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Madness and Civilization [1961]
Birth of the Clinic [1963]
The Order of Things [1966]
The Archaeology of Knowledge [1969]
The Order of Discourse [1971]
Discipline and Punish [1975]
The History of Sexuality
Vol. I: An Introduction [1976]
Vol. II: The Use of Pleasure [1984]
Vol. III: The Care of the Self [1984]
“Getting to know, Monsieur Foucault!”
Introduction to the Philosophy of Michel Foucault
for the 2015 Policy Debate Surveillance Topic
Minnesota Debate Advocacy Workshop (MDAW)
Robert Groven , Augsburg College
I.
Caveat Discipulus:
This session will be:
a. Highly Incomplete
b. Much Too Simple
c. Mostly Foucault Focused, Not Directly Debate Focused- many debate
problems arise with the use of Foucault’s work
II.
Biographical Minimum
a. Michele Foucault (1926-1984)
b. Preeminent French philosopher of his age, but work defies
categorization, incorporating historical methods, literary criticism,
linguistics, and social science theory.
c. Professor, Collège de France & University of Paris
d. Also engaged in political activism and social reform to improve
prisons, mental health facilities, and GLBT recognition, but such
activities were ad hoc and inconsistent and he often denied that they
were directly a product of his scholarly work.
e. Born to wealthy, conservative family: father a surgeon, mother from a
prominent local family
f. Awareness of his homosexual attractions in teen years created conflict
within himself, his family and the conservative society of the time.
g. Experienced academic difficulties through early high school, but then
exceled at the highest levels in late high school and at university.
III.
Method
a. Foucault’s approach is primarily historical research with theory
extracted from and explaining the historical information.
b. Archeology of Knowledge (early method): understanding historical
periods through and within their own discursive norms (borrowing
from Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals)
c. Genealogy of Knowledge (later method): understanding historical
periods through their own discursive norms from a present day
perspective and discourse.
d. There is no bad guy (or bad concept) in most of Foucault
e. No Illuminati: It is “a story with no author, a system with no subject.”
f. No Intentionality: most of the systems Foucault describes were
created by collective social forces that no person or group of people
created with deliberate, conscious understanding of the system they
participated in or built.
IV.
Discipline & Punish: Spectacle, guillotine, and prisons
A. Damiens the Regicide & Punishment as Public Spectacle
a. Excerpt from Discipline and Punish (p. 3-5) concerning the
execution of Damiens the Regicide, who was condemned in
1757 for attempting to kill King Louis XV,
“Damiens the Regicide was taken and conveyed in a cart,
wearing nothing but a shirt, holding a torch of burning wax
weighing two pounds; then…on a scaffold…the flesh will be
torn from his breasts, arms, thighs and calves with red-hot
pincers, this right hand burnt with sulphur, and on those places
where the flesh will be torn away, poured molten lead, boiling
oil, burning resin, wax and sulphur melted together, and then
his body drawn and quartered by four horses and his limbs
and body consumed by fire and his ashes thrown to the
winds….
And yet, the fact remains that a few decades [about 80 years or
less] say the disappearance of the tortured, dismembered,
amputated body, the symbolically branded face or shoulder,
exposed alive or dead to public view. The body as the major
target of penal repression disappeared.
b. Juridical Power & Punishment
i. Sovereign power & the body as material property and
exterior objects
ii. Focus on the monarch as highly visible subject wielding
power and control
iii. Individuals are deprived of power by the monarch and
therefore want to “destroy” the monarch’s power or
“steal” it for themselves
iv. Public spectacles of torture and terror are encouraged
or required as entertainment for the public to drawn
attention to the monarch’s power and control
v. Focus of punishment is on pain and suffering, and only
very rough proportionality to the crime
B. The Rise (and Fall) of the Guillotine
a. Causes for shift:
i. Increasing populations in cities, declining family or
tribal ties
ii. Mixing of cultural traditions of law and punishment
iii. Enlightenment era ideas about justice, individual rights
and neutral judicial process
iv. More efficient and effective with larger populations
b. Results of Shift
i. One punishment for all bodies of all sorts, which
reinforces values of uniformity and equality
ii. Discursive focus shifts from the power/fear of the
monarch to the principles and laws violated by the
individual criminal
iii. Minimizes spectacle
iv. Minimizes shame
v. More efficient
vi. Creates the image of a distant & neutral justice system,
rather than a personal and vengeful monarch
C. The Rise of Prisons
a. Causes of Shift
i. Growing heterogeneous, urban populations
ii. Industrial Revolution model: factories, warehouses,
productiveness, speed, fungible products
iii. Economic, political and social efficiency
iv. Language and metaphors of industrial machines
v. Political shift to government as impersonal and neutral
vi. Extends and increases technologies of control
developed and used successfully by the military and
schools since the late 1600’s, the penal reform system is
just the last, more visible application of these tools
b. Results of Shift
i. Prison and fines becomes the universal and exclusive
“currency” of punishment by the state, all other forms of
public punishments are abandoned.
ii. Torture ceases to be punishment and becomes a tool of
investigative and judicial process to gain information,
confession or compliance with the process
iii. Focus moves to reform of the criminal: teaching selfcontrol of mind and body
iv. More humane approach: reduces pain and public shame
v. Almost eliminates public spectacle of punishment, shifts
to spectacle of judicial process/trial
vi. Far more effective at reducing “crime,” (deviance from
the norm) and deterring criminal behavior
vii. Far more economically efficient, and preserves a larger
and more mobile workforce
viii. Conceptual shift: power isn’t personal, and isn’t bad. In
fact, power is a positive, productive force to maintain
order, control and advance society’s goals
ix. Although punishments become less painful and public,
the state imprisons larger numbers of people and gains
broader public compliance in adhering to norms
D. The Principle of the Panopticon
a. Visibility as trap: the body as visible object
b. Optics as power & surveillance
c. Invisible threads of control- masking & unmasking
E. Discussion: Feminist & Queer Critical Response - the private is public,
invisibility as trap, visibility as vulnerability
V.
Madness & Civilization, and The Birth of the Clinic
a. From the “madness of the other” to “the care of the self”
i. Causes of shift: Responses to the Plague
ii. Causes of shift: Rise of Enlightenment rational approaches
(impersonal, objective)
iii. Causes of shift: developing technologies and successes of the
scientific method
b. Medicine & Psychiatry Create Madness
i. Defining madness as creating madness
ii. Optics of power reloaded: the scientific gaze
iii. Seeing inside the body: the body as mind
c. Normalization as a positive, productive “technology of control”
i. Descriptive “normal”- statistics & the bell curve
ii. Evaluative “normal”- labels and false binary oppositions
iii. Continuous operation of control, not only with violations
iv. Administrative-Medical process:
1. Define social objectives by using normative criteria
2. Observe, count and measure
3. Appraise, evaluate, and diagnose
4. Label, categorize, and divide using binary oppositions
5. “Heirarchize,” organize, arrange, and distribute to
create “geographies of power” & “polygons” of control
6. Automate continuous systems and institutions
d. Categorization of bodies by exterior optics: race, gender to a lesser
extent religion become criteria for systematically determining which
bodies should be “optimized” and which will be “neglected” or
“substracted.”
VI.
History of Sexuality (mostly Volume I)
a. Inverting the “Repressive Hypothesis” of Victorian Sexuality
b. Normalizing & Medicalizing Sexuality
c. Fully Developed Concept of Bio-power
i. “Administration of life”
ii. Shift from Sovereign power to Disciplinary control, and finally,
to Bio-power, but all three are used to varying degrees
iii. Micro-physics of positive, productive control: continuous,
invisible, automatic, interior, self-enforcing
iv. Self-confession as control: the body as identity
d. Basic process/mechanism of Bio-power
i. Surveillance- cool, dispassionate gaze of science collects
information and enforces norms
ii. Normalization – provides both positive rewards for conformity
and negative punishments in continuous, minute increments
iii. Examination- confession, analysis, established narratives,
accepted labels and categories create interior self-compliance
iv. Control – minor deviance consistently receives a response
from many sources, the external response invokes an internal
response which reinforces the control process.
VII.
Summary of Main Theory Concepts
VIII.
What’s the Alternative? Resistance, Political Action, Ethical Choices,
and a Possible Practical Critique
a. The Problem: Foucault’s Prison or the Ironist’s Cage
i. Ethics & Dispassionate Gaze: see no evil, see no solutions
ii. Resistance is futile: The paradox of dominant culture theory –
you can’t destroy power, it simple flows somewhere else.
iii. Political action without advocates or policy: Individual action
when the individual is irrelevant
b. First answer: escape is unthinkable, literally
c. Early answer: possible alternative - the struggle will provide
d. Late answer: possible alternative – the subversive critique
e. Posthumous answer: possible alternative, with a little help from a
friend (Judith Butler): the practical critique
f. Discussion: Are any of these alternatives satisfactory? Is any solution
possible, or does this mark a fatal flaw in Foucault’s theories?