Michel Foucault
1926- 1985
Many disciplines claim him: Philosophy, History, Sociology, Psychology, and Cultural Studies.
From 1961- 1971 wrote a bunch of books that challenged the intellectual scene.
Madness and civilization- History of Psychology
Birth of the Clinic- “ “ Medicine
Discipline and Punish- “ “ Penology
History of Sexuality, Vol 1,2,3 “ “ Sexuality
We are more likely to think- I am trapped in my body. I am this thing, this awareness, which is lodged in this body.
Foucault says- Our bodies are trapped by society.
DISCOURSE- a matrix of language and/or ideas that links desire and power and must be masked in order for it to express the power.
-Writings in an area of technical knowledge in which there are specialists, specialized or technical knowledge and vocabulary.
Karl Marx- argues that Language is ideology, which works to serve a socioeconomic power base. For Marx, the system of distributing resources (commodities and services), also known as the economy, determines ideology. Ideology determines reality.
Foucault goes straight to language itself as an expression of desire and power in action. There is no active agent of oppression to point at except the language itself. Power is diffused through the language. No Bourg. class per se. Technical knowledge shapes the structure of our society.
The oppressor is the discourse. And it will always be oppressive. There is no utopia where we will one day be free of the language.
We are society’s Meat Puppets.
Language reaches inside us, in a number of ways, and controls us.
We are” bodies” subordinated to culture.
This happens to us through systems of DISCOURSE. Specifically, whatever is taken to be KNOWLEDGE is a covert, masked expression of power. All discourse purporting to be the “truth” is duplicitous and nefarious in nature.
Knowledge is a system of rules that determines “who” can say “what.” Experts are “authorized” to say what is and is not true.
Psychology, Medicine, Criminology, Sexology, Social Sciences, all of these things and more are systems of Discourse which make claims about who is okay and who is not and what they need to be doing in order to conform.
Each system of discourse chooses how to define a “we” and how to exclude an “other.”
They control us through the ideas of “normal” and “abnormal.”
Every society throughout time has regimes of truth- types of discourses which it accepts and makes function as “true.” These are mechanisms which enable one to distinguish true and false statements and determine the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true.
Each of Foucault’s books uses a variety of historical documents to show that the definitions of things like madness, illness, criminality, and perversion, are socially constructed inventions, which vary greatly over time.
What is considered “truth” is not a unified grand search in which we will one day arrive at perfect understanding if we just search long enough.
Truth is a social construction which happens by accident, there are no absolutes. When you have the experience of “knowing” something is true, you are a successfully subjugated body.
Read aloud page 112 and contrast w 114.
Ask the question, “What caused the change in the style of punishment?” Both are extraordinary displays of power. The first is an awesome display of death for the people to view and internalize. The lands and the people are the king’s body. The treatment is to excise what is not good for the king’s body.
In the second example we see peoples bodies being regulated by the state through schedules, regimens, and boring repetitive tasks. But this is not only the prison system!
School system. Military. Family life? Daily life? Work place? Mental institutions?
The greater the conformity, the greater the rewards and the greater the consolidation of the feeling of being part of a “we.” The more invested we are in being a we, the more able we are to engage in “othering.” The discourse empowers us, disempowers them. The “experts” tell us how we are supposed to be and who will be othered.
PANOPTICON- Architectural structure, which serves as a metaphor for social reality.
Each person is isolated in a small room. Prisoners can’t see each other but person in central tower can see them all. You can’t see the person in the central tower. You never know when you are under surveillance. You must always act assuming you are being watched.
You follow the rules even when no one is around. Or feel bad because you are not following them, thus discourse is still in control. You are totalized, subjugated.
Can you apply this idea to the weight loss industry? Where else?
Success for the prison system, school system, mental health system, means producing a docile worker.
For those without success who are recidivists, they stay in the prison system and do not become politically active and question the distribution of resources or the concept of property ownership in the first place. Do not cultivate a class consciousness. Keeps them in the fog or in what Marx would call a false consciousness.
Sex is an arena he spends three volumes on.
The story we have up and running is that the Victorian Era was filled with prudes and you didn’t talk about sex at all. Today we are still in recovery from it.
Every time we talk about sex, we are liberated and engaged in revolution.
But are we? Or are we practicing a system of discourse which regulates our bodies, again? Science of sex becomes a form of power.
Homo/heterosexuality invented in the 19th century. Not a universal idea. To label something perverse is to make it forbidden and a source of power.
In his third volume he explores the idea in the orient that sex occurs not in relation to a set of rules, but in relation to the pleasure which is created, intensity, duration, sensation, etc.
The discourse around sex is another way “surveillance” takes place, another way for society to reach inside us and make us its meat puppet.
We say knowledge is power, typically. Foucault says Power is knowledge!
We say War is politics pursued by other means. Foucault says Politics is war pursued by other means----à Back to discipline and punish, 2 prisoners.
Traditional notions of Power have is clearly visible, embedded in laws and hierarchy.
Inside most social relations, their lies an unspoken threat of physical force.
Power is everywhere, localized, not flowing from the top down.
For Foucault, power is now excercised by the process of “normalization.” Much more subtle. Easier to live with and over look, harder to resist.
If I am Marx, proposing an uprising, am I not just another expert, creating another discourse which, in turn, creates a “we” and an “other?”
Inherent problem or interesting quirk—isn’t Foucault an “expert” making a truth claim too?
So what does that mean?
If we will always be bound by language, why bother looking at these processes at all?
Is there liberation?
I argue he is something called postmodern, not just post-structuralist. His project is deconstruction. Tear down constructs that are more constraining than they are enabling. See truth as a local production, not intended to stand for all time.