. 

Foucault is extremely sceptical of the idea that there is some true you hiding underneath what society has made of you. Without society, you wouldn't be a person at all. All of us are and always will be normalized to a very large extend. Foucault points out that while repressive power often focused in very specific institutions and individuals, the police force, the army, the judge, the bosses and the politicians. Normalizing power, on the other hand, is everywhere. The family is the source of normalizing power. And so is the school, the university, the hospital, the psychiatric clinic and even the commercial break on television. 

So, how we can link Foucault's normalizing conception with Stuart Hall's reception theory?

Stuart Hall's theory suggests that the media carries important messages, which producers "encode" in text. However, audiences come to their interpretations when they "decode" a text through the process of negotiation. He further proposed that audiences come to different understandings of a text depending on the reception context in which they saw it. 

Stuart Hall urges that there are three main positions that the audiences might take when they decode the media message. Such as dominant-hegemonic or preferred, negotiated and oppositional. 

The first type of decoding is the dominated response. In this type of response, the audience or receiver fully accepts and reproduces the code to the producer or sender.

The second type of decoding is the negotiated response. To emphasize the notion of no necessary correspondence between encoding and decoding, Hall (1980a) also distinguishes between "negotiated" and "oppositional" readings. A negotiated reading occurs when despite recognizing the authenticity of hegemonic definitions the viewer contests them through particular or "situated" logics. 

The third type of decoding is the oppositional response. An oppositional reading, according to Hall, occurs when the viewer understands both the literal and implicative meanings of discourse but decodes the message in an entirely heterogeneous way. It is here, he argues, that the "politics of signification" meets the "struggle in the discourse," indicating the failure of practices of encoding to achieve a hegemonic reading of the text.

In our contemporary community where the media messages and ideology behind it shapes the living conditions and lifestyles of people, we can urge that normalizing power acts in its best. Media producers normalize their intended message on audiences in the long run or short terms. As Foucault had said that the media has normalizing power. I think Foucault would agree with Hall's dominant-hegemonic or preferred positions of audiences in the contemporary societies but the negotiated and oppositional positions of audiences are contradicted with Foucault's idea of normalizing power. Media could normalize power verily on passive audiences but negotiated and oppositional readers would not agree whatever the media says.

Note: The essay will be revised and completed later. It is the draft version of my assignment to a professor. 

M. Zaher Dowran