Lecture notes DO NOT QUOTE – notes are not for public circulation
Michel Foucault
Last session we discussed Edward Said’s famous ‘Orientalism’, so famous and
powerful a book that – Sarah mentioned it and we shall see in after reading week
– it triggered the emergences of a whole new field of study: postcolonalism.
Now, let’s remind us, what was the argument, the idea of Orientalism proposed:
(slide with definition)
An idea, produced both in and about the West, that holds principally that
the ‘East’ is both ‘other’ and ‘inferior’
(slide)
(slide)
quote: Within the framework of Orientalism, the Orient is not an inert fact
of nature (the ‘geographical’ natural orient), but a phenomenon
constructed by generations of intellectuals, artists, commentators,
writers, politicians, and, more importantly, constructed by the
naturalizing of a wide range of Orientalist assumptions and stereotypes.
So, in short, Orientalism is ‘power through knowledge’. Power Said
suggests does not only lie in very visible military force or domination; in
visible and obvious economic exploitation visible in class struggle.
Imperial power, he suggest is much more subtle and it works via
education, the study of the humanities at the university the study of
science, the production and exhibition of art or theatre production…all
these activities we do not immediatly understand related to the exercise
of ‘power’ – indeed we tend to see particularly the scientific ones as
neutral activities, and explicitly non-political activities.
Clearly, we are inclined to say, these 18th/19th century geographers,
botanists, artists, language specialists, anthropologist and so on went to
the Orient – here I mean the geographical location -- with domination and
exploitation in their minds. Oh no, no,…they went there, we might say and
quote all the 18th and 19th century scientists who told us so in their
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publications, to ‘know’ the other, to learn, to understand…clearly these
are benign activities of civilized cultures who see learning and education,
the gathering and distribution of knowledge at the core of their existence.
All this is done – so we believe because the 18th/19th century scholars tell
us so—in absolute neutrality, their politics do not come into their
‘descriptions’, into their collection and interpretation of the data they
were collecting in the Orient on the Orient.
(slide with image of book – quick analysis)
Now, we saw that Said in the 1970s does not take at face value what 18th and 19th
century scientists and humanities scholars tell us about the neutral nature of
their research. He is a suspicious man…and we saw what he argued:
For there is no such a thing as knowledge that is less…partial than the
individual (with his entangling and distracting life circumstances) who
produces it. Yet this knowledge is not therefore automatically nonpolitical. … What I am interested in doing now is suggesting how the
general liberal consensus that ‘true’ knowledge is fundamentally
nonpolitical (and conversely, that overtly political knowledge is not ‘true’
knowledge) obscures the highly if obscurely organized political
circumstances obtaining when knowledge is produced. … For if it is true
that no production of knowledge in the human sciences can ever ignore or
disclaim its author’s involvement as a human subject in his own
circumstances, then it must also be true that for a European or American
studying the Orient there can be no disclaiming the main circumstances of
his actuality: that he comes up against the Orient as a European or
American first, as an individual second. And to be a European or American
in such a situation is by no means an inert fact. It meant and means being
aware, however dimly, that one belongs to a power with definite interests
in the Orient, and more important, that one belongs to a part of the earth
with a definite history of involvement in the Orient almost since the time
of Homer.’
In short, no scholar could and will ever be able to claim to stand outside of his or
her own value system, its morals and its politics when describing another culture
or historical age. (We saw the problem with Clifford Geertz some of his critics in
the 1970s saw this as a problem with his method of ‘thick description’). To
describe ‘the other’ necessarily requires the observer to judge from his point of
view. To come up with classification systems or structures – in other words, a
point of view -- when observing other cultures or the past, requires a very keen
awareness of those of your own culture, Said suggests. Nobody can describe to
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him or herself and an audience what he or she sees without pre-conceived ideas
in his or her head…the idea of neutrality in scholarship is absurd he argues.
(Caveat) From our viewpoint – almost 50 years onwards, his
observations may not strike you as revolutionary really. I had not single
seminar in which anybody firmly believed in the neutrality of knowledge.
So, he is hardly news to us hard-core cynics of postmodern livestyle, of
fabricated new and political spin, who come to believe that our ‘real’ life
takes place in the identity games on social media. The more ‘like’ one has,
we are told, the more you are what you claim to be. To ask whether there
is ‘truth’ to all of it, to ask what am I – beyond all the daily theatre we have
to perform -- ,cannot bother us because we are too busy to ‘re-invent’
ourselves very minute of the day. Our daily metamorphosis into someone
else – someone more important, more exciting, more happy, ready for the
fight of life -- and the accompanying noises of the media spectacle we
fabricate to announce yet another fabulous identity-fromation
achievement is vital, so we believe, to survive in this world. We come to
believe that is what human nature really is…to be ‘liked’ by as many
people we can find; to be seen by as many people one can find; to squeeze
our ‘selves’ into the technologies provided by the social media; to be
anxious about the judgments of others every single minute of the day and
to pre-empt such unpleasant judgement. We find ways to present
ourselves as ‘untouchable’.
Cynicism vis-à-vis the world in which we live is rampant in our culture
today and we use it, I argue, it as a means of controlling an environment
we come to believe we lost control over. Marxism is dead for many of us,
it never worked anyway…so, why even bother to understand how it all
works.
Cynicism as a form of critique, however, this lecture will argue, is not a
position of control or some might argue, of superior knowledge through
experience, it is a position of defeat, it is a position deriving from sheer
fear and immaturity.
“We choose immaturity because we are lazy and scared: how much
more comfortable is it to let someone else make your decisions! If I
have a book that takes care of my understanding, a preacher who
takes care of my conscience, a doctor who describes my diet, I
need not make any effort myself. I need not to think, so as long I
can pay; others will handle the business for me’ (Kant, What is
Enlightenment, 1784)
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Now, for the sake of this lecture I’d like you to remember that for Said’s
contemporaries did not live in our postmodern cynic times yet. All this in
which we live in today was slowly unfolding, neoliberal governments just
positioning themselves and establishing the free-market world which is
now reality for us. The media revolution had not yet arrived with internet
etc. the self of the 1970s is not our self.
The 1960s 70s was a time in which everybody was in search of ‘truth’ - of
oneself but also for the most perfect society -- may it be conservative or
socialists and Marxists (we should not forget that neoliberal thinker had a
vision of the perfect society too...not only the socialist and Marxists).
There were lost debates about the self about the perfect society, even
fights and not only verbally. Said and his contemporaries – left or right -had not yet retreated into cynicism, into defeat and what Kant would
argue, into a state of perpetual immaturity. Thought, and thought turned
into social practice, was believed to be effective.
Anyway…let’s come to Said. In this quote Said makes clear that he is not just a
‘describer’ of antoehr world, that of the 18th 19th century science and humanities
working in or on the Orient and its cultures. He is not just interested in how
knowledge about that region was constituted in scholarly books or maps, or art
to be hung in public spaces. What is interested in, he tells, to understand how
and why these scholars presented their knowledge as neutral – which, I
explained earlier is clearly impossible.
He wanted to investigate the conditions that made it possible that they and, more
importantly, his own contemporaries in the 1970s, believe and continued to
believe, it to be neutral. I say ‘believe’ because we established last week, that
very few of these very scholars on the Orient did see themselves as brutal
‘imperialists’ writing to ‘other’ Eastern culture and make them inferior and ready
to be devoured by Western forces. These were often gentle people, educated
people, people of taste and superior aesthetics they believed, often driven by
high humanitarian beliefs; they were not imperial intellectual monsters send out
to prepare the ground for take over.
So, what Said singles out as the ‘evil—to use a moral category here – is not the
knowledge they produce but that they believe it is ‘neutral’. To believe in the
‘neutrality’ of any knowledge produced by humans – may be scientific or in the
humanities or arts – is closing one’s eyes to the fact, that this knowledge is
produced by humans, and therefore necessarily produced from a particular
perspective that necessarily comes with values attached. The values of the
culture from which the author stems.
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So, the big question for Said is: what is the invisible politics – in form of thought
as well as practices embodied in institutions -- behind this idea that knowledge is
‘neutral’. What is it that made us believe in this idea of objective knowledge and
which allows –Said argues – for the continuation of sterotyping other cultures in
the case of US diplomacy in the Middle East? (And we saw in our seminars last
week, this continues until today). Why do we prefer not to see that ‘knowledge is
power’, that, in the case of our dealings with the orient ‘others’ it and makes it
inferior at the same time? And why are we not willing to see that our actions
today are shaped and formed not only by our own genius today but forces in the
past which needs to be investigated in order to understand where we are now.
History, Said argues, is crucial to undercover these invisible forces that lead and
control our actions today.
After this rather blown-up introduction for which I apologise but I thought was
necessary to prepares us to the issues at hand today, I will now turn to the
person who inspired Said and many of his contempories to inquire about ‘ways
of thinking’ and ways of action’ we take for granted such as the ‘neutrality of
scholary knowledge, Michel Foucault. Foucault inspired a whole generation of
scholars like Said and propelled them into an investigation of the ‘obvious’, the
‘natural’. Whenver someone said –oh it has been the same, this is the nature of
man – this became a source of suspicion and scholars wished to know about the
powers in the past which make such in the present statements possible and
believable and the powers such a seemingly innocent little statement continued
to sustain in the present.
Scholars in the late 1970s and 1980s, following Foucault, would embark in the
battle of demystying statements and practices that we take for granted, we think
are so ‘normal’ that we do not question them, statement and practices we think
are in fact, necessary to lead our individual and collectives lives (sexuality is one
of them, isn’t it natural what we do? What scientists tell us about it? Isn’t it
nature in its purest form – after all it is about reproduction, isn’t it?) Instead they
began to show how these statements and practices we take as neutral –
particularly in the production of scholarly knowledge – are shot through with
politics. And they also began to show that there nobody can hide from these
powers, indeed, we are part of its very production very day. Power is pleasure
and plays with our desires, indeed it constructs our desires so to make us
obedient believers in them. Power is not simply physical or dominatio
Knowledge/power—that is what they take from Foucault.
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In the remainder of this lecture I shall talk first very briefly about the man
himself. Then I shall turn to how he developed his ideas. Foucault is very special
scholar because he has worked in separate phases. While towards the end of his
life he admitted that his entire’s life’s work was to understand the ‘human
subject’, methodologies he used to achieve this change dramatically. And we read
his work we need to be very aware what is was trying to work out at this
particular moment in time. He is the most systematic thinker, I have encountered
and he always tells you what he is up to, perhaps not in the easiest of languages,
but nevertheless. His line of investigation is always clear and the result always
clearly presented. If there are questions open for him to be further explored, he
tells his readers. So, the archeology of knowledge or the history of madness tries
to do something very different, from ‘discipline and punish’ and the history of
sexuality is a further development in his thinking about his ideas first presented
in discipline in punish. Most interpreters, particularly historian tend to disregard
this important accumulative aspect of his work and mix it all up. (Just a warning:
most critique has been leveled at his PhD thesis on madness, in which he just
embarked on his life-long investigations. One can savely say that about 90 of
historians who engage with it, don’t get it. So, be aware if you read their
comments on it…be suspicious)
1. intellectual phases
So, his life long interest was the history of the human subject, the modern subject
in particular. He began his investigation from a consideration of how language
constitutes subjectivity – he is shaped by the French debates over semiots and
language and is a forceful discussant with Barthes, or Derrida, Deleuze etc. So, we
have to see him in this environment inspired by the investigation of language
and the conclusion that what we say and what we see is not what is is but just a
representation of reality. (I shall not explain the presmises of the so-called
linguistic turn, structuralism, poststructurliams, deconstructionism etc…here
again – go back to the lecture on the ‘linguistic turn’. I take that you know them).
The Archaeoligy of knowledge is to be situate in this intellectual context, as we
shall see.
2. Crime and Punish 1975 is written when F. get suspicious of the power of
language alone. Thought does not have the power to make revolutions, he said to
hist students at some point – critising all these heated debates at French
universities at the time. Change happens also through practices. He starts to
combine his insights into language with investigations into practices, particularly
bodily practices. And he claims, the all modern power, developed since the late
17th century in Europe is to target the human body through thought and through
discinplinary practices. Discipline and Punish how discipline arise since the 17th
century and makes. The normalization of the human body, its training into
docility is what that book is about.
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3. Power in its disciplinary form is no longer what interests him primarily in the
last book you’ve read, in the first volume of the 3 volumed ‘history of sexuality’.
Here he takes an object which we all take as ‘natural’ we all take as given – by
nature and supported by the science which claims that neutrally investigates out
nature – and shows its constructured nature. He destroys the belief in sexualaity
as ‘natural’. On one hand, we shall see, he continues took look at discline because
the is key for how we do think about sex and how we do it in Christian society –
but he also begins to argue that need to cast a broader look and go beyond
disciplinary practices targetting the individual when we want to understand
‘sexuality’s naturalness’. ‘Sex’ is not only an object created through powers that
are directed at individual bodies but also to powers that are linked to wider
ideas and practices that organise the collective of bodies, which, since the late
17th century becomes to be called, the population. The last book you’ve read
deals with, what Foucault is obsessed with at that time and tries to understand
and which he then lables ‘biopower’ or ‘biopolitics’. ‘Biopower’ is both,
disciplinary power directed at the human individual body – which he explored in
his earlier book as we shall see -- and new regulatory power targeting the
population as a whole (e.g. statistics for example). So the sexuality book brings
in a totally new aspect of power in not dealt with in his earlier. He argues that
the world in which we live in is a world of biopower today. These ideas have
become incredibly influential over the last decade, not so much in history yet –
usually late – but in political sciences or cultural anthropology under the sexy
title of governmentality.
4. The hopefully last minutes of my talk I’d like to turn to critique. We’ll see…
e been thinking them, transformation becomes at the same time very
urgent, very difficult and entirely possible.’
Biography
F. was the son of a successful provincial doctor who turned out to be a brilliant
student, even the star student at France’s most important intellectual institution
the Ecole Normale superioeure (from which still all major intellectuals,
cultural and polticial leaders in France emerge). His brilliance spared him the
traditional years of teaching at a provincial school which usually followed a
university career in France, and instead he spent a couple of years in Sweden,
Poland and Germany while finishing his dissertation. Once finished he moved
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easily through a serious of professorships. His 1966 book “Les mots et les
chooses” (The Order of Things) was an academic bestseller.
After a few years later he was elected to the super-elite College de France,
which put him at the pinnacle of the French academic world and relieved him
from the ordinary teaching obligations. He choose in own title ‘Professor of the
History of systems of Thought’, I shall explain why in a minute. From then on, he
travelled the world and became a international celebrity (Japan, Brazil,
California, among other countries) lecturing to packed halls, increasingly
engaged in high-profile political actions, but still managing to write bestselling
books on crime, sex and madness. He died in 1984 of a condition, which is now
understood to be related to Aids.
Foucault was a serious political activist – engaged in various political debates
but, as his private life, he is very difficult to place him in our convential
political classification patterns. And he was in fact very proud of it.
“I think I have in fact been situated in most of the squares of the political
checkerboard, one after the other and sometimes simultenously: as an anarchist,
leftist, ostentious or disguised Marxist, technocrat in the service of Gaullism, new
liberal, and so forth…None of these description is important by itself: taken
together, on the other hand, they mean something. And I must admit I rather like
what they mean.”
--- what he means is that they actually means nothing, that he succeeded to
escape conventional categorisations -While for us in the UK and particular in our neoliberal times, it is for us perhaps
weird to think about an academic as a political activist or as they were called in
Frence ‘engaged intellectuals’– there are here only very few such as E.P.
Thomson who were academics and activists – that was not the case in postwar
France when Foucault grew up. In fact, it was impossible NOT to be actively
engaged in politics in 1948 when Focault took his first degree from the Ecole
Normal superieure, his licence de philosophie. France had just come out of the
war as a victor but had to deal with its own dark past during the facist era, the
Vichy government that had collaborated with the Axis of power between 19411944. Foucault’s early professional years -- he would take a degree in psychology
in 1950 - witnessed the ascent of the ultra-conservative General Charles de
Gaulle, who would in 1958 found the 5th republic and ruled France for the next
decade in almost an absolutist fashion. This provoqued ongoing friction and huge
controversies with France’s traditional left, socialists and communists, many of
whom were intellectuals.
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It is in this environment that young Foucault – very inspired by the German
philosopher Nietzsche -- starts to question the idea of the subject in much the
philosophies he was studying and the daily discussion with Marxist and others
he led during his campaigns.
He came to think that to study the ‘subject’ or the self he needed to work
through, to think through what constitutes a subject. What make me me so to
speak. He began to be suspicious of the understanding of the subject that stood
at the core of all these Marxists discussion at the time but also the emerging
neoliberal debates of the 1970s and 1980s. Marxists as the new right took the
subject very much for granted and had a particular way to understand of the
power.
Let’s remind you of the Marxist understanding of power we discussed:
Of course, we know that there were of course various forms of Marxism; they
have analysed power relations in many different ways. But, I think there are four
interrelated themes that typify their overall approach to power:
(slide)
 The first of these is a concern with power relations as
manifestations of a specific mode or configuration of class
domination rather than as a purely interpersonal phenomenon
lacking deeper foundations in the social structure.
 Second, Marxists are concerned with the links – including
discontinuities as well as continuities – among economic, political,
and ideological class domination. Despite or, perhaps, because of
the obvious centrality of this issue to Marxist analysis, it continues
to prompt widespread theoretical and empirical disagreements.
Different Marxist approaches locate the bases of class power
primarily in the social relations of production, in control over the
state, or in intellectual hegemony over hearts and minds.
 Third, Marxists note the limitations inherent in any exercise of
power that is rooted in one or another form of class domination
and try to explain this in terms of structural contradictions and
antagonisms inscribed therein. Thus Marxists tend to assume that
all forms of social power linked to class domination are inherently
fragile, unstable, provisional, and temporary and that continuing
struggles are needed to secure class domination, to overcome
resistance, and to naturalize or mystify class power.
 It follows, fourth, that Marxists also address questions of strategy
and tactics. They provide empirical analyses of actual strategies
intended to reproduce, resist, or overthrow class domination in
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specific periods and conjunctures; and they often engage in
political debates about the most appropriate identities, interests,
strategies, and tactics for dominated classes and other oppressed
groups to adopt in particular periods and conjunctures to
challenge their subordination. (Bob Jessop Marxist Approaches
to Power’ in E. Amenta, K. Nash, A. Scott, eds, The WileyBlackwell Companion to Political Sociology, Oxford:
Blackwell, 3-14, 2012.
(http://bobjessop.org/2014/03/27/marxist-approaches-topower/)
Now Foucault as we shall see comes up with a different idea of power, which
questions the Marxist understanding of it and that will allow him to talk about
the subject in a very different way. It will allow him to see the human subject’ the
self as historically constructed entity – no longer as fixed and transhistorical, no
longer constituted by its intentional choices.
Now, what inspires him to do so? To see power differently, so that the
self—the subjects becomes unhinged?
His notion of power cannot be understood without seeing him very closely
related to the movement around the linguistic turn. His thinking about
language and its relation to ‘reality’ – and our understanding of subjectivity -- do
stand at the core and at the beginning of his career.
Results of the linguistic turn – a reminder. Now what is the importance for
him here?
We know all this from earlier lectures. Key for Foucault as for others was the
possibility languate theory offered for for a re-investigation of knowledge.
Saussure’s work undermined the certainty of a connection between a word and a
thing, making the link conditional and equivocal. Meaning and sign separated.
What opened up is a whole space of ‘uncertaintly of meaning’.
And Foucault, we shall see, is working with this fundamental assumption that
language is ‘uncertain’ and abritary, and historically constituted and this ever
changing. So, what goes along with this new uncertainty about language and its
meaning is a question of the notion of the ‘subject’ -- we are made up by the
knowledge that is produced about is – in medicine, in science, in history…all of
this serves to understand ourselves and thus make ourselves. Now, what of these
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knowledge can no longer taken as neutral and thus ahistorical. What if this
knowledge on which our understanding of ourselves is based is not longer ‘true’?
Intellectual phases: Archeology – the making of ‘truth’
Foucault spend a considerable time of his life to investigate how truth about us
and about the world is made. His bestseller in 1966 the order of things is all
about that.
Indeed he invents a new method to investigated these language games of
truthmaking and calls this method Archaeology.
1. The method of Archaeology:
Foucault’s idea of an archaeology of thought is closely linked to linguistic theory,
and ‘structuralism’ which we talked about already. (later denies he is a
struturalist- however, the metaphors of Archeology links to it)
What is that?
Partly due to the preoccupation of 1960s with language and its limitations,
Foucault’s method of archaeology is in the first place concerned with the analysis
of language as a system of the possibility of expression.
He claims that at any given historical period, due to a particular language
used, there are substantial constraints on how people are able to think
(and consequently act). So, there are the formal constraints of grammar and
logic, which exclude certain formulations as gibberish or illogical. (this is
something Saussure had already pointed out.)
Now, an archaeologist, as F. called himself, goes further than a mere structuralist,
stating this fact that language limits through its internal structure. An
archaeologist is interested in a further set of constraints that act on human
thinking. He is interested beyond the mere structure of language.
He is interested for example, in concepts that were ‘unthinkable’ for
centuries, for example… … to take an example from my own speciality that
insects were created by spontaneous combustion from dirt.
Some of these constraints are foolish to us: Why don’t you observe these insects?
What makes these concepts possible? Why were they conceptual ideas
considered ‘true’? – what he is interesting in beyond the structure of language is
is how these organisation of language and thought allow for the existence of
utterly different ideas about nature or human behaviour.
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To frame it otherwise: Foucault’s idea is that very mode of thinking involves
implicit rules (maybe not even formulated by those following them) that
materially restrict the range of possible thoughts.
He believe that if we can uncover these rules, we will be able to see how an
apparently arbitrary constraint actually makes total sense in the framework
defined by those rules.
(expline the idea by the work of an archaeologist) - (2 images)
Moreover, he suggests, that our own thinking today is governed by such
rules, so that from the vantage point of the future it will look quite as arbitrary
as the past does to us.
Taken from my own module now ‘being human: human nature
from the Renaissance to Freud, why do we construe human nature today
from the biological realm – think about the brain sciences
Epistemes
Foucault then defines three different epochs of rules of thinking and knowledge
between 1000 and his own time, the 1960s. He calls these major epochs of
knowledge “episteme”.
He writes:
‘In any given culture and at any given moment there is always only one
episteme that defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge, whether
expressed in theory or silently invested in a practice’
(slide)
1. Renaissance episteme (1450-1650),
2. Classical episteme (1650-1800)
3. The modern episteme (1800-1966) (at the time he was writing he saw the
modern episteme crumbling and giving rise to the postmodern episteme.
What he means by this is best expressed in his work The Order of Things
(1966). (picture) which investigates the changes of episteme in the early
modern period (16th to 18th century).
So, in sum, through the method of archaeology he wishes to understand the
underlying constraints within which people at a given period think (and act) and
which created entirely different systems of knowledge production.
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Difference to the History of Ideas:
The idea of ‘episteme’—an époque of knowledge -- is very different approach
from the ‘history of ideas which we are more used to.
How is that different of the history of ideas? Usually the ‘history of ideas’
analyses what is consciously going on in the minds of famous scientists,
philosophers, politicians etc. in the past.
Now, F. thinks that is less important to analysise what they consciously said but
more important to analyse the underlying rules of the episteme – which make
them think as they think, which restricts their thought but also gives it its unique
distinctive form. – no one is the precursor of germ theory for example
Let me give you another example of how an archaeologist of knowledge works in
comparison to a conventional historian of ideas:
So, an archaeologist of knowledge is not interested in just interpreting famous
writings such as for example of Descartes, the famous French philosopher of the
seventeenth century. He is not so much interested in figuring out what Descartes
meant by saying certain things. (that is what philosophers usually say)
No, an archaeologist of knowledge proceeds differently. An archeologist of
knowledge would read all the authors at the time of Descartes and all their
utterings– famous and not famous -- from all fields of knowledge such as
medical authors, authors on geography, economics, natural history. He is
interesting in recording ALL their statements in order to then uncover the
general rule of the ‘classicel episteme’ in which Descartes and all the author lived
and in which they thought and wrote, in which they operated and most
important to him, what contraint them.
An archeologist invesetigated systems of thoughts of discourses.
The interest of an archaeologist, to say it once more, is not in the particular
object (text) studied but – to use the image of an archeological exacation site
-- in the overall configuration of the site from which it was excavated.
Foucault’s ideas went down very badly with some people at the time:
Foucault is accused of marginalizing the subject, of killing the author and so on.
But we have to clear: It is not that he denies the reality of individual
consciousness. He does not deny that Descarte was a great intellectual. But he
thinks that individuals operate in a conceptual environment that determines
and limits in ways of which they cannot be aware. They are not super
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humans, no universal intellectuals, men who could see beyond it as Satre like to
have it. And he dislikes what history of ideas and philosophy usually does,
namely to put ideas of great individual – of course all free thinking and
without constraits – on a petastil and demonstrate how pure thought
developed.
We can see how his archaeology is developed in response to ‘universal
intellectuals such as Satre.
F. provides a detailed formulation of archelology as a historiographic method
most explicitly in his book The archaeology of knowledge (1968). However, the
method was gradually developed earlier in three histories written in the 1960s:
(pictures 3)
1. Madness and Civilisation
2. The Birth of the Clinic
3. And, already mentioned The Order to Things.
So to summerize the archeological method:
So what Foucault’s does in his Archeology is presenting us alternative modes of
thinking and consequently acting which were possible for our not so distant
ancestors. By doing so, he questions of course our own thinking and they way we
know our world throught the language we use. It was also a way for F. to work
though his criticsm of intellectual theory of his time, Marxism, phenomenology
and existentialism and the idea of an intellectual these traditions proposed. We
also know understand why he, when asked what professorial title he would like
to choose when he started his job at the Ecole Normale Superieur was Professor
of Systems of thoughts’
However, at some point he leaves his archeological method behind.
Why is that?
(slide)
Geneology:
At some point F. realised that the method of archaeology was not very much
suited to describe the effect of a practices. (it is analysis of language as I have
said)
Archeology is a synchronic method, a method, which looks at things happening
at the same time within a particular episteme:
It is not concerned with causal (diachronic) relationships.
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F. admits that very freely in the introduction of his book “The Order of Things”:
He says there that he had restricted himself to a description of sysmsts of
thoughts, with no attempt to explain changes from one system to the another.
And he says something very interesting:
‘The traditional explanations as the spirit of the time, technology, social cultural
influences struck me for the most part as being more than magical effective’.
Shorthand for not explaining anything really – example of marxism which sees
economic condititions as the driving force of historial change.
However, F. when he wrote the first books had, as he freely admits, no
alternative sort of explanation to offer and felt that he did not want offer
something he had not thought through enough.
“Consequently”, he said, I left the problem of causes to one side, I chose
instead to confine myself to describing the transformations themselves”.
Now, by the time F. wrote Discipline and Punishment F. had found what he saw
as an adequate method of causal explanation to complement archaeology.
And this was a method which he comes to call geneology. (Picture)
It is the first book in which he combines archaeology and geneology
What is geneology?
Opposed to traditional history which is interesting in origins and in describing
uninteruped continuities and stable forms, geneology is to reveal the
complexities, fragility and contingency surrounding historicial events. One of his
studies here is the most obvious and so seemingly natural object of our
knowledge. Our own body. He offers us a history of the body. Geneology shows
that even our physiology is not stable.
The other dimension of geneology is concerned with the analysis of historical
emergence conceptualised not as the culmination of events, or as the end of a
process of development but rather as a particular momentary manifestation of
chances or as a struggle between forces. Geneology embraces confrontations,
the conflicts.
He argues that humanity has not progressed from war, combat and force to a
more human system of rule of law – the usual story of traditional history -- but
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from one form of domination to another. So, historical succession becomes a
matter of contest and struggles over the system of rules, success belonging
‘To those who are capable of seizing …the rules, to…invert their meaning,
and redirect them against those who had initially imposed them’
And he makes another discovery which was that the objects of these diverse
and specific causes are human bodies.
He claims that the forces that drive our history do not so much operate
on our thoughts, our social institutions, or even our environments as on
our individual bodies. In his work the body as a central component in
the operation of power relationships occupies a prominent place.
He argues,if one want to understand power one has to look at the same time at
knowledge and the body.
Let me go into detail what he means by looking closely at Crime and
Punishment
The book opens with an historical document, the description of the extremely
cruel punishement of Robert Damiens, 42 years old, in January 1757. His
crime was that he had rushed up to Louis XV and had hurt with a knife. He
claimed that he only wished to frighten him, not to kill the king. Nevertheless he
was found guilty and punished to be excectuted. The exectution was public,
attended by a large crowd, and spectactulalry brutal. The guys is drawn and
quartered, we all get it in minute detail.
Without comment then, Foucault switches to another document from 1837,
just 80 years later. The rules for a detention centre for young offenders in
Paris. Interestingly, no obvious cruelty anymore, just a timetable of their daily
duties.
These are two modes of punishment: The first typified, according to F. the
punishment of criminals in Europe until about the middle of the 18th century;
the second presented the new “gentler” way of punishment, the product of a
more, it would seem to us, more civilised, more humane approach to
punishment.
But Foucault ask the questions: is this really so?
has doubts because he reminds us the point was not “not to punish” at all – that
would be revolutionary indeed – but “to punish better”.
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F. does not deny that the “gentler way of Punishment is certainly an
advancement – particularly for the prisoner.
But the darker side of the “gentler way” is its move towards total control of
mind and body
On one level, this is signalled by a switch from brutal, but unfocused,
physical punishment to less painfull but more intrusive psychological
control.
Premodern punishment assaults the body, but is satisfied with retribution
through pain, modern punishment demands an inner transformation, a
conversion of the heart to a new way of life.
But this modern control of the soul of the prisoner is itself a means of more
sublte and persuasive contral of the body, since the point of changing
psychological attides and tendencies is to control bodily behaviour.
In the modern age, F. claims, ‘the soul is the prison of the body’.
F’ thinking about disciplinary power is linked to a revision of power more
generally by him:
(slide)
“It seems to me that power must be understood in the
first instance as the multiplicity of force relations
immanent in the sphere in which they operate and
which constitute their own organization; as the
process which, through ceaseless struggles and
confrontations, transforms, strengthens, or reverses
them; as the support which these force relations find in
one another, thus forming a chain or a system, or on
the contrary, the disjunctions and contradictions
which isolate them from one another; and lastly, as the
strategies in which they take effect, whose general
design or institutional crystallization is embodied in
the state apparatus, in the formulation of the law, in
the various social hegemonies” (Foucault, 1990, pp. 9293).
General aspects of power:
There are some general aspects to bear in mind here: Contrary to what
many may suggest today; power (to Foucault) is not subjugation,
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wielded singularly through a form of sovereignty, nor a central
government or a body of laws. Foucault moves away from notions which
set power in a binary of domination and coercion or liberty and consent;
regarding power as a set of relations existing everywhere in all facets of
our lives from a micro-level to a macro-level. (Marxism)
Foucault’s analysis reconceptualises, suggesting that power is
“omnipresent” and can be found in “all social interactions”, interwoven
to be “present in all of our social relations, even our most intimate and
egalitarian. It appears that the traditional liberal and Marxist theories of
power are “radically” in contradiction with Foucault’s own approach
(Kelly, 2009, p. 37). Such conceptions of power are reductive, limited
and “inadequate” according to Foucault
How does this new form of disciplinar power that emerged since the late
17th century adtually work? So, what are distincitive features of disciplinary
techniques directed at the body?
1. A feature is that disciplinary techniques focus on a specific part of the body
not on the whole body.
A good example is the military: We do not teach soldier just hold a rifle. But to
hold in a very specific way and we break down the process in minute details. The
focus is not merely on the result but of seeing that the soldier does what we
want. The point is F. argues to achieve the results through a specific set of
procedures. We just don’t want you to just shoot the enemy, we want you to hold
the gun in this way, raise to over the shoulder in this way, sight down the barrel
in this way, pull the trigger in this way. In short, it is matter of micromanagement. (todays increasing administration is an example)
F claims that these micro-managements are everwhere such as schools
(picture of school sitting description 19th century)
F. sums up the modern approach to discipline by saying that it aims at producing
‘docile bodies’: bodies that not only do what we want but do it precisely in
the way we want it.
Docile bodies the result of disciplinary power are produced through three
distinctively modern means:
1. Hierarchical observation – connection between visibility and power,
that an apparatus designed for observation induces effects of power.
By making people visible, one controls them and one can change
them.
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Paradigmatic idea is Jeremy Bentham’ (an English social reformer of the
19th century), plans of a Panopticom, a proposal for maximising control of
prisoners with a minial staff. In fact, Bentham’ s ideal prison was never build
until the 20th century. (Image of bentham)
(3 picture)- inmate in separate cell, separated from and invisible to the
others. Further cells are distributed in a circle around a centre tower which a
montir can look into each cell at anny given time. The principle of control
here is not the fact that you are actually observed but the possibility of
observation.
Inmate must assume that they are always watched.
Result is that “we induce in the inmate a state of consciousness and
permant visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power.
2. feature of modern disciplinary control is Normalising judgement
what is meant by that:
‘The workshop, the school, the army were subject to a whole micropenalty of time (lateness, absence, interruption of tasks) of activity
(inattention, negligence, lack of zeal), of speech (idle chatter, insolence),
of the body (incorrect attitudes, irregular gestures, lack of cleanliness) of
sexuality (indecency)
What we punish is non-conformity which the exercise of disciplinary
power seeks to correct. However it does not only operate through
punishment. But in addition through gratification, with rewards and
privileges for good conduct and practices, and punishment and penance
for bad ones.
The threat of being judged by others abnormal contrains us moderns at
every turn.
3. the 3rd instrument of discipline is examination:
which combines normative judegment with hierarchical observation to effect a
‘normalising gaze’ through which individuals may be classified or judged.
Best example of ‘knowledge – power’
Through the mechanisms of examination – lets say find youself at a pscchiatrist
and are examined – individuals – in this case you - are located in a field of visible
knowledge – here ti is the case of psychiatry and its classifications of disease. You
turn from you unique individual to an object of a particular set of knowledge.
Your story is turned in a a ‘truth’ of psychiatry. The pscchiatrist writes a report
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on you which he files with all the reports. You are not not only an object of his
knowledge but your classified within all the cases of knowledge. You become a
‘case’, to accessed by other psychiatrists, and in case you’ve done something bad
by the legal appartus.
But in the modern age the exercise of power through discipline is typically
invisible, but it controls its objects by making them highly visible.
Knowledge – power (refer back to Said)
History of sexuality:
Now, let me move briefly to the last book you’ve read for today: the first volume
of a 3 volumed History of Sexuality.
Having dealt with disciplinary power in Crime and Punish, F moves on.
He target and object of knowledge – sexuality – which he sees fit to extend his
investigations of power, beyond ‘disciplinary power’. He argues that in order to
understand ourselves today – or in the 1980s when he writes these volumes –
we need to include another form of power. While disciplinary power we saw
targest the human indivividual body since the 17th century, during the 18th
century we see another form of power emerging, which F calls ‘regulatory
power’. This is a power that links the individual body – disciplined and docile –
to society, to the population. REgulartory technologies of power are for example
statistics, surveys, national census etc, everything in which the individual is
related to the population.
F. calls this combination of disciplinary technologies of power – targetting the
individual – and of regulatory technologies which make the individual part of a
larger population, biopower or biopolitics.
He argues that biopower emerges in the 18th century
(definition).
His investigation of ‘sexuality’ in the book you’ve read is an investigation into
this biopower. It allow to investigate disciplinary power mechanism – our
expression of our sexuality is ‘not free’ but highly disciplined he argues in
constrast to all the 1960s and 1970s free sex hippies, and it is linked to
regulatory idea of population (family planning, eugenics, one-child policies)
(If time talk about about general aim…..)
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A history of the present to facilitate change:
particularly the one’s leveled by his French collagues of a more Marxist
background who see him as the neoliberal evil personified. He is accused of
being responsible thorugh his works to made neoliberal thinking fashionable, he
helped, so they argue until today to set up the intellectual framework of our
world today, he killed the author, questioned the enlightenment believe in
reasons, evil, evil evil..
While I do not disagree with this and particularly many of his followers who
applied his method to describe can be accused of that…particularly from
sociology, I am more wary about him himself.
This is an ongoing debate and I like to engage with it by looking at the years
before his death in 1984. I shall argue that, indeed Foucault was an investigator
of what made the rise of ‘neoliberal’ culture possible by invesitated its historical
possibilities since the 17th century. However, having described an discussed this
in various lectures and the sexuality book, he turned in the last year to a more
philosophical question, reflected in the very philosophical following volumes of
the history of sexuality. He felt that there was an urgent question to be deal with.
He returns to the Greeks particular to Stoic thought to investigate answers to a
question that arose for him from his historial investigations what made
neoliberal possible. He de-mystified the ‘naturalness of neoliberal culture – of
course he only writes about it from the perspective of the 1970s and early
1980s…
It a question that is still unanswered establish answer to a question which I
think concerns all of us right now: namely how to lead a satisfied and ethical life
in the neoliberal world we live in. the answer he gives tentively is not
‘revolution’ but indeed a very enlightened one: take responsibility for what you
choose. Life your life with othter to the full by taking responsibility for
everything you chose to take on. So, in a way, he invites us to find way of life,
ways of forming our subjectivity as humans that go beyond cynicism. (becausetis
that what neoliberals made us think is a natural human condition) He wants us
to think and to practice a different kind of human nature, one that is very aware
of the power which shape it – contemoray and historican – but that – because if
this knowledge and its investigation into its own formation – is empower to take
responsibiligy and emit change. Cynisicm was never his thing..he saw this
attitude – very much Kant he write a famus inerprettionof Kant’s famous
article—as immature, a position of the fearful and of those in chains. Although
being accused of having destroyed out believe in the values and ideas of the
Enlightenment, I think he is one of the most ardent believers in the fundamental
belief of the enlightenment, that that reasons allows humans to thrive for a
freedom, understood not as free from all responsibility but the opposite. Free
means for him to take what you take on …. Foucualt thinks beyond ‘right’ or ‘left’
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– he always jokes about the fact that his enemies are never sure what lable to use
for him, to categorise his thinking -- but to be free can only be achieved by a
constant, ongoing suspion of the world out there, of an ongoing upsettness about
the naturalization of daily behaviors. One cannot be free without always being To
be free for Foucault, I to do share this philosophical position is to ‘care for the
self’. Real crititue cannot be undertaken from a cynical standpoint because it
misunderstandts that cynisicam is a product of modern life. First we need to
know why we think today that is a position to investigate the world
from….Suspiciou is not synical, but a predocniditon of man on its way to
freedom. There are no categories to describe him because his life was devoted to
identify these categories and destry them by investigating their emergence and
power.
‘Real criticism consists in uncovering that thought and trying to change it:
showing that things are not as obvious as people believe, making it so that
what is taken for granted is no longer taken for granted. To practise
criticism is to make harder those acts which are now too easy... [A]s soon
as people begin to no longer be able to think things the way they have
been thinking, then, transformation becomes at the same time very
urgent, very difficult and entirely possible.’
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