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The mission of York University is the pursuit, preservation, and dissemination of knowledge. …
Committed to
• Academic freedom,
• Social justice,
• Accessible education,
• Collegial self-governance,…
Tentanda Via: the way must be tried.
Source: http://www.yorku.ca/president/about/mission.html (accessed 2011 Sept)
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Foucault and Ethics/Truth
Purpose of the university, i.e.: its mission:
Academe in search of:
•
Philosophical foundations of knowledge
•
Methods of developing Self-knowledge
•
Methods of inquiry into the world
Morrison (2000): University must examine, evaluate, posit and reinforce values.
Giroux (2002): Corporate culture has intruded into and taken over the university
Tsoukas (1997): Knowledge vs. Information
• We have begun to think in this information society that greater knowledge would
lead us to transparency in society
• Knowledge has come to mean information
• Useful information is understood as “objectified, abstract, decontextualized
information”
Postmodernism:
• Deconstructing our sense of self, culture and existence
• a philosophical movement away from modernist viewpoint
• Much like Einstein, relativity and quantum mechanics that entirely changed what we
understood as the physical universe
• the belief that apparent realities are only social constructs
• they are subject to change inherent to time and place
e.g., the role of language, power relations, and motivations
• Attacks the sharp classifications such as male vs. female, straight vs. gay, white vs.
black, imperial vs. colonial.
• Realities are plural and relative, and
• Realities change according to the interested parties and their interests.
• Foucault’s archaeology:
• The ‘history of ideas’ usually means the conscious thought of the various thinkers in
different periods
• But, for Foucault, the context of their thought is more important as it provides the
structural clues to why they thought that way and with what implications.
• What did Darwin say is not as important as what made Darwin possible (Gutting, 2005).
•
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Instead of vague causes for the emergence of social institutions, Foucault points to the structural
roots that underlie social inventions and ideas of the time from which unwittingly a radically new
system of social control arises:
• Prison system: Invention of a new kind of rifle (to control prisoners)
• Clinics: Space organization in hospitals (to monitor patients)
• Schools: Methods of teaching penmanship to children (to shape uniformity in
students’ writing)
• Foucault does not imply that some deeper meaning in thought must be deciphered.
• He does not wish to embark upon a psychoanalysis of the thinkers to understand their
thought.
• An episteme is a general mode of thinking –the factual beliefs and actions that lay behind
the diverse range of ideas and practices:
• e.g., the deviant being thrown into a mad-house & confined –the details about its extent
in different regions at different times may represent a distinctive classical way of thinking
about madness
• The philosophical or scientific thinkers are shaped or structured by the episteme
• Foucauldian genealogy is a historical causal explanation that is material, multiple, and
corporeal
• The objects of these diverse and specific causes are human bodies.
• The forces that drive our history do not so much operate on our thoughts, our social
institutions, or even our environment as on our individual bodies
• Prisons, clinics and schools have structured regimen designed to produce ‘docile bodies’
The ‘Self’ disappears as body becomes passive, Docile, Normalized, Objectified
- “Consensual conformity” of students/faculty and constraining the “docile bodies”
through admissions/hiring , financial and behavioural control.
- Faculty/students are examined, tested and isolated by administrative experts to
become passive and docile bodies
- Willingly they subject themselves to Internet education, research technologies and
become normalized and subjectivized
Power transforms the frameworks that underlie our knowledge
Government and other institutions control power and make rules – power and violence go
together to discipline us
Thesis of Foucault's Discipline and Punish:
• Disciplinary techniques that keep criminals under control become the model for
controlling/operating other modern institutional social sites: schools, hospitals,
factories, and other social institutions
• Prison discipline pervades all of modern society
Foucault
• Process of Constructing the Docile Bodies through Disciplines, the new political
technology of the body (137) :
• Cellular (located bodies in enclosures)
• Organic (Specified repetitive activities)
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•
•
Genetic (Trained and timed in hard work of production)
Combinatory (Division of labour and organizing ranks & classes as units
of production- Marx, Capital, vol. 1. 311-12) (isolation)
COG-D of L
• Applying Foucauldian framework to Morrison’s article:
Morrison (2000):
(Cellular) University must teach students to examine their own values and those of society.
Spatial Enclosures
(Organic) Process: Interrogation of U’s purpose: Specified Repetitive
(Genetic) Students/ profs. must be encouraged to: Trained and Timed
• do public volunteer service
• debate readings and their political implications
• do research for public good not private profit
• interrogate complex ethical problems
(D of L): University’s role: Hierarchical Isolation
• Guard civic freedoms through ensuring democratic practices
• Examine social problems and individual responsibilities in establishing
ethics/truth in behaviour
Morrison (2000): University must examine, evaluate, posit and reinforce values.
Giroux:
Higher education
• is seen as a commodity (C spatial Enclosures)
• embodies value of market driven self interest (G Trained and Timed )
• promotes consumer life styles (O Specified Repetitive activities)
• produces market identity (G Trained and Timed )
• lacks accountability & social responsibility (D of L Hierarchical Isolation)
Giroux: Corporate funding of and corporate culture in higher education:
• Reduces ability of the state and civil society. (C spatial Enclosures
• Driven by profit motive - ‘applied’ (vs. ‘pure’) research. (G Trained and Timed
• Experiments at the cost of ethics. (O Specified Repetitive activities
• Advances vocational learning vs. pure knowledge. ( G Trained and Timed
Tsoukas (1997):
• We have begun to think in this information society that greater knowledge would lead us
to transparency in society
• Knowledge has come to mean information
• Useful information is understood as “objectified, abstract, decontextualized information”
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