1. POWER AND KNOWLEDGE
What are the possibilities for resistance?
2. SEX AND POLITICS
How to make a subject out of the individual?
3. SEEING WITHOUT BEING SEEN
Is there a possibility to hide from the eye of power?

 One can’t not categorize people.

The question is when does the categorization harms people.

The categorization of people has become more and more a scientific enterprise.

Example: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
Mental Disorders.

These kind of categorizations can humiliate people.

Example: the story of Herculine Barbin.


Herculine Barbin (1838-1868) > a
French hermaphrodite.

First treated as a female.

After an affair and a physical examination by experts she changed her sexual identity.
 Pointe > the power-knowledge nexus has serious consequences for an individual as Herculine Barbin.

Scientific research becomes more and more involved in the determination of the sexual identity of individuals.

Foucault focuses on the changes in the power-knowledge of science.

BIOGRAPHY:
 Born: October 15, 1926 in Poitiers.
 1936-1945: secondary school.
 1946-1950: studies philosophy and psychology at the École Normale
Superiéure.

1950-1953: member of the French communist party.

1951: master philosophy.

1960-1962: lecturer psychology at the university of Clermont-Ferrand.
 1961: PhD.
 1962-1966: professor philosophy at the university of Clermont-Ferrand.
 1967: visiting professor in Tunis.
 1969: professor at the Collège de
France.
 Death: June 25, 1984.


Maladie mentale et personnalité (1954).

Folie et Déraison (1961).

Naissance de la clinique (1963).

Les Mots et les Choses (1966).
 L’Archéologie du savoir (1969).
 L’Ordre du discours (1971).

Surveiller et Punir (1975).

Historie de la sexualité, 1. La volonté de savoir (1976).

Historie de la sexualité, 2. L’usage des plaisirs (1984).

Historie de la sexualité, 3. Le souci de soi (1984).

 Foucault’s work > mainly historical research.

Not the figure out the historical facts, but to get a better understanding of the present.

The books of Foucault are in fact histories of the present.

To decipher the historical material in such a way that phenomena become visible that where invisible, such as possibilities to change the status quo.


Concerning the history of the present Foucault was inspired by Nietzsche, especially his ‘Genealogie der Moral’ (1887).

Genealogy is a kind of research method, but not in the strict scientific sense of the word.

Aspects from the genealogical criticism:
To generate a radical new perspective on an object by using rhetorical tools.
-
To show that we shouldn’t take something for granted by going back to the beginning of a specific way of thinking.
Genealogy is a form of criticism because the problematic sides of the object of historical research will be expounded.

 The focus of Foucault’s historical research > the analyses of power relations.

Foucault radically changed the research on power.

Shift of emphasis:
1. From the macro-physics of power (the relation between the individual and the state) to the micro-physics of power (the way individuals are made to an object or subject within institutions like the hospital, the prison, the school or the asylum).
2. From a negative conception of power to a positive conception of power > power is not only destructive, but also productive.

In the later work of Foucault: again an interest in the macrophysics of power (gouvernementalité).


Two concepts of power:
1. Powerover someone or something (> pouvoir).
2. Powerto realize something (> puissance).

The first concept prevails in the social sciences.
 Max Weber: “the probability that one actor within a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his own will despite resistance.”

Foucault accents the second concept.

Power has a linguistic and a non-linguistic component > this implies: 1) discourse analysis and 2) the analysis of the effects of architecture, urban development and the gaze.


Discourse > the way people talk and write.

Every discourse is based on specific norms.

People are often not aware of these norms.

These norms are constitutive for the way how people conceive of the world.

Every discourse mobilizes knowledge that gives expression to certain power relations.

Power and knowledge are intrinsically connected to each other.

Scientific knowledge is constitutive for the way an individual is made to a subject or an object.

Discourse analyses > making the power relations explicit that underlie discourses.


The institutions that carry specific discourse can be characterized by specific mechanisms of exclusion.

The order of a discourse determines what will be excluded and what not.

Important questions:
1. Who has the authority to say or write something?
2. What can be said or written and what not?
3. Which rhetoric is allowed?
4. Are there any presuppositions of the spoken and written word that have never been made explicit?


Foucault > what are the effects of the truth embodied by the sciences?

The power of the social sciences > to generate concepts with whom people talk about themselves
(for example psychotherapy as a talking cure).

Scientists have the capability to define a problem in a certain way; they can mobilize intellectual resources to intervene very easily in public debates.


Power is a potential that is determined not only by contingent factors but also by structurally defined capabilities and resources.

Foucault > power relations generate resistance.

There are possibilities for resistance, because power is not monolithic and centralized.

Practices of liberation > to figure whether it is possible an individual has to undermine the identity given by others.

Foucault is a source of inspiration for those who are involved in identity politics > those who are in prison, homosexuals, transsexuals, etc.


Foucault was a public intellectual.

He criticizes the classical type of intellectual.

Two types of intellectuals:
1. The universal intellectual > a master of truth and justice who is the spokesman of the universal.
2. The specific intellectual > an expert (for instance an engineer, a doctor or a teacher) who provides detailed responses to concrete problems.

Foucault prefers the specific intellectual and argues that the universal norms don’t provide adequate answers to the problems of modern societies.


Intellectuals should, according to Foucault, embody a specific political and moral virtue: parrhesia.

Parrhesia > truthful speaking.

This praxis implies telling powerful people the truth they don’t want to hear.

Classical examples: philosophers who, like
Socrates, criticize political rulers and take the risk that they will become the victim of their power.

Contemporary example: Anna Politkovskaja.


Classical way to exercise power > repression.

The presupposition of this form of power > some possess power and others not.

Foucault analyzes a new way to exercise power.

Since the 18th century > power is not (negatively) primarily direct to prohibition (injunction), but
(positively) to create something by the disciplination and normalisation of people.

CLASSICAL FORM:
SOVEREIGN POWER
Negative
Repressive
Possession of power
MODERN FORM:
DISCIPLINARY POWER
Positive
Productive
Power relations


Foucault wrote a history about the way people write and talk about sex.

Sex is related to a quest for the truth, the will to know.
 Foucault doesn’t deny that in a capitalist world sex is repressed via moral norms.

However, it is exaggerated to say that the discourse about sex is only repressed.

Just the opposite > since the 16th century there is an increase in discourses about sex.

Foucault analyses the relations between power and the will to increase the knowledge about sex.


The exercise of power was a long time a question of repression (by the sovereign power).

Freud developed the thesis of the repression of sex.

The power over sex is determined by that what is forbidden: the law distinguishes between sexual actions that are allowed and not.

Nevertheless > sex is a handsome mean to make individuals to specific subject.

A society that is characterized by denomination.


Power is not only a question of repression, but also of the transformation of individuals into subjects with appropriate motives and desires.

Normalisation: Individuals become socialised members of the society because they internalise specific norms.

Discipline > system of productive social control.

Bentham developed such a system, which is called the Panopticon!


The Panopticon was for Bentham a utopian (i.e. an ideal) solution to social problems.

However, the same Panopticon has for Foucault distinctly dystopian undertones!
 Surveillance > power based upon ‘seeing without being seen’.

Nowadays > computer databases are used to store and process personal information about different kinds of populations.


Many scholars discuss the emergence of a so-called surveillance society, i.e. “a society that collects precise details of our personal lives, stored, retrieved and processed every day within huge computer databases belonging to big corporations and government departments” (David Lyon).

After September 11, 2001 > intensifying surveillance, automating surveillance, integrating surveillance and globalizing surveillance.

The argument > security.

Question: is privacy threatened?


The surveillance society imposes pressure upon one of the core values of democracy: privacy.

Privacy implies a number of restrictions:
Not being observed by others.
-
Restricting others’ knowledge of oneself.
Restricting others form publishing knowledge of oneself.
Not being in a position to observe certain actions of others.
Not allowing others to meddle in one’s affairs, to take decisions for one.
Not allowing one’s affairs to be a subject of discourse, and preventing comment on the decisions one makes.


Aim of electronic surveillance > to gather information about the private life of citizens in order to control them and maintain the governing power.

Computer databases are used to monitor the private life of citizens to control them and maintain the governing power.

Electronic surveillance has panoptic features: the invisibility of the inspection, the constant monitoring of consumer behaviour, etcetera.

The familiar distinctions between the public and private sphere dissolve as both the state and companies ignore old thresholds and gather of the most intimate information.


The surveillance society categorizes people in many ways.

Two important types of categorization:
1. Categorical suspicion > surveillance that is concerned with identification of threats to law and order – with malcontents, dissidents and terrorists.
2. Categorical seduction > modern marketing which endeavours to identify behaviour of customers that they might be more effectively persuaded to continue as consumers.


In search of a solution of the privacy problem.

PETs > privacy-enhancing technologies.

They can only be part of the solution of the privacy problem.

Sousveillance > the observation of the observation, i.e. the surveillance of individuals, corporations and states making from citizens the object of surveillance.

A legitimisation to undermine the surveillance society > crucial values of modern democracies are threatened , such as autonomy and privacy.


Le Monde once published an article called
‘philosophe masqué’.
 The philosopher didn’t want to say who he or she is; anomaly would guarantee that they would take him seriously.

This philosopher was Michel Foucault.
 The ‘dark room’ as a metaphor to withdraw form the ‘society of denomination’ and the ‘surveillance society’.

Create more dark rooms!

1.
Michel Foucault, Surveiller et Punir
[translations in several languages].
2.
Michel Foucault, Historie de la sexualité, 2.
L’usage des plaisirs
[translations in several languages].
3.
Barbin, Herculine (1980), Herculine Barbin:
Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a
Nineteenth-century French Hermaphrodite
[translations in several languages].