Post on 14-Oct-2018
Understanding and Misunderstanding Foucault
Sociology 250
April 9, 2013
Sociology 250 () Understanding and Misunderstanding Foucault April 9, 2013 1 / 26
Michel Foucault1926–1984
Born 1926, Poitiers, Frenchcountryside1946–50: Ecole NormaleSuperieure, ParisDiscovers own homosexualityAlong with many Frenchintellectuals, joins theCommunists
1953: Leaves the CommunistParty
. . . becomes a crucial Frenchintellectual, finishes career atCollege de France (1969–84)
1984: Dies from complicationsof AIDS
Sociology 250 () Understanding and Misunderstanding Foucault April 9, 2013 2 / 26
1968 in Modern HistoryChicago
Sociology 250 () Understanding and Misunderstanding Foucault April 9, 2013 3 / 26
1968 in Modern HistoryNew York
Sociology 250 () Understanding and Misunderstanding Foucault April 9, 2013 4 / 26
1968 in Modern HistoryPrague
Sociology 250 () Understanding and Misunderstanding Foucault April 9, 2013 5 / 26
1968 in Modern HistoryParis
“My work had nearly no echo with the exception of a very small circle,before 1968”
Sociology 250 () Understanding and Misunderstanding Foucault April 9, 2013 6 / 26
1968 in Modern History
How to be a Radical:
1848–1968: Critique within modernism (Marx)
1968–present: Critique of modernism (Althusser → Foucault →postmodernism)
Sociology 250 () Understanding and Misunderstanding Foucault April 9, 2013 7 / 26
Connaissance vs. Savoir
Both translate as “knowledge”
Connaissance: objectified knowledge; materialized and communicable,e.g., mathematical, linguistic, philosophical, etc.
Savoir: a more intimate direction of the subject towards the objectconsidered. One speaks about self-knowledge, of knowledge of a givensubject, which implies the experiment, the intimisation, which isimpossible to formulate. Savoir is a relation of intimacy to the object.
Sociology 250 () Understanding and Misunderstanding Foucault April 9, 2013 8 / 26
Foucault’s Life Project
The problem is to determine what the subject must be, to what conditionhe is subject, what status he must have, what position he must occupy inreality or in the imaginary, in order to become a legitimate subject of this
or that type of knowledge [connaissance].
Sociology 250 () Understanding and Misunderstanding Foucault April 9, 2013 9 / 26
Michel FoucaultMajor Works
1965: Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age ofReason
1970: The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the HumanSciences
1972: The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse onLanguage
1973: The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of MedicalPerception
1975: I, Pierre Riviere, having slaughtered my mother, my sister,and my brother ...: A Case of Paracide in the 19th Century
1978: Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
1978: The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction
1985: The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2
1986: The Care of the Self: The History of Sexuality, Vol. 3
Sociology 250 () Understanding and Misunderstanding Foucault April 9, 2013 10 / 26
The Birth of the Clinic
Historical connection between science, social reform, andtechnological prowess
An institution for the knowledge of the human body
An institution for the reform of the human body
An institution for the discipline of the human body
Medicine is not sinister or underhanded; it is discursive andhistorically contingent
Sociology 250 () Understanding and Misunderstanding Foucault April 9, 2013 11 / 26
Madness
Modernization is about the enforcement of a discourse of reason
Madness is the resistance to this enforcement
The asylum/hospital is the institutional expression of this resistance
Sociology 250 () Understanding and Misunderstanding Foucault April 9, 2013 12 / 26
“I, Pierre Riviere. . . ”
The extraordinary story of a brutal crime in a small nineteenth-centuryFrench village is movingly and strikingly told in the first half of the book,
through the actual documents of the case, and in the words of itsparticipants and observers–witnesses, judges, doctors, lawyers, peasants.
Sociology 250 () Understanding and Misunderstanding Foucault April 9, 2013 13 / 26
The Birth of the Prison
18th–19th century prison reform movements bring Reason topunishment
Note the three meanings of discipline:1 The treatment suited to a disciple or learner; education; development
of the faculties by instruction and exercise; training, whether physical,mental, or moral.
2 Subjection to rule; submissiveness to order and control; habit ofobedience; severe training, corrective of faults; instruction by means ofmisfortune, suffering, punishment, etc.
3 The subject matter of instruction; a branch of knowledge.
Prison reform brings the rational gaze and control of the body tocrime control
Sociology 250 () Understanding and Misunderstanding Foucault April 9, 2013 14 / 26
The PanopticonPerfection of the rational disciplinary gaze
Sociology 250 () Understanding and Misunderstanding Foucault April 9, 2013 15 / 26
The PanopticonPerfection of the rational disciplinary gaze
Sociology 250 () Understanding and Misunderstanding Foucault April 9, 2013 16 / 26
The History of Sexuality
Does sexuality really have a history?
The transformation of sex into discourse. . . the disseminationand reinforcement of heterogeneous sexualities, are perhaps twoelements of the same deployment: they are linked together withthe help of the central element of a confession that compelsindividuals to articulate their sexual peculiarity—no matter howextreme.. . . it is in the confession that truth and sex are joined,through the obligatory and exhaustive expression of an individualsecret.
Sociology 250 () Understanding and Misunderstanding Foucault April 9, 2013 17 / 26
Power and Sexuality
Sex is placed by power in a binary system: licit and illicit,permitted and forbidden.
(The 20th-century “reformist” view of the regulation of sex)
Sociology 250 () Understanding and Misunderstanding Foucault April 9, 2013 18 / 26
The Paradox of Reform (Perrin)
Social systems characterized by more “freedom” may not actuallyprovide greater individual autonomy
Present in some classical social theory, e.g., Marx and Weber
Foucault explores and expands this idea
Because power infuses everything—even reform—reform rearrangespower but does not overcome it
Sociology 250 () Understanding and Misunderstanding Foucault April 9, 2013 19 / 26
Foucault’s Grand ProjectCentral metaphors
Genealogy Archaeology
Sociology 250 () Understanding and Misunderstanding Foucault April 9, 2013 20 / 26
Foucault’s Grand ProjectExample: The Practice of Opining
What is expected of the modern citizen?Sociology 250 () Understanding and Misunderstanding Foucault April 9, 2013 21 / 26
The Production of Discourse
Problems ⇐⇒ Discourse
Sociology 250 () Understanding and Misunderstanding Foucault April 9, 2013 22 / 26
Foucault on Governmentality
I think people in both [the Western and socialist] worlds arefeeling more and more discomfort, difficulty, and impatience withthe way they are “led.”. . .We are, I believe, at the beginning of a huge crisis of awide-ranging reevaluation of the problem of ”government.”...[And] the political parties, for sample, don’t seem to grasp thegenerality of the questions at stake.
Sociology 250 () Understanding and Misunderstanding Foucault April 9, 2013 23 / 26
Misunderstanding Foucault
Foucault is not a postmodernist
Foucault is not a grand theorist
Some of Foucault’s insights and claims underwrite grand andpostmodern theory
Sociology’s approach to Foucault needs to improve!
Sociology 250 () Understanding and Misunderstanding Foucault April 9, 2013 24 / 26
PerformativityAn interesting extension to Foucault
Sociologists don’t think economics’s idea of human nature is true,but. . .
Economics seems pretty good at predicting how people behave, atleast economically.
Why?
Sociology 250 () Understanding and Misunderstanding Foucault April 9, 2013 25 / 26