Understanding Michel Foucault

[Drkshadow03]

Jozanny... you would most certainly do well not to underestimate the posters at LitNet. Kafka's Crow, for example, has a couple of MAs with more than a goodly knowledge of Arabic/Persian/Middle-Eastern literature, French literature and lit as a whole. Petrarch's Love is a PhD. (or PhD. candidate) with a marvelous ability for inserting common sense in the most diplomatic manner into our disputes and a mastery of Italian and English Renaissance literature. JBI, who is currently vacationing in Italy (lucky schmuck!) is probably better read than almost anyone I have ever come across on line... and there are any number of others who certainly take their literature seriously and truly know their stuff (Darkshadow03 certainly included).

Personally I won't get into the Foucault dialog. I haven't read enough... nor wanted to read enough... to do so. I agree with your suggestion that Americans have been overly seduced by French intellectualism. Personally I have little patience with the notion of approaching a work with the idea of analyzing it from a set theory... whether that theory be based in Foucault's theories or Freud's. As a working artist I have even less patience with any theory that underplays the achievements of the individual and leans toward a concept that all is a product of social energies. Foucault, Derrida, and perhaps even more so, Jean Baudrillard, are raised again and again by art critics and even artists wishing to offer up some proof of their intellectual depth... but they often strike me as succeeding more along the line of those third-world military leaders whose chests are emblazoned with medals with which they intend to convey their sense of power, and yet outside of their own small sphere of influence, no one believes the illusion at all.

If anyone's curious about my qualifications I have a Masters in English (with a focus in American lit). I also am finishing up a second Masters in Library Science.

Your last paragraph I think sums up the Derrida/Foucault/Baudrillard culture in academia very well.

[Jozanny]

Jozanny... you would most certainly do well not to underestimate the posters at LitNet. Kafka's Crow, for example, has a couple of MAs with more than a goodly knowledge of Arabic/Persian/Middle-Eastern literature, French literature and lit as a whole. Petrarch's Love is a PhD. (or PhD. candidate) with a marvelous ability for inserting common sense in the most diplomatic manner into our disputes and a mastery of Italian and English Renaissance literature. JBI, who is currently vacationing in Italy (lucky schmuck!) is probably better read than almost anyone I have ever come across on line... and there are any number of others who certainly take their literature seriously and truly know their stuff (Darkshadow03 certainly included).

I never claimed to be a professional scholar. If things settle down for me and I get my pacing back with freelancing I may buy myself a graduate course or two, but a degree is mostly likely out of the question--however, I can be forgiven for any underestimation of TLN. Lots of young folk here who seem to run into trouble with their assignments.

Personally I won't get into the Foucault dialog. I haven't read enough... nor wanted to read enough... to do so. I agree with your suggestion that Americans have been overly seduced by French intellectualism. Personally I have little patience with the notion of approaching a work with the idea of analyzing it from a set theory... whether that theory be based in Foucault's theories or Freud's. As a working artist I have even less patience with any theory that underplays the achievements of the individual and leans toward a concept that all is a product of social energies. Foucault, Derrida, and perhaps even more so, Jean Baudrillard, are raised again and again by art critics and even artists wishing to offer up some proof of their intellectual depth... but they often strike me as succeeding more along the line of those third-world military leaders whose chests are emblazoned with medals with which they intend to convey their sense of power, and yet outside of their own small sphere of influence, no one believes the illusion at all.

This is a bit harsh. I am certainly not as prescriptivist as Maria in my nascent admiration of Foucault's methods, but he, and Sartre, and Derrida were important movement thinkers, as was Levi-Strauss. Linking power-knowledge to strong-men totalitarian tactics is unfair.

[stlukesguild]

I never claimed to be a professional scholar. If things settle down for me and I get my pacing back with freelancing I may buy myself a graduate course or two, but a degree is mostly likely out of the question--

I'm no professional scholar myself... hell I teach art to grade-school students. My own field of "expertise" (and my degree) is in the visual arts... but I have long been a bibliophile/bibliomaniac if not by profession, then certainly by passion. I like to think of myself as the "common reader"... along the lines of what Virginia Woolf outlined... but I'm probably more obsessed than that.

...however, I can be forgiven for any underestimation of TLN. Lots of young folk here who seem to run into trouble with their assignments.

That is certainly understandable... Of course if you'll notice... a good many of those asking for help writing some essay (usually due tomorrow) have only 1 or 2 posts under their name, proving that they merely joined LitNet with the intention of getting someone to do their homework for them. In most cases they could get a good deal of the info they are looking for simply by using Google... or even Wiki. I've been known to lose my patience a few time and tell them to go do their own damn homework.

[Jozanny]

Darkshadow:
I spent some time thinking about how to answer your question on this topic. I opened my wordprocessor and started to write something out, but I need to read a few more titles from Foucault and critical analysis before I can offer anything more than a thumbnail sketch, however--

In the disability movement, once the battle for de-institutionalization had been joined, and legally codified to some degree under Title II statue and the 504 rehab laws, (which have been seriously eroded under the Americans With Disabilities Act), new systems arose which allowed for new state controls. Foucault touches upon some of this here, in an interview he gave which is one of the first things I read about his work:

And what about the Republic, 'one and visible'?

That's a formula that was imposed against the Girondins and the idea of an American-style federalism. But it never operated in the same manner as the King's body under the monarchy. On the contrary, it's the body of society which becomes the new principle in the nineteenth century. It is this social body which needs to be protected, in a quasi-medical sense. In place of the rituals that served to restore the corporal integrity of the monarch, remedies and therapeutic devices are employed such as the segregation of the sick, the monitoring of contagions, the exclusion of delinquents. The elimination of hostile elements by the supplice (public torture and execution) is thus replaced by the method of asepsis - criminology, eugenics and the quarantining of 'degenerates'....

Is there a fantasy body corresponding to different types of institution?

I believe the great fantasy is the idea of a social body constituted by the universality of wills. Now the phenomenon of the social body is the effect not of a consensus but of the materiality of power operating on the very bodies of individuals.

And:

Your studies of madness and the prisons enable us to retrace the constitution of an ever more disciplinary form of society. This historical process seems to follow an almost inexorable logic.

I have attempted to analyse how, at the initial stages of industril societies, a particular punitive apparatus was set up together with a system for separating the normal and the abnormal. To follow this up, it will be necessary to construct a history of what happens in the nineteenth century and how the present highly=complex relation of forces - the current outline of the battle - has been arrived at through a succession of offensives and counter-offensives, effects and counter-effects. The coherence of such a history does not derive from the revelation of a project but from a logic of opposing strategies. The archaeology of the human science has to be established through studying the mechanisms of power which have invested human bodies, acts and forms of behaviour. And this investigation enables us to rediscover one of the conditions of of the emergence of the human sciences: the great nineteenth-century effort in discipline and normalisation. Freud was well aware of all this. He was aware of the superior strength of his position in the matter of normalisation. So why this sacrilising modesty (pudeur) that insists on denying that psychoanalysis has anything to do with normalisation?

http://www.thefoucauldian.co.uk/bodypower.htm

To me, he is getting at *why* the legal codification of disability in the US has been a failure, and why the activists, some of whom also bring gender and race discrimination as a relevant analogy to disability discrimination, are barking up the wrong tree and will never be able to create a society which supports broken bodies to such a degree as to make them innocuous.

Maybe when I am ready to do an indepth paper/article (or two) you can critique, but I am not satisfied with my own thought processes just yet. Hopefully I'll get there while I have the energy to complete a thoughtful study.

[Drkshadow03]

Darkshadow:
I spent some time thinking about how to answer your question on this topic. I opened my wordprocessor and started to write something out, but I need to read a few more titles from Foucault and critical analysis before I can offer anything more than a thumbnail sketch, however--

In the disability movement, once the battle for de-institutionalization had been joined, and legally codified to some degree under Title II statue and the 504 rehab laws, (which have been seriously eroded under the Americans With Disabilities Act), new systems arose which allowed for new state controls. Foucault touches upon some of this here, in an interview he gave which is one of the first things I read about his work:



And:



http://www.thefoucauldian.co.uk/bodypower.htm

To me, he is getting at *why* the legal codification of disability in the US has been a failure, and why the activists, some of whom also bring gender and race discrimination as a relevant analogy to disability discrimination, are barking up the wrong tree and will never be able to create a society which supports broken bodies to such a degree as to make them innocuous.

Maybe when I am ready to do an indepth paper/article (or two) you can critique, but I am not satisfied with my own thought processes just yet. Hopefully I'll get there while I have the energy to complete a thoughtful study.

Thank you for sharing. By the way, what do you personally find inadequate/problematic about The Americans for Disability Act?

[Jozanny]

Thank you for sharing. By the way, what do you personally find inadequate/problematic about The Americans for Disability Act?

504 recognized the imbalance and allowed for resources to be available for groups like me. The ADA, although heavily based on 504, and fairly redunant in my estimation, was co-opted by the State. If claims of a level playing field are made, then resources are taken away.

For me personally, life has gotten much harder since transportation has restricted special services. I could go on, but my anger is best reserved for getting a mainstream article accepted by a publication like The New Republic, which I used to respect, though I think the blogosphere has watered down their contributors rigor somewhat. They are one of the few magazines out there which actually motivated me to apply for an internship with them. I didn't get it, but they have always been polite and told me to go ahead and send them something. Fear stopped me the first time and the idea is dead now--but still, an ADA deconstruction is a policy matter and I need to aim for something akin to TNR--not that TNR likes the ADA, but I am starting to see why.

[Jozanny]

Kant's great epistemological innovation was to maintain that the same critique that revealed the limits of our knowing powers could also reveal necessary conditions for their exercise. What might have seemed just contingent features of human cognition (for example, the spatial and temporal character of its objects) turn out to be necessary truths. Foucault, however, suggests the need to invert this Kantian move. Rather than asking what, in the apparently contingent, is actually necessary, he suggests asking what, in the apparently necessary, might be contingent. The focus of his questioning is the modern human sciences (biological, psychological, social).

jgweed, can you do me a favor and help me parse what Foucault is reversing in Kant's innovation? The passage is from Stanford and I have looked up the logical definition five times.

I wasn't very good in logic as an undergraduate, though I got A's in other philosophy courses.

I know I have to do a lot more reading. Do both Kant and Foucault mean possible?

[jgweed]

I am quite flattered that you should ask me for some perspectives about that passage, but I have to admit that I have not yet had the opportunity to work through Foucault to the point where I can offer anything meaningful in a comparison between Kant (which I think I understand) and Foucault (which I only know by cursory reading and second-hand discussion).

I think it means (maybe and very tentatively on my part) that Kant argues that truth is dependent (or is guaranteed) on its ability to be structured by us. For Foucault, on the other hand, this very structure (and here he seems to be considering more the structure provided by society and language in providing "always already" meaning) gets "in the way" of finding truth.

Cheers,
John

[Jozanny]

I am quite flattered that you should ask me for some perspectives about that passage, but I have to admit that I have not yet had the opportunity to work through Foucault to the point where I can offer anything meaningful in a comparison between Kant (which I think I understand) and Foucault (which I only know by cursory reading and second-hand discussion).

I think it means (maybe and very tentatively on my part) that Kant argues that truth is dependent (or is guaranteed) on its ability to be structured by us. For Foucault, on the other hand, this very structure (and here he seems to be considering more the structure provided by society and language in providing "always already" meaning) gets "in the way" of finding truth.

Cheers,
John

Thank you for trying. Your attempt is more sound than any summation I can produce.

I have only a very cursory understanding of Kant, and dismissed him when I was 19 as a Protestant trying to find a metaphysical justification for Christian doctrine--I am not attempting to deflate his intellectual tour de force, just describe my youthful impatience. I became more attracted to Nietzsche later, but have never made it through his flights of fancy with Zarathustra, and the poor fellow lost his mind. But the Nietzschean streak no doubt attracted me to Foucault, because I think much of human social intercourse is about power and exploitation.

As I mentioned earlier, such intellectual import as the disability movement has, these thinkers are attracted to Foucault as well, for a variety of reasons.

Now, I do not know how understanding Foucault will help me in the end, but I determine, at least, to try to follow through.

Obviously I have to be a good girl and penetrate Kant as well... (sigh), and do it for more than getting at Foucaultan power-knowledge dialectic.

I'm not going to live this long

[jgweed]

You might be better off reading Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil and his Geneology of Morals, since Foucault admits FWN's influence on his own philosophy. One might view F's project as an attempt at FWN's "geneological method" to show that the "will to power" is more operative than we would think, or at least operates not only in the sphere of the individual Self.

Ars longa, vita breve
John

[~Sado]

'Man has become an object of study for man since automobiles have become harder to sell than manufacture'
- Baudrillard

For me, personally, this is an example of what may be contingent within the apparently necessary, especially in relation to the modern human sciences. They, much like their age-old companion religion, only emerged out of a need to dominate. The question here is, I think, whether it is a coincidence that psychology and sociology emerged at the onset of the industrial revolution, or plain inevitability. Technological determinism seems to be breathing down our necks, especially when taking into consideration Paul Virilio, who suggests that the invention of rails also means to invention of the crash - or, more importantly, that the industrial revolution could only result in Auschwitz. The irony is that, with the gradual fading of true critical thought in the popular masses (and the inability to any longer seduce them), it is exactly this trend which continues, and this, in my opinion, is the great contribution of Foucault: to show that Auschwitz is still ever-present, but that it has been normalized, and thus, like the fish that can't perceive the ocean, we are unable to any longer deal with it effectively. The best example of Auschwitz is the slaughterhouse (Adorno said that Auschwitz begins whenever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: 'they're only animals'), but Auschwitzianism continues all the way down into education and the modern factory.

(Edit: just a note in relation to Foucault's reading of the body and his reading of the soul - Auschwitz was a residue of the premodern, in that in the camps, one was concerned with the extermination of the body, while in our postmodern Auschwitz, one is concerned with the extermination of the soul. Consider doing a google search for 'Baudrillard Disneyland' for a good example of this.)

I apologise for the shocking content if anyone was offended by this.

[PeterL]

Although I have heard of Foucault in other regards, I have only read The Order of Things, and I found major problems with that. The first chapter, which appears to have been intended to show point of view and is a discussion of Las Meninas by Velasquez gives an inaccurate description of the paining. Some of the other parts of the book demonstrate ignorance about history and economics. It appeared that he distorted facts to try to make his points, but he damaged his credibility so much that his points weren't made at all.

[~Sado]

It appeared that he distorted facts to try to make his points, but he damaged his credibility so much that his points weren't made at all.

What's funny in this regard is that popphilosopher Zizek openly admits that he doesnt even watch some of the videos he theorises on, out of fear that doing so will shatter his theory. The history of philosophy is filled which such reality-bending, beginning with Plato; perhaps the moment of death for philosophy is when it can no longer lie about the obvious.

[PeterL]

What's funny in this regard is that popphilosopher Zizek openly admits that he doesnt even watch some of the videos he theorises on, out of fear that doing so will shatter his theory. The history of philosophy is filled which such reality-bending, beginning with Plato; perhaps the moment of death for philosophy is when it can no longer lie about the obvious.

That's roughly what happened with me. I noticed those obvious lies a long time ago and fell back onto non-obvious lies. In the common parlance, 'philosopher' is synonymous with bull slinger.

[Drkshadow03]

For me, personally, this is an example of what may be contingent within the apparently necessary, especially in relation to the modern human sciences. They, much like their age-old companion religion, only emerged out of a need to dominate.

A) I don't think this is a good understanding of why religion formed. A bit of a strawman actually. In fact, depending on how you look at it, it could be convincingly argued I think, putting divine revelations aside, that almost all the Abrahamic religions began as systems to prevent subordinate groups from being dominated--a cultural defense mechanism if you will.

B) Even more importantly than point A, I think this fails to capture what Foucault is really driving at. When he says what is apparently necessary is really contingent, well, he means almost everything in our reality is in fact contingent; history, our intellectual disciplines, our relationships to our body, our sexuality, our relationships to others. No structure in society has to be the way it has to be. In other words, I think Foucault would say there is no natural NEED to dominate since there is no underlying human nature. The very belief in a particular human nature whether as inherently good, bad, needing to dominate, altruistic, inherently selfish, etc., is all a contingent illusion based off your historical circumstances and what the current episteme would have you believe. I also should use the word, "illusion" hesitantly. Foucault is not denying that human beings act a certain way once historical circumstances create and formed that human being as a subject through power-knowledge.

I think your metaphor of a factory is apropros. It is a factory of the social-historical-power system that pumps out new human beings as subjects of their individual society.

I think where you seem to be misunderstanding Foucault is in your commencts that still seem to hint at an underlying human nature, which for Foucault doesn't exist. And your comments that seem to suggest Foucault specifically is only talking about our modern age and when the episteme shifted onto the soul rather than the body.

Foucault in the later part of his writing goes all the way back to the Greeks and puts his analysis to them. There is NO such thing according to Foucault as a society outside of power with particular power relations. There is no such thing as a non-contingent subject for Foucault (with some minor exceptions). You are always the product of power-knowledge whether you are an Ancient Greek, a modern person in the episteme of the soul, or even the pre-modern man who lived under the episteme of the body. The only difference is in the techniques and the formation of the power relations.

Foucault later offers an ethics that he takes from the Ancient Greeks as a way of working within, not escaping, power relations so that you have room for a certain amount of self-formation and experimentation.

Also, the episteme of the soul does NOT want to exterminate the soul. Foucault is very clear in his belief that power is productive. It doesn't just say no; it's not just "thou shalt not." Power-knowledge CREATES the soul. It forms individuals. Every urge, desire, and thought you could possibly have was formed by your society's current power-knowledge relations, not just big things, but even the tiny little things like the conversation we are having right now. The very idea of a "soul" is contingent. Foucault most likely thought that no such real entity called a soul with a true metaphysical existence whether you believe in it or not, actually exists. In many ways it functions more as a metaphor for the psyche.

Therefore, I'm not sure your society-wide Auschwitz metaphor works because power-knowledge is doing the complete opposite; it isn't trying to crush the soul, but in fact create it. The implication of course is that your entire individuality is a product of your society that helps serve a particular function within your society and maintain the status quo of power-knowledge.